“How can you tell that box isn’t a weapon?” she asked. She sounded genuinely curious.

“I’ve been living inside my grandfather’s personal lab for nearly a year,” he said. “I know intuitively how to work his devices. He made his living as a magician in Vegas before he was recruited into the Bluestone Project, but he was an engineer by training.”

“An engineer with a sixth sense for manipulating light from the dark end of the spectrum?”

“Right.”

“Probably not a lot of job opportunities for him in the normal world,” Sierra said. “No wonder he wound up with a magic act in Vegas.”

“Until the Bluestone recruiters found him.”

North slipped the screwdriver back into his small tool kit and gently lifted the black metal plate off the machine. He set the plate on the floor and gazed into the box. There was a compartment inside. It was made of steel. He undid the lock that secured it and found himself gazing at a chunk of colorless gray crystal.

A thrill of anticipation crackled through him. He was on the brink of discovering something very important, something that would answer a few questions.

Gently he lifted the crystal out of the inner compartment and jacked up his senses.

“Looks like a gray rock,” Sierra said.

“It’s a crystal.” North sat back in the seat and studied the artifact. “Not a natural one. It must have been created in a lab. There’s a lot of energy inside it, but it’s unfocused. Shattered. Probably because whoever has been using it couldn’t handle the vibe. If you don’t control it, the vibe controls you.”

“Any idea what that machine is supposed to do?” she asked.

“I’m not absolutely positive, but judging by the energy and what I know of my grandfather’s engineering style and interests, I’ve got a feeling this is some sort of tuning device. I’ve got a crystal on my mantel back home in Vegas that looks a lot like this one. I always knew it was important but I couldn’t figure out why.”

“So that crystal is not a weapon, but it may be a mechanism for tuning one to a human aura?”

North turned the crystal in his hand. “But not just any aura. It would only function properly if it was used by someone with an aura that carried Griffin Chastain’s unique vibe.”

“One of his descendants?”

“Right. But regardless of the original intent, it’s useless now.”

“I’ll bet Loring was using it to try to tune the Puppets to some paranormal weapons, like the light grenade and the flashlight gun Matt described.”

“Probably. If that’s true, those four orderlies are in bad shape by now. This crystal was very powerful.”

Sierra tightened her grip on the steering wheel. “Delbridge Loring was trying to tune paranormal weapons in his lab at Riverview.”

“Looks like it. He managed to find a few people with enough talent to activate the weapons—the orderlies—but he would have needed subjects for his experiments.”