Sighing, Cadence turned to Hannah. "All right, Hannah, we're going to take the G5 back to headquarters. Christian's going to check his lab and see if anything is missing. Can you arrange for the plane to leave as soon as we get to the airport?"
Hannah nodded, and Meagan asked, "What about us?"
"I'll send the plane back just as soon as we can," Cadence assured her. "Hannah will stay here with you and Jamie. Eliza, catch an airliner."
"Since when are you in charge?" Eliza asked, her hands on her hips.
"Don't make me take out your other eye," Cadence warned her. "Come on Christian, let's go. And while we are on our way, be thinking about what he may have needed from your lab."
The three-hour flight back to Kansas City was excruciating. Cadence was in constant contact with Mrs. Carminati as she worked to figure out where Aaron might be going. She explained that he had come in early, at around 8:00, went into his office for just a second, thanked her for all of her hard work, and then left. She thought he was acting a little strangely, so she went into his office where she could see the security cameras, something she never did before--she assured Cadence--and saw him enter Christian's lab a few minutes later. There were no cameras in there and she wasn't sure what he had with him when he left, but he seemed to have something in his hand. She said he had arranged for the plane to be ready himself, but didn't file a flight plan and the transponder had been turned off.
Cadence asked her to make contact with air traffic control and see if she could determine where he might be headed. In the meantime, Cadence periodically checked in with Christian to see if his memory had been jogged at all. The beads of sweat on his forehead, despite the air conditioned cabin, made her think there was more to this story that he wasn't telling her.
The trip from the airport to headquarters was both dangerous and quick. Cadence was driving Aaron's preferred Aventador, and she covered the distance so rapidly, Christian, a seasoned veteran, was actually holding on for dear life. She screeched to a halt outside of Aaron's office building. Christian's lab was next door. "Okay, go check your lab. I'm going to go check his office for anything Mrs. Carminati might have overlooked, and I'll meet you back here," she directed.
He nodded, and ran off to his lab. Cadence ran through the doors of the office building, waited a few seconds, and then followed him.
She stood outside the open door quietly for a few minutes, observing. "Shit... shit... shit..." he was mumbling as he desperately searched through what appeared to be a wall safe which clearly took a key. He turned and surveyed the rest of the room, knocking a few graduated cylinders and other scientific paraphernalia to the floor in the process.
"What's missing?" she asked stepping inside the room.
Christian jumped, clearly not expecting her to be there so quickly, or at all. "Oh, uhm, nothing," he said. "I just... I thought..."
"Christian, cut the bullshit," she warned him, stepping up next to him. "You're hiding something from me, and I need to know what it is right now."
He hesitated, glancing at her but unable to meet her eyes. Finally, he said, "I promised Aaron I wouldn't talk about it to anyone."
"Okay--then I'm no one, but I need to know what's missing because wherever he's at, he has it, and that's the only way we are going to figure it out. I have a horrible feeling that he's in trouble, and I need to fix that. I'm not losing anyone else--not today."
Christian took a deep breath, and pounded his good fist against his lab table. "All right. For the past couple of months, I've been working on a re-Transformation serum. For Guardians. I was getting really close with my trials. I just had a couple of things to work out, but it wasn't ready yet."
"And he took it?" Cadence asked, extremely confused.
"It looks like it," Christian admitted. "But I have no idea why. He asked me about it last night when he stopped by. He asked me how close I was, and I told him, I thought I had it. But, Cadence, I still had a few tests to do. Without that serum, I'm going to have to start all over again..."
"Without the serum?" she questioned. "Christian, don't worry about your serum right now. We need to figure out why he took it. What's he intending to do with it? And, if he thinks it's going to work--and you're saying it might not--what will happen if it doesn't?"
"Well, I know the answer to that," Christian replied dismally.
Cadence wasn't sure she wanted to hear the answer, but she asked the question. "What will happen if he uses it on... someone... and it doesn't work?"
"Then, that Guardian will die," he said solemnly.
The lump in her throat formed instantly and was almost too large for her to speak. "And what are the chances that it won't work?" she questioned, bracing herself for the answer.
He sighed and ran his hand through his blond hair. "Uh, well, there's a good chance it would work... on most Guardians. I mean, in the trials with blood samples that I performed, it bonded and reversed the genetic code about eighty percent of the time."
"Okay," she nodded. "Eighty percent, that's... that's good."
"Yeah, it would be," he went on, "but every time it failed, it was in blood samples with extremely high concentrations of Guardian encoding on the strands."
"So...?"
"So, basically, in layman's terms, the better the Guardian, the harder to change them back to human," he explained, not meeting her eyes.
She nodded in understanding. "And he thinks it works?" she asked, still trying to maintain a sense of calm.
"I think so," Christian agreed.
