Lorenzo winks at me.

“There’s more over here,” Morgan says, and leads our tiny parade past the open area and toward the back of the lab. Here, two doors lead to the MRI rooms.

“You’ve got two magnetic resonance imaging setups?” I ask, nudging Lin, who is almost drooling. Back at Georgetown, we had to beg for the use of one MRI in the hospital—a twenty-minute walk away. And that was when we were allowed the time, which wasn’t often.

Morgan beams. “Two Tesla MRIs. And here’s the PET facility.” He opens another door and lets us peek inside.

We had to wait months for access to the hospital’s positron-emission tomography, or PET, equipment.

“What about EEGs?” Lorenzo asks. “And the biochem lab?”

“All here. The electrocephalography stuff is over in the small-equipment area.”

“Electroencephalography,” I correct. “That’s why they call it EEG and not ECG.”

Morgan’s eyes scrunch together. “Whatever. Anyway, I forgot to mention it, but you’ll find the electrodes and the printer in the far right cabinet. The biochem lab is through these doors.” He motions to Lorenzo’s key card. “Go ahead. You’ll probably be most interested in the protein expression module. It’s just here, to your right.”

Morgan points, but Lorenzo is still scanning the room, which could hold five high school chem labs.

There are only three of us. Four, if we count Morgan, but I don’t think any of us is counting him. And only one biochemist.

“Okay, people.” Morgan checks his watch. “Got a meeting with the big guys, so I’ll leave you to it.”

“You do that,” Lorenzo says, and slides his key card into the biochem lab door. “We’ll be fine.”

“Internet?” I say, pointing to a bank of computers with monitors the size of flat-screen televisions in the main lab.

“No way, Jean.” Morgan fires up one of the workstations. “Excel, Word, SPSS in case you need to run statistics. MatLab. Whatever you need.”

All I need if I want to work in a vacuum, I think. “How about access to the world of periodicals, Morgan? I don’t carry the past five years of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience around in my purse.”

“Oh, that. Right.” He moves toward a rack filled with tablets. “All plugged into the academic databases. If you can’t find what you want, call up on the intercom. I’ll make it happen.” Morgan smiles, showing two neat rows of small teeth. They remind me of a hamster. Or a lab rat. “Gotta buzz now, people,” he says, and disappears through the rodent room and out the main doors.

Finally, we’re alone.

“Fifteen million for the two Tesla MRIs and the PET machine,” Lin says when we hear the double click of the main doors to the lab. “Fifteen million. And then there’s everything else.”