“Maybe he never knew about them,” Sierra said.

“It’s possible. Who cares? What matters is that I’m the one who found them.”

“You found your inheritance, but the devices were of no use to you because they were all tuned to Griffin Chastain’s signature, and the tuning crystal that your grandfather stole was engineered to respond only to that signature.”

“At first I thought it might be possible to retune the crystal. I couldn’t risk it myself, but I knew someone in one of the Foundation labs who was an expert on crystals.”

“Delbridge Loring.”

“He had a different name when he was employed here,” Larissa said. “I invented the Loring identity for him. He was good, I’ll give him that much. He’s the one who created the crystals the doctors insisted North wear after he began to go psi-blind.”

“But you are the one who infused them with the poison you hoped would make North psi-blind. That’s why your energy is all over these lenses.”

“I found the formula in my grandfather’s logbook. He had planned to use it on Griffin Chastain but he never got the opportunity.”

“Because Griffin confronted him about the theft of the artifacts. Your grandfather ended up shooting Griffin instead of poisoning him.”

“Initially I put the poison into North’s drink here at the Fogg Club. Like the radiation in the crystals, it has hypnotic properties. All I had to do was provide the right suggestion. Sure enough, he started losing control of his talent within hours. The doctors at Halcyon had no explanation.”

“You had proof of concept,” Sierra said. “The poison worked. The problem was that you had to keep dosing North with the stuff until it had completely destroyed his talent. It wasn’t practical to keep poisoning his drinks, so you infused the radiation into the crystals Loring made for North’s glasses.”

“It was easy enough to slip into the crystal lab and take the special eyeglasses out for a couple of hours one night. That’s all the time I needed to irradiate the lenses. The techs never missed them. I put them back before the lab opened that morning. Every time North wore those sunglasses he was exposed to a small but steady dose of radiation.”

“Were you going to try to poison his father next?”

“Yes, but suddenly Loring sent word about the rumors of a collection of artifacts that had been sold at auction in the Seattle area,” Larissa said. “According to the chatter, a device that belonged to Griffin Chastain was among the relics. We knew it had to be important. Swan Antiques had bought the entire collection, but it was a large number of objects. Unfortunately, there was no description of the Chastain relic. It could have been any one of a hundred objects.”

“You realized you needed a Chastain to identify the artifact,” Sierra said. “You made sure Chandler got the rumor. But he knew he was being followed that day. He tricked Loring and the Puppets. They were left with a useless vintage radio.”