And so he whistled as he hauled equipment from room to room, making notes in each location about temperature, electrical readings, and environmental factors. If a room had a window, he wrote down the direction it faced. If there was a large patch of mold in the corner of the floor, he took a sample for later analysis. If there was a hole in the wall, he drew a simple diagram of its location.

Anything could affect the results.

As he worked, he let the part of his mind not necessary to the task at hand wander. Normally, his brain would flit playfully through dozens of ideas, some ridiculous, some important, some both. Today, though, there was only one thought—or, rather, one image.

Alva Webster.

Her face followed him, and he made no effort to banish it. He thought of the way she smiled, often as though humor or pleasure had taken her by surprise or had forced its way through against her better judgment. He thought of her eyes, watchful and wary, dark and passionate. He wondered why she guarded herself so carefully against even a hint of happiness, and an uncharacteristic surge of anger spiked in him at the person or persons who had taught her to do so.

Was her husband the one who had put caution into her eyes? Something had driven her to leave him, bringing scandal and ostracization upon herself. The papers had talked about other men, illicit lovers, but she hadn’t married any of them, and there was certainly no sign of them here.

A polite chiming noise yanked him back to the present. He looked around in confusion for the source of the noise, frowning when he saw it coming from a machine designed to measure nearby electrical fluctuations. Crouching in front of the elaborate contraption, he studied the settings he had adjusted only minutes before. Wondering if he had accidentally entered the wrong values, he compared his notes to the machine and, when the numbers were identical, quickly ran through the equations again.

The values were correct. Which meant either something in the machine’s wiring was faulty or it had picked up an increased amount of electricity in a room that, to Sam’s naked eye, contained only himself.

He began to feel curls of excitement twisting through his body and forced himself to remain slow and calm as he wrote down the readings the machine was producing. It was almost certainly a problem with the machine; if there really was something else there he couldn’t see, he would expect at least some of the other machines to pick it up—

The large device that measured changes in the magnetic field began to chime as well.

Sam sprang up, his notebook temporarily forgotten on the floor. Observation of the room showed no changes, just a moldy, dark room with a bunch of equipment in it. He saw no ripples in the air, felt no changes in temperature.