“I gathered from the whining.”

“Royal sons do not whine.”

Thomas and Fred snorted in unison.

“Look, Artur, just give us another couple of days. We—” Fred looked around, motioned Jonas closer, and they all bent together in some sort of geeky, multispecies football huddle. “Thomas already has a bunch of the info compiled. We need to pinpoint the source, we can’t just wade into the harbor and start kicking random ass.”

“That’s true,” Jonas said. “Random ass is never a good thing. Though there was this girl from Revere once, who—”

“Then what am I to do in the meantime?” Artur had looked momentarily startled when Jonas and Fred each slung an arm around his shoulders and urged him to bend forward, but now his frustration was evident—more than evident, in his odd football huddle position. Jonas felt a stab of sympathy for the guy, who was probably used to wrestling great white sharks in his spare time. And he probably didn’t like anything that would give Thomas an edge—even if it helped his cause. “This frittering is—”

“Yeah, we got that,” Fred interrupted. “Look, this is all quite weird already, thank you. Don’t do anything to make it—”

“Dr. Bimm?”

Fred audibly groaned, and Jonas inwardly cheered. An exciting morning, made even better by the appearance of the yummilicious…

He turned. “Dr. Barb!”

Dr. Barb looked startled at the volume of his greeting, and Jonas cursed himself. “Uh, hello, Jonas. Dr. Bimm. Dr. Pearson. Ah—” She tipped her head way back to look at Artur. “Sir, I couldn’t help but notice your voice is scaring the—”

“That’s why we came over to talk to him,” Fred said.

“What?” Thomas asked. Then, “Right! Dr. Bimm and I, having no lives, came to work bright and early on a Saturday but on the way to the labs, via the jellyfish exhibit on the other end of the building, we saw this guy making a ruckus, and came over to see if he needed to be escorted out.” Then, lower, “Wouldn’t bother me at all to kick his ass again.”

“Oh.” Dr. Barb looked slightly bewildered at both the glib response and the idea of Fred a) noticing a tourist, b) caring about a ruckus, and then deciding to c) tend to the problem. “Ah. Good work, Dr. Pearson and, uh, Dr. Bimm, but we have, uh, security for that sort of thing.”

Fred made a noise that sounded an awful lot like ‘ha.’

An awkward silence fell. Around them visitors were chatting and the din was pretty good, but the five of them were just looking at each other without a word. Even the glowing jellyfish bobbed around silently. In one of the curious silences that sometimes fell over a large crowd, Madison could be clearly heard to say, “Yes, I’m doing my paper on the dolphins in Boston Harbor.”

Freshly distracted, Fred practically spat. “Good God!”

“Dr. Bimm.”

“There are no dolphins in Boston Harbor!”

Dr. Barb sighed. “Dr. Bimm.”