The shack at the end of the alley—a leaning, faded wreck, tired and abandoned—didn’t look any different, although there was a shiny new lock on the door. Claire sighed. Myrnin had forgotten to give her a key, of course. That didn’t present much of a problem, though; she tested a couple of boards and found one that easily slid aside enough for her to crawl through.

Typical Myrnin planning.

Inside, most of the space was taken up by a set of stairs that went down, like a subway station. There was a bright glow coming up from it.

“There’d better be cake,” she said, mostly to herself, and hitched her backpack higher on her shoulder as she headed down into the lab.

The last time she’d been here, it had been totally destroyed, with hardly a stick of furniture or a piece of glass left intact. Someone—most likely Myrnin himself—had gotten busy with a broom and maybe a dump truck to sweep out the mounds of shattered glass, scrapped lab equipment, broken furniture, and (worst of all, to Claire’s mind) ravaged books. The place had always had a mad scientist-meets-Jules Verne flair to it, but now it really did—in a totally good way. There were new worktables, many of them wood and marble, and a few shiny metal ones. New electric lights had been installed to replace the odd collection of oil lamps, candles, and bulbs that Thomas Edison might have wired together; now they had indirect lighting behind elegant fan-shaped shields. Modern, but retro-cool.

The floor was still old flagstone, but the hole Myrnin had punched in it the last time she’d been here had also been repaired, or at least covered with a rug. She hoped there was something under the rug, but with Myrnin, you really could never tell. She made a mental note to poke it before she stepped on it.

Myrnin himself was shelving things in a new bookcase that must have been ten feet tall, at least. It came with its own little rolling ladder—no, as Claire looked around, she realized that the entire room was surrounded by the same tall bookcases, and the ladder was on a metal rail so it could slide all around. Neat. “Ah,” her boss said, and looked down at her through the little square antique glasses perched on the end of his long, straight nose. “You’re late.” He was five feet up in the air, on the top step of the ladder, but he hopped off as if it were pretty much nothing, landed light as a cat on his feet, and straightened his vest with an absentminded little tug.