“It’s a ghost!” Tower maidens shrieked as they fled a phantom gust of wind that blustered through the halls.

Wendy was having fun while we got lost looking for the computer lab. “What did that girl call it, the holo room?”

I laughed. “Do you mean Ulli? Yeah, that’s what she called it.”

“Why don’t you know where it is?” She asked.

“I’ve never been there.” A quick way to find it would have been to teleport and take my time locating Ulli through the void. I agreed not to do that though, so the only way of finding it was to look around the old-fashioned way. Well, except for the wind. I could have asked for directions, but who thinks about that when you can blast through the halls as twin gusts of wind? It took us a lot longer to find it that way but it was also much funner. Our constant laughter made us sound like wailing ghosts everywhere we went.

It turned out that the holo lab was twenty floors below the floor I lived on. Glass doors somehow detected us even though we were wind and slid open long enough for us to both pass. Ulli looked up in surprise when a gust of wind blew in through the door. I decided to tease her and flowed in circles around her like a private mini-tornado. She pumped her arms in a panic as she danced around the room, managing to move away from the computer terminals. At least, I thought they were computers. While they did display information, it floated in the air above a workstation Zofia was seated at.

She ignored us and hammered away at several control panels at once. Ulli started hyperventilating, so I returned to normal. She gasped as Wendy did the same. “You jerk! I thought you were some kind of evil spirit, and why didn’t you help me, Zofia?”

Zofia tilted her head to the side but kept typing. “What? Did something happen? Kinda busy here.”

“You seriously didn’t feel…?” she stamped her foot as she spoke. “Ugh, never mind! What are you guys doing here? Did something happen?”

“No,” I replied. “Actually, we just came to see what Zofia is working on and if we can help?”

Zofia snorted, not bothering to look at us either. “Fat chance of that. Did you even know that an electronic security system covers the tower and the buildings outside? It tracks everyone in here and records their activities?”

Ulli gaped at her. “It does? Really? Everything we do?”

“Everything,” Zofia replied dryly. “Even how long you spend on the toilet.”

“That’s disgusting,” Ulli grumbled. “What is that information even used for?”

Zofia shrugged. “I don’t think anybody looks at that specific data. There are definitely no cameras in the bathrooms. Trust me, I checked. That might help with the mission by the way.”

“What mission?” Ulli asked, eyeing me suspiciously.

“That’s not important,” I replied. “It’s an inside joke between me and Zofia.”

Ulli raised an eyebrow. “What could you possibly want to do in the bathroom with Zofia?”

Fortunately, Wendy saved us with her reply. “Have you seen the size of the bath in Melvin’s room?”

A smile settled on Ulli’s face. “Yeah, I have. Melvin lets me use it whenever I want.”

“What do you need from us?” I asked, wanting to get the conversation back on track. “Is there anything we can do to help?”

Zofia chuckled. “Not unless you can magic Joe in somehow. Then again, I don’t need him for what I’m trying to do. It looks like your Dad had someone set this up, but doesn’t bother maintaining it. I’ve already been able to disable the audio and video in this room by replaying the feed on a loop. When the time comes, I should be able to do that elsewhere. I’ve already set up a worm, so I should be able to control everything from my room back on the twenty-third floor.”

“You got assigned to the twenty-third floor?” Ulli asked in shock. “It took me nearly a year to make it that high when I was your age.”

“I’m older than you,” Zofia muttered as her cheeks puffed out in a pout that made her look even younger.

Ulli looked to me for confirmation, and I nodded. “Yeah, she’s in her twenties. Can you show us where Marcy took Shara? I need to talk to her next.”

“No! Someone needs to stay here with Zofia,” Ulli replied. “You’ll have to wait until I find…”

“I can stay,” Wendy volunteered with a friendly smile.

“No!” Ulli barked. “I mean, someone needs to watch you too. Um, fine. You do know how to get back to your room, right Zofia? You go down the hall and take the elev-“

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Zofia replied, waving her off. “I’ll be able to concentrate more once you’re gone anyway.”

Ulli rounded on me once we were out of earshot of Zofia. “I’m not sure she should be doing that. The Creator isn’t going to like it very much if he catches her. She might even be thrown out, and I don’t even want to think about what that would mean for her family.”

I winked at her. “Don’t worry, I’ll protect her. Besides, she doesn’t have any family.”

Ulli gasped and looked down. “Oh! I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

While I wasn’t sure if the TGB agent had family, it wasn’t a lie that she didn’t have family on Origin. The lab, it turned out, was in the basement. I looked around as we stepped out of the elevator. We had to walk to a second elevator after the first dumped us on the first floor. “I didn’t know we had a basement. Why doesn’t the main elevator go down?”

Ulli rolled her eyes. “This floor is mainly for storage and infrastructure. It makes sense that the public can’t come down here. Normally, you need a special pass to come but we have all access as your chosen.”

“That’s convenient,” I replied. “Why were you nervous when we visited Merlin’s room then?”

Ulli spluttered, cursing a few times as she bit her tongue. “Ugh, nobody is supposed to go there. Not without invitation. That’s common sense.”

