Nick took it out of his back pocket and handed it to her. She held it up between them.

“What do you notice about this?” she asked.

“The pages are blank. And covered in metal.”

“Copper, yes. But what else?”

Nick shook his head.

“It’s surprisingly heavy,” she said, answering her own question.

She hefted it up and down. Nick realized she was right. It weighed a good few pounds.

“There’s something else beneath the copper,” Hailey said. “A heavier metal. Maybe lead.”

“That’s what got you so excited?”

She turned back to the eagle, and gently turned it over onto its back. She gestured for Nick to come closer, then pointed a long fingernail at a spot near the base of one of the eagle’s wings.

Nick looked closely—and saw two tiny symbols etched right into the bronze.

“What are these?” Nick asked. “Egyptian hieroglyphics?”

Hailey headed toward one of the bookshelves in the center of the former lab. It took her a minute to find what she was looking for—one of the antique looking tomes, with a soft, leathery cover. When she brought it back to the workbench, Nick saw that it was more bound manuscript than book, with yellowing pages tucked inside, most of it held together by bands of string.

The title on the cover was as strange as the manuscript itself:

Principia of Chymistry

“My foster father was a scientist and a collector,” Hailey said, “and he had an extensive library of this sort of thing. I guess I picked up some of his habits, and over the years I’ve gathered a pretty sizable collection of my own. Mostly books on mathematics going back to Newton, but also a fair number of books on related sciences. This one I found in an antique bookstore in Harvard Square. I took it for my shelves as more of a curiosity than anything else.”

There was a lot to unpack in what Hailey was saying, but Nick tried to stay focused.

“I think they spelled a couple of those words wrong.”

“‘Chymistry’ was a term that came about between the Middle Ages and the late seventeenth, early eighteenth centuries; a sort of prescience discipline that rose out of earlier, more mystic endeavors. Basically, it was the predecessor to modern chemistry, the science of elements and compounds, and how they interrelate.”

“This is going somewhere, right?”

Hailey began untying the strings holding the antique manuscript closed. A moment later, she was leafing through the yellowed pages, then held the book open to a page filled with tables. On one side of each table was a vertical row of symbols, and next to each, a few lines of text. The text wasn’t English—Nick guessed Latin, but then again, they hadn’t quite gotten to Latin by the second week of ninth grade.

“Here,” Hailey said, pointing with one of her nails.