With that, Jackson slipped around the corner, paused briefly, and then strode toward the first door, his now slightly smaller sphere bobbing above him. I followed, keeping to the right side of the building, every sense alert as the thick sense of wrongness increased and my skin crawled.

Jackson stopped at the first door and glanced at me. “Ready?”

I pressed my back against the wall and nodded. The two spheres hovering between us sent firefly-bright sparks spinning through the shadows.

Jackson sent the door crashing backward again. As the wall shuddered under the impact, I sent my sphere into the room and flared it brighter, potentially blinding anyone who might have been waiting in there.

No sound, no response.

We went in as one. The large room was filled with all sorts of laboratory equipment, some of which was familiar, some not.

“Computer,” Jackson said, walking to the left. “Looks brand-new.”

I started opening the various drawers and cabinets that lined the walls. “The power was cut ages ago, so there must be a generator around somewhere.”

“If there is, it currently isn’t on.”

“Maybe it ran out of juice. It has been three days since Luke died.”

The cupboards held little more than chemicals and lab paraphernalia. Other than the lone laptop, there was nothing that could be used to jot down equations—not even a whiteboard. It couldn’t have been a lab Professor Baltimore—one of the lead scientists working on a cure for the virus, and whose murder had gotten me involved in the whole mess—had worked in; he’d been an old-fashioned kind of guy who’d preferred to make his initial notes on paper. I doubted being infected would have changed the habits of a lifetime—not when Luke needed him to be one of the saner cloaks. A muddled, empty mind would not have given him the cure he was seeking—if indeed that was what he’d been after. Luke hadn’t actually been playing with a full deck mentally, so who actually knew?

Which didn’t mean the lab couldn’t have belonged to Professor Wilson, the other lead scientist who’d been infected and brought under Luke’s control. While Wilson had seemed more up-to-date in his note-taking methods, he’d apparently kept a backup of all his research on USBs, just as Baltimore had. While we were still searching for those backups, the two locker keys we’d recently found in Wilson’s garden shed had at least taken us a step closer to finding them. One of those keys had led us to a USB stored in an old-style gym locker. Whatever information it had held was now in PIT’s hands, and although we’d retained a copy, we hadn’t yet had time to check it out. We were still looking for the locker the second key belonged to.