“Right,” I replied, laughing at the obvious joke. “So, where are Shara and Marcy?”

“Over this way,” she replied. “At least I think. I’ve never actually visited the place.”

We passed by a series of large doors as we walked through the winding halls of the tower’s underbelly. Ulli took out a map as we went. “It looks like the tower has five sub-basements, so there are more floors beneath this one. The alchemy lab was placed down here so it can be closer to where the toxic chemicals are stored. There are several sections of the lab where you have to wear protective equipment.”

I looked over at the map. None of the information was listed there. “How do you know that?”

She grinned. “I looked it up in the holo lab once I found out Marcy was taking your friend down here. Also, Zofia is quite moody.”

Wendy giggled. “She is an acquired taste, that one.”

We arrived at the lab to find most of the lights out. The only section lit up was in the far corner where Shara and Marcelle hunched over a desk. From the looks of things, Shara made herself right at home in the massive lab.

When they heard us, both girls turned. Shara started toward me, speaking excitedly. “Perfect timing. I’m going to need a sample of your blood.”

I started backpedaling and ran right into Wendy. Our legs tangled and we ended up in a heap on the floor. Kalli giggled back on Scrap, earning another glare from Mika. Before I could recover, Shara was on me. I felt a pinch on my arm and blood shot out of me. I looked up to find Shara threading a string of it straight from my vein into a vial she held in her other hand. It filled quickly, much too fast for a normal blood draw. Once it was full, she withdrew another and repeated the process. She did that until she possessed four full vials of my blood.

It looked like way too much. Part of my brain wanted to be dizzy even though my body recovered from the loss almost instantaneously. “Hey! Won’t I die if you take that much?”

Shara raised an eyebrow. “I don’t know. Will you?”

“Maybe!” I grumbled.

She sighed. “Why don’t you try standing up? If that doesn’t work, do some of that chosen one magic to revitalize yourself.”

She was right, of course. In the time it took me to complain, I had completely recovered. I unceremoniously dusted myself off and climbed to my feet, turning to offer Wendy a hand. She stood behind me with an amused look on her face. “That was interesting. You’re remarkably heavier than you look.”

“I know,” I grumbled, my mind flashing back to the way the kids in high school teased me about my weight. “I’ve always been that way. I used to think it was odd but it probably has something to do with magic.”

Wendy rubbed her chin for a moment. “That’s probably true. I’ve always been light for my size. It must be the wind.”

Shara had already walked back to the table and was connecting one of the vials to a tube by the time we walked over there. I watched it flow into several beakers before asking, “What is this exactly, and why do you need my blood?”

“I’m making you a master key,” she replied, grinning from ear to ear. “Since you share your father’s blood, this should help you.”

“In other words,” Ulli said with a sigh. “You’re going to enable him to get in even more trouble.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Marcelle said in a low voice. “He’s agreed to leave us out of it this time. He’s just looking for a special toy.”

“Oh!” Ulli shrieked, piecing things together. “That’s what you were doing in his room. Looking for some toy? Wow, you really are his son.”

“Uh, yeah,” I muttered, not sure how else to answer. Having Ulli out of the loop was kind of a pain. We stood back and watched Shara work for a while until I became impatient. “Can I do anything to help?”

She looked back over her shoulders. “I don’t know. I’d hate to be responsible if something blows up and you get killed…or worse.”

“What’s worse than death?” Ulli asked Marcelle.

Marcelle leaned closer but we heard her anyway because she wasn’t trying to hide her comment. “She could accidentally turn you into Melvin.”

I groaned as the girls scooted a healthy distance from me. Even Shara laughed. “Relax, it’s not anything quite so gruesome. The blood can cause your body to mutate though. You don’t want three arms by any chance, do you?”

“What about you?” I asked, ignoring the raging laughter behind me. “What if you get deformed? At least let me help shield you or something.”

Shara held up a hand to stop me as I edge forward. “Don’t worry about me. I have immunity to blood. Most spells and compounds that use it as a base can’t affect me. I’ve also developed immunity to the attack that killed my mother. Not that I’d ever bite you, of course. I’m not a vampire.”

“That’s good to know,” I replied slowly, wondering if Shara held a grudge after all. “You know, if I had it to do again, I would have tried something else.”

“It’s fine,” she said, waving me off. “Mother made her choice. I built up immunity because I knew I had an inherent weakness. It’s just self-preservation. That’s all. Nothing against you personally. Wait, this is almost done. Hold on, I think your blood is going to take. Perfect, there we go. Would you like the rest of this blood back?”

I looked at the vials in her hand and shook my head. “No, thanks. That’s okay. You keep it.”

She grinned and they disappeared into her cloak so fast I was positive she planned the whole thing. We watched as Shara methodically cleaned the equipment, explaining as she went. “It’s very important to sterilize everything after each use. A small contaminant can corrupt the end result in unexpected ways.”

Once she was done, we walked together to the elevator. Shara pressed a small cylinder into my hand and whispered. “You’re going to need this when the time is right.”

I looked at her. “When will that be?”

“She said you’d know.”