“He’s there,” she said. “I know he is.”
Nostrils flaring, Sasha opened the container and poured the steam onto the map. Separating, the steam drew several lines on the thick paper as though they were tiny bloodhounds tracking a scent. The vaporous fingers moved away from the cluster of islands off Florida, heading purposefully to a spot intersected by a longitude line out in the ocean. Then, all at once, the smoky tendrils reformed into one solid stripe and shrunk to the size of a pinprick on the map.
Sasha released a shaky breath. Taking the magnifying glass, she held it over the pinprick of steam. A minute ticked by in silence before she finally pulled away, eyes reddening with tears.
“It didn’t work.” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “The search area is probably five hundred miles.”
“How’s that possible?” Max blurted. “That’s just a dot!”
“It’s a map, you idiot!” Sasha shouted. “A dot in the ocean could be even a thousand miles.”
“May I see?” Adilene asked, reaching for the magnifying glass. Bending over, she scanned the map and then grumbled. “I think I’m going blind. I don’t see anything at all.”
“Maybe you do need glasses,” Gordy said. He could see the steam circling around a small search area, with enough space in between that could have contained Rhode Island.
“Yeah, probably,” Adilene said. “But it just happened all of a sudden.”
“After you met Cadence?” Gordy asked, suddenly remembering Ms. Bimini’s warning.
Adilene nodded. “I’m not turning old, am I?”
“You’re going to need a walker soon,” Max said, snickering. “And orthopedic shoes.”
Adilene whimpered. “Really?”
Gordy shook his head. “Ms. Bimini said there would be some subtle changes because we drank the Silt. And you drank more than any of us.”
“I don’t want to go blind.”
“You’re not going blind,” Gordy promised. At least he hoped she wouldn’t. What if Adilene’s eyesight never improved? What if her consumption of the Silt had caused irreversible damages?
“Can you two stop flirting with each other for one second and focus on the real problem?” Sasha snapped. “We’re never going to find Mezzarix.”
“You need his blood, child,” Iris announced. “It was a valiant effort, a worthy idea, but unless you can procure that, the Seeking Serum won’t find him. For all we know, he didn’t even write that letter. He could have dictated it to one of his servants.”
A fresh streak of tears dribbled from Sasha’s eyes, her lips quivering.
Gordy didn’t know what to say. He felt irritated at how well his grandfather had covered his tracks, but it was different for Sasha. Finding Mezzarix meant saving her mother, and this last attempt had left her with nothing.
Sasha slammed a fist on the countertop, disrupting the liquid in the cooling cauldron, and stormed out of the room. She left behind her satchel and her ingredients but didn’t seem to care.
Adilene sighed as though already regretting what she was about to do, then followed Sasha. With all the ruckus being made, Gordy feared the Scourges outside would hear them and grow suspicious. But there was no way he was going to tell Sasha and Adilene to quiet down.
“My, my, my,” Iris purred, gazing into the hallway as Adilene and Sasha thundered down the stairs. “We’ve made a royal mess, haven’t we?” Then she too disappeared from the doorway, hobbling off to some private corner of the house.
Gordy and Max were left in the empty laboratory.
“Women.” Max picked up a vial of liquid from the counter. “What are you going to do?” He squinted at
the wording printed on the label and whistled, jiggling the bottle. “It’s Adilene’s blood. Maybe we could mix it with an insect. Make a little Adilene cockroach for a pet.”
“Give me that.” Gordy wrestled the bottle from Max’s grip. There was only about half an ounce of blood left inside the vial. No more than a couple of drops.
“I was just kidding,” Max said, playfully elbowing Gordy in his side. “It’s too bad all we have is a bottle of her blood, right? If only you had taken some from Mezzarix when you visited him in Greenland. Asked him to donate to the cause. That would have been helpful.”
Gordy nodded. If only, he thought. All his problems would have been solved. Well, not all of them. They still had to find a way out of the city, break through the force field, and travel the long distance to Florida. And there was still the issue of what he would do once he found his grandfather somewhere out in the ocean. He wasn’t looking forward to that. But if he had a bottle of his blood, they would be one step closer.
