“Up and at ’em!” Rooke said. Mark blinked, his eyesight bleary. He forgot where he was for a moment, but then it clicked: the spare bed outside Rooke’s office. He couldn’t have been asleep for too long. Rooke shook Mark until he sat up. “We’ve got a lot of work to do and little time to do it. Let’s go.”
Mark yawned and accompanied Rooke back to the elevator. “Where are Heather and Finster?” he asked.
“Off preparing for an assignment,” he said, stepping inside the elevator. He hit the button for one floor down.
“For your boss?” Mark asked.
“Yes,” Rooke said, his face a little tense. “For Mr. Whyte.”
“Who is he?”
Rooke shook his head. “A generous benefactor who pays the bills. That’s all.” He ended the subject as they stepped out onto the next level. The floor was set up much like the laboratories below but more sparsely populated. Rooke returned courtesy greetings from employees running various tests.
The pair headed into a back room and Rooke locked the door behind them. “Now, I’ve been analyzing the security footage from your little spill,” he said. He zipped over to a table where various cans, tubes, and other chemicals were. “Lydia and you were splashed by many things that day. I’ve collected some samples of a few of the items that were around the area and pieced together some of the mixture. But I’ll need you to fill in the rest.”
“How do I do that?” Mark asked.
“Seeing as needles would only break on your skin, we can’t draw blood to test the contents. So I need you to recount that day as best as possible. What colors did you see in the spill? What did you smell? Did you happen to catch the names on any boxes or anything else? Use your senses. There weren’t that many possibilities.” Rooke picked up a pencil and pad of paper. He sat at the table, writing down a list of ingredients. “This is what I have so far. Start looking through these. Mix them together if you like. Maybe that will help.”
Mark carefully lifted up one test tube filled with a ruby liquid and then another of a bubbling deep blue. Rooke slid an empty petri dish over to him. He poured in one chemical and then the other, watching the two samples coalesce into a soft purple. “These may be part of it,” he said.
“Excellent.” Rooke wrote down the chemicals. “Excellent. Keep going and when we’re ready, we’ll test it.” He pointed his pencil to some nearby cages. Each cage contained white mice, eating or sleeping.
“Keep going,” Rooke said, returning Mark’s attention to the chemicals. He nodded and picked up one of the cans.