Game Over

Chapter 59





DID YOU EVER have a friend who you worried was doing something stupid, but you didn’t want to be a busybody, so you stayed quiet and kept your opinion to yourself?

Looking through the glass at Kildare’s ant colony in the science lab, I was realizing I’d just had a situation like that. I couldn’t keep the what-ifs from running through my head. What if I’d argued with Kildare? What if I’d persuaded him not to pursue his plan? What if we’d regrouped and come up with a bold strategy that hadn’t involved meekly going along with Number 7 to the GC flagship store? What if I’d just gone solo against his parents so that he didn’t have to be involved? Why had I even gotten their poor son sucked into this mess?

I sighed and looked down at Kildare’s ants. Maybe they were hungry. After all, they probably hadn’t been fed since the other day. I materialized some food—a nice fresh turnip—and was removing the lid from the tank when I noticed they’d been digging a hole in the sand. At the bottom something white was poking through. A piece of paper!

I put the turnip in the corner of the tank and removed the paper. It was the page I’d seen Kildare scribbling on the last time we’d been in the lab.

I pored over the organic chemistry formulas he’d written down, all involving some high-energy, self-propelling reaction, resulting in a bunch of compounds I didn’t recognize. In fact, the only things that made any sense to me were two heavily circled abbreviations in the center of the page: NaCl and H2O, shorthand for sodium chloride—common table salt—and dihydrogen oxide, more commonly known as water.

Water and salt? I had some serious chemistry studies ahead of me, but now, thanks to Kildare, at least I knew where to go.