Glancing around the ransacked room, Gordy tried to remember how it used to look. In his memory he could see flasks and vials and where they had been stored. Pieces of masking tape were still stuck to the various drawers of the apothecary table, listing their contents. Gordy’s focus drifted down to the bottom drawer marked “Volatile.”
And then the idea struck him right between the eyes.
“Max! You are a genius!” Gordy moved over to the apothecary drawer and wrenched it open.
“I’ve been telling you that for years,” Max said.
Gordy cradled a vial in his hand, no bigger than his pinkie finger. The cork had been removed, the bottle discarded among several other empty glass jars as though forgotten. But Gordy remembered.
“We do have a bottle of his blood,” he said, holding up the vial for Max to see. The same bottle his mom had brought home from Greenland the previous year after Mezzarix had agreed to destroy it. The one that had once contained the Eternity Elixir. “We’ve had it all along.”
For the first time since Gordy could remember, Max acted like a legitimate lab partner. He tucked in his shirt, rolled up his sleeves, and nodded at Gordy with grim determination.
“Just tell me what to do,” Max said. “I won’t let you down.”
With the door closed, and the others elsewhere in the house, Gordy and Max went to work. Most of the ingredients Sasha had used to brew the Seeking Serum had been wiped out. Despite not having the necessary materials, Gordy began thinking up alternative solutions. Images of substances and ingredients formed in his head, cycling through as though his brain was a computer and he had access to elite potion-making software.
“Keep the heat steady if you can,” Gordy whispered.
Max grunted as he heated the fire beneath the cauldron and kept the temperature smoldering within the bowl. He combined the iskry powder and ogon oil, per Gordy’s instruction, into a sparkling paste, and fanned the flames with one of the ripped magazines.
Closing his eyes and blocking out all other sounds and distractions, Gordy began to Blind Batch.
Every potion needed at least one form of the four main elements: liquid, mineral, chemical, and herb. In Sasha’s mixture, she’d used the pickling solution of the piranha scales, but they still had half a jar of the pale-green liquid dappled with bits of fish. She’d used all of the shark teeth for the mineral; not a single piece remained. While Gordy stirred the liquid with the dousing rod—providing the necessary herbal component—he asked Max for the container of smashed quartz to use as substitute. Three of the four elements were done, but Gordy wasn’t finished yet.
Though he knew it was risky, he didn’t have much of a choice. Sucking in a breath, he inserted his finger into the boiling liquid in the cauldron. He heard Max gasp in surprise, but Gordy ignored him.
A minute passed and then two, and Gordy sensed an approving tingle under his skin. He immediately removed his finger and dabbed a couple of drops of Oighear Ointment on the flames to extinguish the heat. Gordy then funneled a ladle of the potion into the empty Eternity Elixir vial. The mixture smelled like rotten eggs and instantly transformed into smoke. Before any of it could escape, Gordy plugged the opening with
a piece of cork and placed the bottle on the counter.
“Are you feeling okay?” Max asked, his voice unsteady.
Gordy grinned, his cheeks flushing with embarrassment. He knew how it must have looked. “I’m fine.” He held up his finger. Not even the tip looked red or burned. “It doesn’t hurt, I promise.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about. You . . . uh . . . you looked different just now. Weird.” Max averted his eyes. “Really weird.”
“I was Blind Batching,” Gordy explained.
“Yeah, I know, but I’ve seen you Blind Batch. I was there when you nearly blew up B.R.E.W. headquarters, and you’ve never looked like that before. Did you even open your eyes once this whole time?”
The question caught Gordy off guard, and he laughed. “Of course I did.” He had paid careful attention during the whole brewing procedure. Judging by Max’s look of awe, however, Gordy wondered if he actually had. Maybe that was why the skill was called Blind Batching.
The smoke within the vial swirled. Gordy reached for the atlas, glancing at the closed laboratory door. “Should we call the others?”
