Vivienne pulled her sweatshirt back over her head to hide her raw skin.
“I’m going to ask you again, and if you feel your adrenaline spike, try to breathe through it.” After Vivienne nodded, Penelope asked her why she had come to Neverland.
With her eyes fixed on the desk, Vivienne took a deep breath. “Because I wanted to belong somewhere.”
“You belong right here.” Penelope gave her red hand a reassuring squeeze. “It sounds like you should check out our recruiting program.”
That made her think of Deacon, and her adrenaline spiked for an entirely different reason.
“All right everyone, I want you to leave your things here and come with me. It’s time to get you linked to Neverland’s security system.”
They followed Penelope to a door concealed in the paneling near the reception area. Behind the door, she pulled the string on a single exposed bulb and started down a narrow stairwell with creaky wooden treads.
“Someone needs to fire the maid,” Max muttered, swiping at one of the many cobwebs hanging on the chipping plaster walls.
Vivienne gulped the musty air and moved closer to Emily. If she saw a spider, she was going to end up embarrassing herself even worse than she had upstairs.
“They’re fake,” Penelope said when they reached the concrete pad at the bottom. “We don’t want outsiders thinking we use this area for anything important.”
At the end of a short, damp passageway, light seeped from beneath a wooden door with a dented silver knob.
Deacon had been kidding when he said there were human sacrifices, right?
This looked like the place to avoid on Wednesdays, just in case.
On the other side of the door was a corridor barely big enough for the four of them. Vivienne stayed between Emily and Max in case there were cobwebs on the cement walls—fake or not.
Penelope pulled the string attached to another hanging bulb.
The tight space felt smaller in the dark; Vivienne’s adrenaline surged. She squeezed her eyes shut and took a deep breath. Before she could take a second breath, she heard a mechanical hum.
Her eyes snapped open in time to catch a glowing blue screen emerging from the wall. Penelope bent, and the screen scanned her eye, then the wall to their left disappeared, revealing a massive, state-of-the-art laboratory.
There wasn’t a cobweb in sight.
“Hey, Penelope,” a guy greeted with a smile as broad as his shoulders. “Are these the newest PAN?” His southern accent and deep voice were as smooth as apple butter.
“They sure are.” Penelope waved the newcomers into the room. “Max, Emily, and Vivienne, this is Robert, head of R&D at our on-campus lab.”
“Hey, y’all.” Robert’s black hair had the slightest hint of a curl. “Welcome to my little paradise within paradise.”
“What’s happening down here?” Emily touched one of the microscopes on the table beside her.
“We’re responsible for helping Neverland survive in secrecy by creating and modifying Nevertech. But we also maintain the security system on campus and”—Robert indicated a row of frosted windows behind him—“house a large microbiology sector for research.”
“Research on the Nevergene, right?” Vivienne said. A woman opened the door to the back section, and she tried to catch a glimpse of what was going on inside.
“They mostly handle the inactive Nevergene problem in the London lab.” Robert tucked his hands into his lab coat pockets. “Here, we’re trying to improve our ageless injection and analyze the adverse effects of HOOK’s poison.”
“Why do we need an ageless injection?” Vivienne asked.
“You and I don’t. But we need to administer an injection to anyone without an active Nevergene who marries a PAN.”
Vivienne’s mouth dropped open. Surely he wasn’t saying . . . You can keep normal people from getting older too?”
“I wish.” Robert picked up a vial of pink liquid from the desk beside him. “So far, we’ve only been able to keep them from looking older.” Robert replaced the vial and clapped his hands. “How about we get movin’ so we can get y’all back out into that beautiful sunshine? Who’s first?”
When no one volunteered, Vivienne lifted a hesitant hand. “I’ll go first.”
“Great,” Robert said with a smile. “Vivienne, right?”
She nodded.
“I knew it!” He smacked his thigh. “You look just like your momma.” He told the others to have a seat and asked Vivienne to follow him.
“You knew my mom?”
“Sure did. But I knew your dad better. He worked here in the lab before they moved to Ohio.”
If her dad had moved to Ohio, what had happened to him?
Vivienne followed Robert past teenage workers hunkered over tables and wondered how many of them had known her family. “What’d he do here?”
He snapped on a pair of rubber gloves from a box on his desk. “Your dad was studying the way HOOK’s poison deactivates Nevergenes.” He scooted a silver tray with vials and needles in sanitary packages closer to where Vivienne stood and asked if she had eaten breakfast.
“Yeah. At The Glass House. Why?”
“I don’t want you getting woozy after giving blood.”
The smell of alcohol lifted to her nose when Robert ripped open the antiseptic swab. “I’m not giving blood.”
He set the antiseptic back on the tray and frowned. “Why not?”
Vivienne crossed her tingling arms over her chest. Breathe in. Breathe out. “I just think I should wait.”
Robert picked up a giant Q-tip in a sanitary packet. “What about a cheek swab?”
Vivienne shook her head.
“All right then…” He moved the tray to the other side of the desk. “Will you let me scan you for biometric access, or do you want to wait on that too?”
“Yeah. That sounds okay.”
After scanning her retinas, fingerprints, and palms, Robert stood and walked to a table against the wall. He came back lugging what looked like an antique astronaut helmet. The bulky piece of equipment was attached to a thick rope of woven electrical cords.
“This beauty scans your head, face, and neck so we can create a customized earpiece and helmet for you.”
She touched the blacked-out visor. “Will it be as big as this one?”
“Goodness, no. Could you imagine trying to go unnoticed with this thing on your head?” Robert clicked some buttons on his keyboard and plugged the helmet into the USB port.
With Robert’s assistance, she lifted the monstrous contraption over her head until the heavy base rested on her shoulders. Inside the helmet was a gray screen. A vertical line of green lights flashed in her peripheral vision. The helmet began beeping, and the green line ticked pixel-by-pixel across her vision and toward the back of her head before returning to where it had started.
Then the green line disappeared and was replaced by a red line, horizontal across the visor. It blinked from a point below her nose, went down to the base of the contraption and then back up again.
The red light disappeared, and a muffled voice from outside of the helmet told her to take it off.
A computerized image of her features appeared as digitized dots on Robert’s computer screen. An assistant handed her a laminated sheet of text and a microphone and told her to read what was on the paper.