Ultraviolet Catastrophe (14 page)

“Luckily, you don’t have to. Come on, Branston has nothing on us. I mean,
I’m
not there.”

I smirked. “And what makes you so special?”

“Besides resident genius status?”

“Ha ha. Seriously, if you pull that out one more time, I’m going to start wondering if you’re trying too hard.”

“Only with you, Lexie.”

I didn’t know whether to roll my eyes or blush, so of course, I went on the defensive. “You say that to all the other girls, too? What about Amy?”

He shrugged. “There are worse things than having lots of friends who happen to be brilliant…and female. That’s what Amy is. A friend. Besides, I just like to get to know people. To figure them out.”

I arched an eyebrow. “You play catch-and-release, too?”

“I used to.”

My mouth went dry. Was that what he was doing with me? I thought we were friends, but once he’d figured me out, would he release me, too? Some of my worry must have shown in my face because he reached across the table to touch the back of my hand.

“Lexie, it’s not like that. No matter how much I joke about it, I’m genuinely interested in people. I like figuring them out. I like learning who they are. Especially you. Because maybe if I can figure them out, I can figure other things out as well. Like…why I feel the need to impress you more than anyone else.” He looked away, but I caught the vulnerability in his eyes.

The door jangled as a group of laughing QT students walked in. I spotted Amy the same time she spotted us. A surge of disappointment twisted through me.

She made for our table, sliding in beside Asher and bumping him with her shoulder. She glared at his hand touching mine until he pulled it away. I dropped my hand to my lap and rubbed the spot where his touch still seared my skin.

“You guys should have called. I would have met up with you,” Amy said, her gaze darting between us.

His face was expressionless. “We got done early.”

“Well, I’m here now, so it’s all good.” She turned to me, though she still leaned her shoulder against Asher’s. “How’s everything going, Lexie? With all the project stuff going on, we haven’t had much of a chance to get to know each other yet. How do you like QT?”

“I’m getting used to it. Slowly. It’s not quite like Columbus High.”

“Right. You went to public school.” She wrinkled her nose. “I can’t imagine having to deal. Were there cliques and bullies and stuff?”

I shrugged. “It was just a normal high school. And there are cliques in QT, too.”

“Yeah, I guess there are. I just don’t think I could handle some place so…understimulating.” She watched Asher from the corner of her eye. “But you probably fit in better there, huh? I mean, with people more your level?”

I forced myself not to react, though more than anything I wanted to reach across the table and slap the smug expression off her face.

She smiled sweetly. “Oh, look, your food’s here.”

Coco carried a huge tray over to our table and slid the burgers in front of us. A basket of chili cheese fries hulked in the middle of the table. My stomach growled loudly.

Amy laughed at me and shook her head at Coco. “Can I get a Caesar salad and a Diet Coke please?”

“Sure, darlin’. I’ll bring it right over.”

Amy turned back to me. “Asher and I used to come here every Wednesday for the burgers, but then I started getting a little pudgy. I had to stop.” She patted her flat stomach, and I tried not to glare at her. I wasn’t fat, but I wasn’t rail-thin like her. More importantly, what I looked like had nothing to do with who I was, and I hated this girl for making me feel like it did, even for a split-second.

Asher seemed oblivious to the subtext in our exchange and was busily shoveling down his hamburger. I ignored Amy’s sneers and tried mine, closing my eyes at the deliciousness. “Oh my god, Asher.”

“Right?” He grinned at me. “Just wait till you try the fries.”

“I may have to sneak one, even though it’s so not on my diet.” Amy’s giggle made my head ache. She snagged a gooey fry and popped it in her mouth, then shook her head. “Oh, Ash, you have mayo all over your chin.” She grabbed a napkin from the dispenser and dabbed at his face.

My chest ached, and I forced myself to chew deliberately as I stared down at my plate. They were just
friends
, huh?

Amy spent the next half hour chatting about friends I didn’t know, about things that obviously had nothing to do with me. It didn’t take a genius to see she was trying to exclude me, but playing the game just seemed too exhausting, so I focused on my amazing hamburger instead.

When Coco wandered over to check on us, I put on my best smile. “This whole meal is fantastic. I don’t think I’ve ever tasted anything like it. Will you move in with me, Coco?”

“As long as your daddy’s there, I’m packing my bags right now.” She grinned at me. “But seriously, I’m glad you like it. Next time you’re in, you’ll have to try my portobello lasagna. It’s amazing if I do say so myself. Everything else all right?”

I nodded. “I think I’m ready for my check when you get a chance.”

“I got this, Coco.” Asher waved his hand. “My treat.”

Amy kissed his cheek. “You’re the best. Thanks, Ash.”

