“You know what we should have done already?” James asked as they walked toward the bare door of the Foundation apartment.

“Lots of things,” Bradley said. “Like quit.”

“Other than that,” James said. “We should get some of the other teams in here. It’s not an actual competition, and it’s ridiculous that it’s just the six of us going through an entire apartment’s worth of shit to solve this. I only have Genevieve’s number in my phone, the other captains’ cell numbers are written down at my desk. Do you happen to have any of their numbers on you?”

“No,” Bradley said, instead of saying something terrible. James chalked it up to the spirit of reconciliation between them. “No, the best I could do right now is send a mass email.”

“Nah, it’d just get lost, even if people did check. Do you know how many of those we get a day?”

“You know you can set up a digest, right? Get them all grouped together instead of scattered in your inbox?”

“What?” James turned to Bradley, wide-eyed. “Seriously?”

“Yeah, how did you not know that? I’m on one for admin staff. You schedule it to arrive at certain times during the day.”

“So I can have one email where the messages all arrive once a day, then not have to deal with it again?”

“No, there are things in there that the Foundation wants you to get right away. If you do it once, you’ll miss them and McGovern will get mad. Do it two or three times a day.”

“Is that what you do?” James asked.

“No, once. Fuck them.”

James laughed and opened the door to the apartment to see Jessamyn and Rita leaning against the kitchen counter with a pile of unopened boxes beside them. “Jessamyn, do you have any of the other captains’ phone numbers?” he asked as they walked in. “We’re thinking we should get some backup here.”

“I have a few of them,” Jessamyn said, pulling on one of the gloves he offered her. She carefully lifted the lid of a wooden box on the kitchen counter. “That would actually make things a lot easier, let me just-”

She hissed and dropped the wooden lid to the counter, where it bounced off and slid into the small space between the counter and the wall beside the living room doorway. “Splinter,” she muttered, checking her gloved fingertip.

She seemed fine, because she didn’t say anything else about it. Instead, she got down on her knees and reached into the slot where the lid had fallen. Then a crackle of electricity flew through the room and a flash of light burned across James’s vision as Jessamyn crumpled, the large stone in her hand falling to the floor as she landed. James’s heart stopped for a second, but she sat up before he got to her.

Everyone else was in the room in seconds, stumbling over boxes in their hurry to get to Jessamyn. “I’m fine,” Jessamyn insisted, waving everybody off though she was clearly dazed. “Don’t worry about it. But I think I found the artifact.”

The artifact was a polished green stone with veins of rich minerals woven through it. It was probably the size of James’s fist and that reckless part of him wanted to grab it. But the intelligent part instead helped Jessamyn to her feet.

“Yeah, I think you did,” Rosa said. “But how…”

She glanced out the window, where a Green Line train was rumbling past. “Do you think…”

Jessamyn looked back between the counter and wall, then motioned for James to do so too. He squatted down and took in what he was seeing. It was a completely ordinary little nook with some dust and a piece of folded paper crumpled in the corner. The perfect place for something small to fall and get lost forever.

“That has to be it,” Rosa said. “Look.”

She motioned to the power line coming out the side of the apartment building, just above the window. James traced the movement to the utility pole in the middle of the wide street. There, it connected just above the cables of the Green Line track.

“That’s how the energy’s getting out into the transit system,” Rosa said.

Sure enough, as James looked back down into the nook, he saw a protruding electrical outlet about two inches away from the floor.

“So the energy traveled from that,” he motioned to the artifact, which was still sitting on the floor between them all, “up into the outlet, through the wiring, and into the power lines.” 

“Then into the train lines, where it zapped people who were, what, in the wrong place at the wrong time?” Tim asked.

“That’s my theory,” James said. “And if there’s a connection between all the victims beyond the fact that they were in T stops or trains, I don’t know it.”

Bradley reached a gloved hand into the nook and pulled out the crumpled piece of paper. It was a faded receipt for a mango peach smoothie, marked six months earlier. He reached in again and pulled out a straw wrapper with strings of dust dangling off it.

“And it was just sitting beside the counter,” Jessamyn added, her voice tinged with disbelief. “No storage procedures, no paperwork. No signs of how dangerous it was. I didn’t even mean to pick it up, I was going for the lid that fell.” She took a shaky breath. “Just sitting there where someone clearly lost it. And that’s why they made up this whole thing about a scavenger hunt. This thing wasn’t accounted for, but they had to know that it was causing the problems.”

“They couldn’t just retrace their fucking footsteps?” Bradley said. “McManus, I take back what I said before. Steal whatever you want from this place, they’re clearly not keeping track of anything.”

“That’s it,” Jessamyn said dully. “We’re done. We solved it. Let’s make it their problem.”

She still seemed a little unsteady, but pulled out her phone and swore. “It’s fried.”

“I’ll talk to them about replacing it,” Rita offered. “They better, it happened on the job.”

That hadn’t saved James when his phone was crushed in the van wreck last winter. But he wasn’t going to say anything right now. Instead, he just pulled out his own phone.

“Want mine?” he offered. “Or I can call it in, unless you want to.”

Jessamyn grinned bitterly at him. “Oh, I want to,” she said. “Me and Harding are going to have a chat.”

---

CONTINUE TO CHAPTER 19