I really don’t know for sure what we’re looking at. Adults wearing white coats stand beside huge, steaming vats. I watch the guy closest to us pull a flaming orange container out of his vat and carry it over to a large work table. He pours glowing liquid into a dark metal container. When he is finished, he looks up, right at us! But then he goes back to his vat.

“Dude, do you think we’re invisible?” Doug is examining his outstretched arms.

“Either that, or the guy is very nearsighted. Like me.” I adjust my glasses on my face.

“Or he’s ignoring us for some reason,” Zoe says. “C’mon.”

Another guy brings his flaming container over to the same work table. “Not much here. Just a few flakes. A lot of scrap.” He pours a small amount of liquid into the dark container.

“That’s too bad,” a woman standing next to him says. “I had high hopes for that one.”

Wait a minute . . .

I take a few steps closer. I can barely believe my eyes.

Is that the woman who gave me the token?

It looks like her, but she’s not wearing her regular white sweat suit and Triple T ball cap. She’s wearing a white coat, like all the other workers in the room, and her hair is tucked up into a gold bandana.

I elbow Zoe. “Zoe, what does the patch say on her coat?” Zoe’s farsighted, so she needs reading glasses, but she can see distances way better than me.

Zoe takes a half-step closer and cranes her neck forward. “It says Quality Control.”

“So she’s some kind of inspector, then?”

Zoe shrugs. “I guess so.”

“I’m gonna test my invisibility,” Doug proclaims, and he struts right up to a vat in the middle of the room.

DOUG!

Workers walk around him, and he grins back at us, waving his hands in the air.

“They can’t see us.” Zoe has to grab the sleeve of my T-shirt to move me forward. “Let’s follow the Quality Control woman.”

She is walking from vat to vat, staring into the steaming fires. Zoe and I stay a few feet behind her.

“This one is all scrap,” a man says, as he carries his container to pour the contents out at the work table.

The woman yells out to the workers, “Keep testing! One of these will come out pure.”

“Guys! Check it out!” Doug motions us over to a table at the far corner of the huge warehouse. We jog over, dodging workers along the way.

“We got gold bars, people!” Doug reaches over, pulls a gold bar off the table, and hands it to me. “Of course, I’d prefer a chocolate bar . . . or an ice cream bar. But gold is pretty awesome too.”