But I shook my head. “It’s fine. I’ll pay for my own.” I stared at Coco willing her to follow my instructions.

She glanced between the three of us but finally nodded. “I’ll be back with the bills.”

Asher glared at me but didn’t say anything.

I ignored him and finished the last two fries. “I need to be getting home. Thanks for the company, guys.”

“No, I’ll drive you home. Amy, you don’t mind, do you?”

A flicker of indecision crossed her face. “Actually, I was hoping you could help me with the piece of the project I’m working on. I had a few questions. If you don’t mind.”

Asher hunched his shoulders, and I decided to put both of us out of our misery. I could not handle hanging around watching Amy flirt. “My house is only a couple of blocks from here. I don’t mind walking at all.”

He shook his head. “Amy, do you mind waiting? It’ll only be a few minutes.”

Triumph shone in her eyes, and she knew she’d won this round. “Of course not.”

I dug my debit card out of my pocket as Coco returned with the checks. “I can put it on your dad’s tab if you want,” she suggested.

“Great. I didn’t know he had a tab.”

“All the scientists do. Comes right out of their paychecks.” She winked at me. “Sometimes I think they eat here more than they eat at home.”

“Well, I know I’ll be back.” I slid from the booth. “Thanks, Coco.”

“No problem, love.”

Amy stood up as well. “Have a good night, Lexie. I’ll be waiting right here for you, Ash. Hurry back.” She waved as Asher and I left the restaurant.

We were both silent as we climbed into his car. The lights from downtown glowed softly around us, and I looked away from Asher’s handsome profile. Instead, I watched laughing couples stroll down the sidewalk.

He started the car and pulled out into traffic. “Look, Lexie…”

“Don’t worry about it. Not a big deal.” But I was lying. It was a Friday night at the end of September. The air smelled of bonfires and cider, and I’d been looking forward to hanging out with Asher instead of being trapped alone at home for a change. But now…

“I have some homework to catch up on anyway.”

“But I promised we’d do something.”

“It was just dinner. And it doesn’t matter. Amy needs your help.” I shrugged. “Do you remember where I live? Just around the corner here.”

“Of course I remember.” He pulled up in front of my dad’s house and put the car in park. He turned to me in the almost-dark, his eyes glinting. “Amy and I are just friends now. No matter what it looks like, Lexie.”

“It doesn’t matter to me who you’re dating or not. But just a suggestion about that catch-and-release game you like to play? When you release someone, you might want to make sure they know they’re off the hook.” I pushed open the car door. “Thanks for the ride. See you Monday.”

“Lexie…”

I slammed the door on whatever he was going to say and sprinted up the front walk.

The one good thing about Amy’s unexpected appearance at dinner was it gave me the push I needed to prove her wrong. For some reason, her sly innuendo I wasn’t good enough did more to piss me off than anything Zella had ever said. I spent the rest of the night going over the formulas Asher and I had already worked through, trying to understand them.

Unfortunately, my brain started to ache within five minutes of starting. The formulas looked like they’d been written in another language, and no matter how long I stared, waiting for something to make sense, nothing clicked. It had been a lot easier with Asher helping me through it.

I threw my pencil down on the dining room table. I was never going to get this on my own, and Dad was still out. Not to mention I couldn’t expect him to help me out at school. My classmates were already suspicious I’d gotten special favors. No, I was going to have to figure this out myself.

I started again, reading through Asher’s notes from the beginning where he’d helped me try to understand some of the theory behind Avery’s discovery.

This was impossible. I stared at the notes again, read them slowly — piece by piece — until it finally started to compute. Okay. Got it. I moved on to the next section of his notes and reread those until they made sense.

But the deeper I dug into Avery’s formula, the more confused I got. It looked good and almost worked, but there was something missing, something that squawked
all wrong
. Unfortunately, I wasn’t smart enough to figure it out. I couldn’t spot it; I could just feel it.

I wrote and rewrote the formula, moving it, tweaking it, playing with it until I’d filled half a notebook and my hand cramped from clutching my pencil and my eyes felt like dried-out dishrags. Whatever was wrong with the stupid thing, I wasn’t going to find it tonight.

Yawning, I turned off my tablet and made my way to my room. When had it gotten to be one o’clock in the morning? And where was Dad? He should have been home hours ago, even if he was with Jordan. I shuddered and picked up my pace. The last thing I wanted to see was him coming home all glowy from a date.

I brushed my teeth at quantum speed and finally crawled into bed. But even after I closed my eyes, numbers danced behind my eyelids. I dreamt of them all night, waking up briefly when I heard the front door close around three, and then falling back into a nightmare where Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen screamed at me for being so stupid and ruining their experiment.

