“Gee, I don’t know. How about you and me?”

“Right.” North felt a visceral tug on his senses. Experimentally he reached out to touch the metal box. Familiar energy whispered through him. He smiled. “I think I know why Loring left this behind.”

“Why?”

“It’s infused with Griffin Chastain’s psychic signature. Got a hunch Loring couldn’t make it function correctly, assuming he got it to work at all. If he did try to activate it, he would have run the risk of damaging his own aura in the process.”

“I assume we’re taking that thing with us when we leave?”

“Oh, yeah. But first we need to see what else we can find here.”

Sierra walked across the room and stopped near a wall. “How about a vintage radio?”

She stripped off a leather glove again and bent down to gingerly pick up an object from the floor. She winced a little and transferred the artifact to her gloved hand.

“Well?” North asked.

“It’s a radio that looks like it dates from the era of the lost labs,” she said. “There’s definitely some heat in it, but nothing spectacular.”

“The radio Dad bought from Gwendolyn Swan?” North asked.

“I wouldn’t be surprised.” Sierra took a closer look. “The plastic is cracked and one of the knobs fell off. There’s some hot rage infused in it. Got a feeling Loring or someone hurled it against the wall in a fit of anger.”

“Because it wasn’t the artifact that he had been expecting,” North concluded. “Dad fooled him.”

“Do you want to take it with us?”

“No, it’s useless.” North got a familiar frisson of energy across the back of his neck. His intuition was warning him that it was time to leave. “Let’s go. I need both hands to carry Griffin Chastain’s machine. You’ll have to handle security until we get out of the building.”

“Right,” she said. “I’ll go first.”

She paused at the door long enough to check the view of the hallway through the small window. Then she cradled her locket in her ungloved hand.

“All clear,” she announced softly.

She opened the door and moved out into the hall. North followed with the machine. The ward was still relatively quiet but now there were more faces at the windows of the cells.

They made it past the nurses’ station before disaster struck. The door at the end of the ward slammed open. A massive figure loomed in the doorway. He was dressed in scrubs and, like Ralph’s and Joe’s, his arms were sheathed in tattoos.

He aimed a pistol at Sierra.

“Stop,” he roared.

The screaming started then. One patient howled. Within seconds the rest joined in. Some of the cries morphed into panicky shrieks. A terrible keening echoed from one room.

The chorus of the doomed grew to a thunderous roar.

“Sierra?” North said.

“I’ve got this,” Sierra said.

North felt energy charge the atmosphere. Sierra’s locket glowed like a white-hot mirror. The tattooed man staggered as though he had been struck with a blunt object, pitched forward and went down. There was a reverberating thud when his unconscious frame hit the floor.