“What exactly was that about?” Ray asked Perfect after the black van let her off right where it had picked her up.

“What… oh,” Perfect said. “Trying to strong-arm me into working for them, I guess.”

“What, like a job?”

“More like a consultation,” Perfect said. She shook her head and frowned. “It isn’t important, since I’m not interested in troubleshooting for them.”

“So, it’s on to Harbor Hill,” Ray said. “Why exactly are we going to meet the ‘ghost’? Are you planning on offering her a spot on the team?”

“Well, I just think that in light of what we’re up against, we need to have as much mystical expertise at our fingertips as possible,” Perfect said. “Though… ‘expertise’ might be too strong a word. Experience? Perspective? Whatever. She’s in tune with things that we aren’t. That, and she already has superhero contacts. Or one contact, anyway. The key is, we’re expanding our circle.”

“Fair enough,” Ray said. He turned and started to walk across the street, but then he realized Perfect wasn’t moving. “Uh… everything okay there?”

“The thing is… why on earth would they have a trinary system in the first place?” she said. It seemed to him that she was talking to nobody in particular, or at least, to somebody who wasn’t him.

“What?” Ray asked. “Who?”

“Of course, that’s the key: they aren’t from earth,” she continued. “But even so, it doesn’t add up. Addition. We use base ten for counting in part because the first digital calculators were our hands… we might expect other races to settle on a different numeric base for cultural or anatomical reasons, but binary logic and its advantages in processing information should be universal. So what’s the basis? Is it biological? Ideological? Theological? What if it isn’t 0, 1, 2… but -1, 0, 1? What if we’re wrong to think of it as numbers at all? What if they have a language with only three phonemes? What if… what if… what if… I can’t think. I need my bunnies.”

“Not just Mr. Buttons?” Ray asked.

“Oh, no,” Perfect said, looking at him for the first time since she’d went off on the tangent. She turned around and started pounding her feet in the direction of home. “This is way too big… too many ideas, too many possibilities. I need a conference.”

“So, what am I doing while you’re having tea with a consortium of the leading scientific minds?” Ray called after him. “What about the Harbor Hill Ghost?”

She turned around to face him, still walking briskly, and waved a hand in the air dismissively.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’ve got to get this out while it’s still fresh in my mind. We’ll go this afternoon. Or evening. It’ll be better after dark, the park should be deserted. I’ll go in costume.”

The fact that Perfect had just announced that she’d be going out in costume on a public street wasn’t lost on Ray. It wasn’t like there was a crowd around, or that anybody who overheard her would instantly connect what she was saying with masked crimefighting, or that anybody who did would have any reason or means for connecting this random young woman on the sidewalk up with the name and identity of Perfection Jones… but the contrast between this behavior and her earlier attitude troubled him.

It was like the idea which had lodged in her head, whatever it was, had completely overridden all other thoughts and concerns.

Ray had known people like that… other Darkwells. For those whose bodies bore additional mutations or powers, the extra capacity of a Darkwell-enhanced brain enabled them to make the most of those abilities… to not just spout fire but to control it, for instance. In those who were otherwise humans, though, all that extra capacity had to find another outlet.

Some Darkwells became wizards, consumed with the need to pursue esoteric knowledge and power, to drill a peephole in the wall of mundane reality and glimpse whatever lurked beyond it. Some were detectives, obsessed with putting together the pieces of intractable puzzles and unraveling the riddles that stumped all others. Some mastered martial arts to a greater degree than any other human being, bringing their bodies into a greater state of harmony with their minds than would otherwise be possible.

And some became mad scientists.

---

“Wrong,” Dr. Clevenger announced, looking at the image of the molecule that was rendered on her screen in three dimensions. “This is just completely… wrong…”

She trailed off into muttering when she realized that she was talking to herself, and she wasn’t even sure what she was saying. Wrong? It was the anomalous molecule she’d isolated from Rhyme’s blood just that morning. What precisely was wrong about it?

It was the right molecule, certainly. Was it the wrong shape? The wrong composition? She’d certainly never seen anything like it, but by that very token she had no basis for comparison, no expectation of what would be “right”… her phenomenal intelligence did, on occasion, manifest itself an intuitive flash of understanding, but that wasn’t what she was experiencing now as she looked at the image.

What she was experiencing was more like… dread. Cold fear. Uncertainty verging on a panic-inducing level, as though well-established constants were becoming variable and the comforting solidity of floor beneath her feet was becoming suspect.

“Get a hold of yourself, doctor,” she chided.

She didn’t yet understand just what it was she was looking at, but there was no reason for her to feel so perturbed by its very appearance.

She was a woman of science. She did not get “the creeps”… certainly not from staring at the very thing that was going to make her enormously wealthy and famous, or even immortal.

She closed her eyes for a moment to steady herself, and then opened them again to get a fresh look at the image…

What the devil?

Had the molecule changed?

Well, obviously not, she thought. Even if the sample was degrading, it wasn’t as though the program was rendering in real time. It was a snapshot. It was still the same molecule, obviously… nothing more threatening than an inert lump of atoms. Not even that… just a computer model of it.