Max considered it for a second. “Let’s see if it worked. Just the two of us. Mono e mono.”
Gordy didn’t think that was the right way to say that phrase, but he agreed. It should just be the two of them testing it out.
“Just don’t do that again, okay?” Max smiled at Gordy awkwardly. “I’ve seen enough stuff to give me a lifetime of nightmares already. I’d rather not see anything more.”
Five miles.” Gordy tossed the atlas on the downstairs coffee table.
Both girls sat on the carpet, Sasha with her face buried in her knees and Adilene next to her, consoling her.
“What are you talking about?” Adilene asked, squeezing Sasha’s shoulder.
“I know where Mezzarix is hiding, and I’ve narrowed it down to a five-mile area.” The last of the smoke had dissipated, but not before Gordy had circled the spot on the map with a pencil. He had also written down the coordinates of the exact location of his grandfather’s hideout, less than sixty miles from the coast of Miami and just ten miles north of a little place called South Bimini Island. That wasn’t a coincidence.
Sasha looked up, her face wet and glistening. “How?”
“Your potion worked,” Gordy replied. “We just needed the right ingredient. The letter didn’t have enough of Mezzarix’s DNA, but I knew where to find some.”
“Reap it, losers!” Max cheered. “We’re the dynamic duo!”
After hurriedly returning to the lab to gather her possessions and snagging a few tissues to clean her face, Sasha was back to her old self again. “We’ll need a flight to Florida. And then a boat,” she said, poring over the map and plotting a course to the island. “Something inconspicuous, but with enough fuel for the sixty-mile journey there and then the return home. We can stop at my place to pick up my mom’s credit cards. I doubt any of you have enough cash to even get us to airport.”
Max smirked. “Airport? Boat? Since when are we the ones going?”
Sasha stared at Max in disbelief. “This is our chance to take back the Vessel. Mezzarix won’t suspect us coming to the island.”
“But we’re just kids, remember?” Adilene said. “You said it yourself, we don’t have training.”
Sasha turned to Adilene as if sizing her up and then shrugged. “Then stay. What do I care? Gordy and I can handle it.”
“Uh, I think we need to get this information to my mom first,” Gordy said. It had always been his intention to hand off the assignment to the professionals. His mom, Aunt Priss, and Tobias were way better equipped to take on Mezzarix than they were.
Sasha huffed. “We can’t do that! They won’t bring us along.”
“That’s the whole point,” Max said.
“But then I’ll never be able to help my mom!” Sasha shouted. Gordy and the others eased back out of range, just in case she started swinging. “They will go there and maybe find a way to defeat Mezzarix, but do you think they’ll pause for one second to return my mom’s abilities to her?”
“Of course they will,” Gordy said.
“To the person who threatened to ExSponge all of you? To ‘crazy Madame Brexil’? Not a chance!” Sasha buried her fists under her arms and looked down at the map. “I’ll go by myself if I have to.”
“Not to change the subject,” Max said. “But it’s not like we can even leave the city if we wanted to. There’s still no way out of this weird invisible dome.”
The four of them fell silent. Max was right. They were trapped.
“This potion—it’s like a ward, right?” Adilene asked. “How do you get rid of those?”
“With wardbreakers,” Sasha said. “With bugs.”
“Oh, yeah, the bugs,” Max groaned. He had been at the Stitsers when Esmeralda had attacked the home wards with more insects than they could possibly count. They had swarmed through the front door and devoured the protective potions. By the end, the floor had been completely covered with their quivering husks oozing with goo.
“Do you know how to brew a wardbreaker potion?” Adilene asked Sasha.
Sasha thought for a moment. “It’s illegal for anyone not approved by B.R.E.W. to make one. If you’re caught concocting a wardbreaker, they’ll arrest you.”
“But your mom could have done it, right?” Adilene looked hopeful. “As Chamber President, she would have been allowed—”
“My mom’s no longer the Chamber President!” Sasha snapped. “And she’s been ExSponged. She wouldn’t know the first step of how to brew one of those anymore. Oh, and she’s been Blotched and kidnapped by Scourges!”