I woke up the next morning, stretching as the sunlight streamed in the window and warmed my side of the bed. I didn’t feel like I’d slept at all, and I lay in bed for a minute, staring at the travel poster I’d pinned to the far wall. “Visit Egypt,” it said with a vintage illustration of the pyramids.

The pyramids reminded me of the symbol for wavelength. And then something clicked in my brain. Something I could actually test. I shoved my feet into a pair of slippers and headed for the kitchen. Coffee before science, no matter how excited I was to get working.

Dad had already beaten me to it. He blinked blearily as he poured himself a cup, his sandy hair standing on end, his jaw shadowed with stubble.

I leaned against the counter and crossed my arms. “What time exactly did you get home last night, young man? Do we need to talk about a curfew?”

He pulled another mug out for me, filling it to the top. I curled my fingers around it, soaking up the heat. “I was worried, you know. You could have at least told me you were going to be out that late.”

A blush stained Dad’s cheeks. “Sorry, Lex. I didn’t expect to be out that long. I promise I’ll check in next time.”

I frowned at him. Since when had I turned into the parent? And honestly, discussing my father’s potential love life just wasn’t right. “Just don’t let it happen again or we’ll have to talk about punishments.” I took another sip of coffee, feeling the blessed caffeine start to work through me. “What’re you up to today? We should probably get some groceries. We’re still drinking this same old sludge coffee.”

He stared into his mug and got that apologetic tone to his voice that I hated. “Sorry, honey. I have to go in to work this morning. Avery wants to run some tests, and I need to be there. Is tomorrow okay?”

He had to go to QT. Where the project computers were. I chewed my lip. If I went with Dad, I might be able to test my theory in Asher’s lab. And if I was completely wrong, I wouldn’t look like an idiot because no one else would be around. I didn’t really want to spend a Saturday there, but if it would help me get ahead, I’d suck it up. “Mind if I hitch a ride? I have some work I should catch up on, too.”

“For the project?” Dad nodded. “Of course. I might not be able to get out of there at a decent hour, but you can take the shuttle home if you need to.”

“Great. I’ll go get dressed.”

An hour later, I pressed my finger to the scanner to unlock Asher’s lab, then snapped on the lights. The room was about the size of Dad’s house, but right now, only part of it was in use. Two long tables held four state-of-the-art computers and monitors. A server bank sat along one wall, and Max had created a robotics station, with a table full of tools I’d never seen before. The room was silent and chilly, and I rubbed my arms, trying to ignore the hum of the machines. If I let myself, I would start imagining they’d come to life. Or were watching me.

I hiked myself up on one of the tall stools and powered on a computer. Max, Zella, and Amy’s assignment had been to design a simulation of the wormhole machine we could use to verify our formulas. They’d finished it three days ago, and now it was time to take it for a test drive.

I opened the program to enter Avery’s formula into the system. The clicking sound of the keyboard filled the room, and when I was done, I scanned his numbers again. I’d bet my life there was something wrong with his equation.

My finger trembled as I clicked the simulation button. On the monitor, the machine started working as expected. Twenty percent, forty percent, sixty percent. Maybe I was wrong after all. Maybe I didn’t know what I was talking about. The computer gave a long, low tone and then started beeping, increasing in speed until it was a steady scream in my ears. The screen flashed red warning text across the top as it hit seventy percent complete and a computerized voice said, “
Warning: Experiment Unstable
.”

A second later, the entire simulation exploded on the screen in a wave of particles.

The voice came again, like a disapproving teacher. “
Experiment Failed.
”

I frowned at the computer. Yeah. That was not supposed to happen.

“What are you doing here?”

I gasped, spinning around on my stool. “Asher. You scared the crap out of me!”

He shrugged, his eyes looking tired. “Sorry. I didn’t expect anyone else to be here today. Thought I’d get some extra work in.” He shuffled past me to dump his bag on a desk, and I wrinkled my nose.

He smelled like the perfume Amy always wore. My jaw tightened, but I refused to acknowledge it. I had no reason to be jealous. Not technically anyway.

Instead, I spun back to my computer and started clearing the simulation data. “Yeah, I needed to check some numbers I was working on last night, and then I remembered the sim Max and Zella built. I didn’t think I’d be bothering anyone if I came in today.”

“Not at all. I would have been here sooner, but I had to drop Amy at her house. We worked on her piece of the project way too late, and she crashed on my couch last night.”

Was he blushing?
Oh my god.
Had they hooked up? After he’d told me they were just friends?

“Ah.” I pretended to study the computer screen. I didn’t care. I couldn’t care. I had more important things to focus on, like figuring out what was wrong with this calculation.