Ceci n’est pas une molécule.

“The treachery of images, indeed,” Clevenger said. She got up from the workstation, intent on taking a short walk to clear her head and then tackle the problem afresh. Given that she’d just spoken aloud to herself three times, she felt very glad to be alone in the lab… then her eyes fell on the room’s other inhabitant, the one she had managed to completely forget about.

As Rhyme’s blood was a biohazard and she had nothing to fear from self-harm, Dr. Clevenger had ordered her to be not just strapped down but strapped in, completely enclosed in a spacesuit-like containment unit that left only the upper half of her face visible.

The not-so-good doctor was finding even this level of containment to be insufficient protection, though, as she realized that Rhyme was blinking at her. It wasn’t just child’s play for Clevenger to work out the pattern of blinks and decode them… it would have been impossible for her not to. Those tiny movements were like a drumbeat in her head, an insistent whisper in her ear. She drew in closer, almost against her will, until she was standing right in front of the be-suited supervillainess, looking her right in her code-flashing eyes.

“What… about… my clone?” she said finally, though in fact the word Rhyme was blinking in Morse code was two syllables long and rhymed with “slaughter.”

Rhyme’s eyes flicked downward, in the direction of her mouth. Dr. Clevenger went over to the suit and flipped a switch. Speakers cracked on.

“She isn’t just your clone,” Rhyme said. “You did things to your… to her… DNA.”

“Of course I did,” Dr. Clevenger said. “I am not so narcissistic as to desire a copy of myself running around. The possibility of human cloning has been around for ages. That isn’t any kind of progress.”

“You were building your replacement?” Rhyme asked. “No, of course not… because what you just said is backwards. You’re way too narcissistic to want there to be another one of you, much less one who’s better…. you were beta testing. You were building a prototype before you added the upgrades to yourself.”

“And with good reason,” Dr. Clevenger said. “The theory was sound, but the results… an unmitigated disaster. Given the complexity of the human genome and of the central nervous system… well, the unexpected was to be expected. Hence, why I did not use my own body as a laboratory, as so many of my peers have done.”

“I told you I met her, didn’t I?” Rhyme said. “I went looking for my half-sisters and I found her, alone… had her dead to rights, too, but I wasn’t in any hurry, so I told her to give me a reason not to kill her, in two words or less.”

“Oh? And what exactly did my prodigal science project say?”

“‘Need five’,” Rhyme said. “The fact that she even had an answer intrigued me, so I told her she had them. And she said to me, ‘Because I can kill you.’”

“Is there a point to any of this?”

“There is a point to everything, Cass… if only you know where to look for it,” Rhyme said. “So, I asked her if she was actually threatening me, because she was paler than my face paint and shaking like a vibrator set to stun. And she stammered out, ‘No… if you let me live, I mean.’”

“So my malformed progeny offered to kill you if you let her live?” Dr. Clevenger said. “It seems I underestimated the magnitude of my failure.”

“You underestimated something, that’s for darn tootin’,” Rhyme said. “Because it worked, didn’t it? She’s still alive. And do you know why?”

“Because you’re as impaired in your way as she is in hers?”

“Because I believed her,” Rhyme said. “I believe she is capable of doing what she claimed… or that she will be, one day. In the event that I ever get tired of this game, that would be useful knowledge for me to have. Unlikely, I know… but the probability of even the unlikeliest events approaches one hundred percent given an unlimited amount of time, and it seems I have been given exactly that. In the meantime, the foe who could very possibly end me is an interesting addition to the universe. So, I let her live.”

“She was bluffing.”

“She was not,” Rhyme said. “She believed it.”

“Then she was deluded.”

“It is you who are deluded, dear doctor,” Rhyme said, “if you think you can extract the secret of immortality from my blood… your discarded progeny, given sufficient education, might stand a chance, but not you. What did you do to her, doctor, that she is so much more than you ever will be?”

“I don’t have to listen to this,” Dr. Clevenger said. She reached for the switch. “Literally.”

“Wait!” Rhyme said. “Try rotating the image thirty-seven degrees on the X axis, six on the Y, and then increasing the magnification by a factor of two.”

“And what… exactly… will that do?”

“Make the image turn and get bigger,” Rhyme said. “Seriously, though… just try it. That is why you got up from the chair in the first place, wasn’t it? To get a ‘fresh angle’ on the problem?”

“Are you suggesting this view would be particularly revealing?” Clevenger asked.

“What do I know? I’m crazy, remember?” Rhyme said.

“Well, I supposed it would only take a matter of seconds,” Clevenger said. “If it turns out to be a wild goose chase, at least it will be a short one.”

“That’s the spirit,” Rhyme said.

Dr. Clevenger returned to the computer. Eschewing the mouse, she tabbed and typed her way through the necessary fields, then looked up at the screen as her pinky finger struck ‘Enter’ and the image resolved itself into the requested view.

She didn’t stop screaming until she passed out from lack of oxygen.