Gordy clenched his jaw. “Could we please stop overreacting?”
“Yeah, Sasha, it’s not like you’re trying out for the school play,” Max added. “How about you dial it back, like, two hundred notches?”
“I don’t like being trapped in your house or being reminded about what happened to my mom,” Sasha apologized through gritted teeth.
“What I was trying to say,” Adilene offered, “is that if your mom could have brewed a wardbreaker as Chamber President, wouldn’t Iris Glass also know how to do it?”
“Maybe,” Sasha said, her tone easing. “I mean, yeah, I suppose she would.”
“Do you think she’d help us?” Gordy asked.
“She wants to get out of here as much as we do, and she’s been somewhat helpful,” Adilene said.
“You’re forgetting something,” Sasha said. “We don’t have any bugs.”
Gordy sighed with frustration. He had imagined busting a hole through the force field, but now they were back to square one.
“Why do they have to be bugs again?” Max asked.
“Because they can be easily manipulated,” Sasha explained. “But you need a lot of them. I read that to break the ward for a small house, you need at least two hundred thousand cockroaches.”
Max’s nose crinkled with disgust. “Fat chance of finding that many.” Then his eyebrows rose. He looked at Gordy with a grin.
“Before you say it, no, I don’t have any bugs,” Gordy replied. They used to have a few terrariums in the family lab back before B.R.E.W. wiped it clean, but even then they had no more than a hundred insects at one time.
“No, but maybe you could lure them here with a potion.” Max waggled his eyebrows. “With something like Rat Magnet.”
Gordy grinned at his friend. Max was full of ideas tonight.
It took Gordy and Sasha the whole morning to whip up the right potion. Pooling their supplies, they had enough ingredients. Iris, who agreed to help, estimated they would need close to fifty million insects to destroy the ward surrounding the town, possibly more. Referring to his potion journal, Gordy modified his Rat Magnet recipe and put the final touches on a newer version. The po
tion filled a two-liter bottle with a vibrant-pink liquid fizzing with carbonation.
They ate a lunch of stale crackers and overcooked spaghetti noodles Adilene heated up on the stove using the last of Gordy’s iskry powder. Despite not having any sauce for the noodles, they scarfed down the food.
A massive swarm of insects would definitely draw the attention of the Scourges, so they decided to wait until evening. Then they would head to the forest by the edge of the barrier to lay out the lure and hope there were enough insects in the area to wipe out the ward.
It was starting to get dark outside when Gordy was startled awake. He hadn’t realized he’d fallen asleep; Adilene, Max, and Sasha were still dozing on blankets or sprawled out on the couches. Gordy wanted just five more minutes of rest when he heard the movement upstairs. Something was shuffling from one end of a room to another.
Sitting up, he strained his ears to listen. Iris Glass had certainly made herself at home, but this was getting ridiculous. It sounded as though she was moving around in his parents’ bedroom. Hadn’t she and B.R.E.W. ransacked enough already?
“Ah, you’re awake,” Iris asked from the kitchen. She leaned on a crutch to help with her injured leg. “I hope you don’t mind, but I found this in the master bedroom earlier this afternoon, and I borrowed it. My leg is growing worse by the minute, and the less stress I place on it, the better.”
“Yeah, sure,” Gordy said.
“I suspect you know this, but I don’t intend to go with you when you head to the barrier,” Iris said. “Should there be any trouble, I would only get in the way, and my ExSpongement would escalate things in the wrong direction. You understand, don’t you?”
Gordy had been wondering what they would do with Iris when the time came to make their move, and he started to nod in agreement. Then he heard another floorboard creaking upstairs, and his pulse quickened as he shot to his feet. “Did you hear that?” he asked.
“Hear what?” Iris glanced around the room.
Max’s snoring sounded like static from a walkie-talkie, but Gordy knew it wasn’t that.
The Seeking Serum Page 16
