The handful of men and women gathered around the oracle were dressed in classic lab coats, complete with plastic pocket protectors that held pens and small spiral-bound notebooks. Everyone in the scene stared at the oracle with expressions that ran the gamut from shock and disbelief to outright horror.

The oracle’s features were obscured by the hood. She was not perched on a three-legged stool. She stood, one arm raised, finger pointing at a strange structure in the middle of the room—a crystal pyramid enclosed in a glass chamber. The pyramid was large enough to hold a human figure standing upright. The door was a dark blue mirror.

The oracle’s prophecy was written in flowing script across the bottom of the painting. Here there be monsters.

Harlan managed to wrench his gaze away from the picture. “It’s the Vortex lab. It must be.”

“I agree,” Victor said.

“It was done by someone who was there,” Harlan said.

“Or by someone who saw a photograph,” Lucas suggested.

“I think the oracle was the artist,” Harlan said.

“Or else she took a picture and had someone else paint it,” Victor said.

“The question, of course,” Lucas said, “is why go to the trouble of creating a painting of the scene? If there was a photograph, why not preserve it? You could make as many copies as you wanted. And why use the iconography of the Delphi oracle?”

“Someone wanted to leave a message that had a shot at surviving,” Harlan said quietly.

“Exactly.” Victor grunted with satisfaction, as if Harlan had just confirmed his own conclusion. “Photographs are fragile. In the era of the Bluestone Project you couldn’t put them online. You dumped them into boxes along with hundreds of other pictures that got tossed into the trash when you died. Even if they did last, they deteriorated. A properly done oil painting, on the other hand, can last for hundreds of years.”

“And people hesitate to throw away an interesting work of art,” Lucas added. “The artist who did that picture was good. The subject is unusual and, therefore, intriguing. It makes the viewer ask questions. Art like that has a shot at surviving.”

“That was what it was designed to do,” Harlan said. “But only those who know something about Vortex would ask the right questions. I assume you examined the back of the canvas?”

“We took the frame apart,” Victor assured him. “Checked everything. No hidden signature. No date. Nothing. Looked at every object in the picture with a magnifying glass. Didn’t find any clues to the location of the lab.”

“The oracle,” Harlan said.

Victor fixed him with an intent gaze. “What about her?”

“I need the oracle who is a direct descendant of the one in that picture.”