All three of them stared at me in horror as I explained how it had disappeared from my nightstand drawer. How, somehow, the factory worker who’d attacked Henry on the train platform had found my house, broken in, and left me the threatening note.

Scylla jutted her lower lip out and sighed, blowing her choppy bangs off her forehead.

“Right, well, who even knows what the key is. So the coin’s a dead end. And everything else we’ve found on site, GSAF has now. But, Tamara, what about this thing with your mom’s mark on it?”

Tamara looked it over once more. “There’s a 3-D scanner in her workshop. If whatever this is has been saved on her computer, scanning it should bring up the file on her deskpad.” She glanced at me hesitantly, as if looking for reassurance.

I shrugged. “It’s worth a try. I think we’re in too deep to do nothing, now.”

◦ • ◦

Over our heads, there was the slam of a door. “We’re home,” I heard Tamara’s mom Bryn announce. “Tam?”

“Down in the basement,” Tamara yelled back.

The basement doubled as Delia’s workshop and her unofficial museum of technology. Collecting old tech had been Mama D’s hobby for as long as I’d known her, and her collection was pretty impressive. Plexiglas cabinets lined the walls, their shelves laden with more electronics than I could count. It seemed like every time I came down here, there was something new—a lime green iMac, an Atari gaming system, a brick-sized cellular phone. Some were just for show, but a number of them still worked, and Delia had modded them herself to make them compatible with newer technology. The room was crowded and would probably look haphazardly cluttered to an outsider, but I’d been around Mama D long enough to know there was always a method to her madness. Each and every one of these gadgets had been cataloged in great detail, I was sure.

In the center of the workshop, the four of us sat on stools around Delia’s workbench, which was piled high with a clutter of tools. There were wrenches, pliers and screwdrivers, blank motherboards, lidless Tupperware containers filled with pins and random pieces of metal, and countless other things I couldn’t even guess at the function of.

On the far end of the table, a new-looking A-Top was hardwired into Delia’s 3-D printer. Tamara was scrolling through this now, searching for any files that might be related to the artifact. We’d already tried scanning it, but there was no record of it in the device’s memory.

I looked up at the thud of footsteps coming down into the shop. Mama D stood on the stairs with her hands on her hips, her frizzy red curls falling out of her messy bun in three different directions.