Unfortunately, Asher was the one person who might be able to help me.

He shuffled in his bag and refused to look at me. An awkward silence filled the room as I watched the cursor blinking in an empty field. Finally, I pushed aside my feelings and said, “Before you get started, would you mind looking at something for me?”

“Sure. What’s going on?”

“I’m not sure. I was going over Avery’s equations last night, trying to make sense of them, and something kept bothering me. I think the numbers in this part of his formula are wrong.”

Asher stood beside me as I pointed to my tablet and the calculations I’d come up with. He furrowed his eyebrows, his lips moving as he read through my changes. “You know, I think you might be right. How did I miss it?”

“I ran Avery’s original calculations through the simulation Max built. Look what happens.” I clicked the simulate button again, and Asher watched the wormhole machine explode on-screen.

“But if I change one section to my new numbers, everything seems to work. Or at least the first part of the experiment does. I haven’t gotten all the way through yet.” I changed the numbers again, and the computer ran through the project successfully.

Asher started pacing the lab. “This just doesn’t make sense. How could Avery and his team have missed this? It seems like it’s a fundamental problem with the initial mass structure.”

“Maybe they compensated somewhere else?” I played with the numbers a bit. “See, if you leave it like this, the mass generator will work — up to a certain point. But once you pass this threshold, everything changes. It becomes unstable.”

Asher leaned closer to get a better look at the computer, and I couldn’t help but watch the way his long eyelashes grazed his cheekbones. It should be illegal for any guy to have lashes like that.

I frowned and jerked my gaze back to the computer. I didn’t need this kind of distraction, especially if he’d hooked up with Amy last night. He was nothing but a flirt and a smart ass. Letting my guard down around him was only going to get me in trouble.

He straightened and shook his head at me. “You’re right. I’m not sure how you…”

I jumped down from the stool and moved away from him, arms crossed. “How I figured that out? Gee, thanks. I appreciate your faith in me.”

Asher rolled his eyes. “Stop being touchy. If you had let me finish, I was actually wondering how you’d spotted something so tiny. Just one little section off. Almost like it was on purpose to hide something.” He stared at the screen and shook his head. “I think we need to go use the main simulator and test this theory. I trust Max and Zella and Amy and their design, but I want to make sure we’re a hundred percent certain before we bring up something this big to the main project team.”

I nodded. “The main labs should be empty today. My dad said Avery has them working in another section. They were running a few pre-tests I think.”

Asher and I headed down the hall toward the main project suite. I knew we were underground, but the sheer size of the labs down here was astonishing. This level alone had to be at least the length of three football fields. And even though it was Saturday, the place bustled with people. We wove between groups of scientists deep in discussion and tried to stay out of their way as they walked.

Asher had shoved his hands deep into his pockets, and he stared straight ahead as he said, “You know, I don’t appreciate you immediately jumping to the conclusion I think you’re stupid all the time. I’m not sure how many more times I need to say it, but I don’t.”

I stopped short in the middle of the hall and gaped at him. “Excuse me?”

He walked a few steps past me and then stopped with a shrug. “Just because you don’t believe you’re smart enough to be here doesn’t mean it’s true. You’ve been here a month — you need to get over it. I’m tired of your self-esteem issues. I already told you why I picked you for the team. You can either believe me or not, but don’t keep making me defend myself.”

I opened and closed my mouth, but nothing came out. What the hell was his problem? Where was this even coming from? “Seriously? You’re going to give me a hard time about not believing in myself? I’m sorry I can’t pretend to be an arrogant asshole like you.”

Asher glared at me. “Do you even hear yourself? You’re doing it again. All I want is for you to believe in yourself, not to pretend to be something you’re not.”

Our furious glares locked, and we stood frozen in place until one of the scientists bumped into my shoulder. I looked away with a frown. “This isn’t really the place for a discussion about my issues. We have a bigger problem to solve first.”

“Fine.” Asher turned on his heel, and we walked the rest of the way to the lab in silence. At the door, he ran his finger through the print scanner.

“Welcome, Asher Rosen,” the computerized voice said.

The doors slid open, and we stepped inside. I’m not sure what I expected, but it wasn’t the huge warehouse spread out before us. The ceiling was so high I couldn’t see the iron girders holding it up or the far end of the space. Cold air snaked across my skin, and I shivered. If I’d known I’d be visiting the Antarctic, I would have brought a sweater.

“Over here.” Asher’s voice was expressionless as he made for a bank of computers along the wall. The blinking lights and computer screens reminded me of the pictures I’d seen of NASA control centers. Knowing QT, that probably wasn’t too far off.