Chapter 51: The Magnet's Secret
The common room had become a war room of scattered ambition. Pages from the notebook lay across the workbench in overlapping layers, held down by wire spools and a dusty soldering iron. The ozone smell from the soldering station had long since faded into the background, replaced by the sharper scent of concentration and cold coffee.
Roy sat perched on a stack of engineering textbooks, a yellow legal pad propped against the spine of the topmost volume. From his vantage point, the notebook pages looked like a map of some vast, alien territory. Lee's finger traced a circuit path through one of the diagrams, his glasses catching the flicker of the work lamp.
"Hang on," Lee said, his voice dropping into that particular register he used when something clicked. "Hang on."
Jason leaned in, his shoulder brushing Lee's. "What?"
Lee's finger stopped on a small, circled component in the corner of the page. "The reversion prototype doesn't just need a power cell and a focusing lens. The core itself, the part that actually reverses the quantum collapse, it's built around a rare earth magnet. Specifically a neodymium alloy, based on the hardness marks here." He tapped the diagram. "That's not something we can jury-rig from scrap."
Rosa sat cross-legged on the floor beside the workbench, her back against the wall, the containment tube resting in her lap. She'd been quiet for the better part of an hour, her sharp eyes moving between the notebook and the glass cylinder. "We don't have anything like that."
"No," Lee agreed. "And I've never even seen one in person that big. The field strength this design calls for is massive. You'd need something the size of a dinner plate, at least, with the right composition to hold a stable field."
Roy shifted on his textbooks, his voice carrying across the room with the practiced clarity of someone who had learned to project from a fraction of his former size. "Where would you even find something like that?"
Lee pushed his glasses up his nose. "The physics department, maybe. Or the materials science building. Somewhere with high-end research equipment." He paused, then glanced at the notebook again. "Actually, if Carter found that containment tube in a campus lab, and the notebook wound up in the hardware store, then whoever wrote these notes was working somewhere with access to serious equipment."
The room went quiet. Roy knew that quiet. It was the kind that settled in when everyone was doing the same math in their heads.
"Carter said the lab was on campus," Rosa said slowly. Her thumb traced the edge of the glass tube. "The one with the greenhouse on the roof."
Lee's eyes widened slightly behind his glasses. "That's the materials science building. The roof greenhouse is part of their environmental testing wing."
Roy felt his pulse quicken. The coincidence was too clean. The notebook, the tube, the lab. All of it pointed toward the same place, a place they'd known about for months but never dared to approach. He'd heard Rosa and the others talk about it before, in hushed tones over maps and supply planning. The campus research lab was crawling with walkers, and somewhere in its lower levels, there was something big.
"Silas worked at the university," Roy said, his voice careful. "Before everything. We know that much from what Carter told us."
Rosa's jaw tightened. "And Carter found the tube in a lab that Silas must have used. The notebook, too. It's all connected."
Jason straightened up, crossing his arms. His hazel eyes moved between the notebook and Rosa's face. "So the parts we need to make this thing work, the magnet, maybe even the power cell, they're all sitting in Silas's old workspace."
"Or they're gone," Lee said, ever the pragmatist. "Silas could have stripped that lab bare. He might have moved everything to wherever he's holed up now."
Roy shook his head. "No. Think about it. If Silas had the magnet, he'd have built the prototype himself. But he didn't. He has the shrinking tech, sure, but he's still working on the reverse effect. That means the components are still out there. He hasn't found them either."
Rosa looked up at him, her green eyes sharpening with something that might have been hope, carefully leashed. "Or he can't get back into the building."
The weight of that possibility settled over the room. The campus lab was dangerous. They all knew it. The walkers had clustered around it in greater numbers than anywhere else in the area, as if drawn to whatever machinery still hummed in its depths. And there was something else down there too, something neither Roy nor Rosa had ever actually seen, only heard rumors of from other survivors before the networks went silent.
"I could go," Rosa said quietly.
"No," Roy said immediately.
"Roy—"
"You can't carry me while fighting off that many walkers." He held up a hand before she could argue. "I'm not saying you're not capable. I'm saying the math doesn't work. You'd be managing me, the pack, the threat, and the scavenging all at once. That's too many variables."
Jason moved around the workbench, crouching down so he was level with Roy's perch. His hand hovered near the textbooks, close but not crowding. "So what do you suggest?"
Roy looked at the notebook, at the diagram Lee had been tracing. The device in those pages was his way back. Every hour they spent picking through the design brought them closer to a future where he could stand at his full height again, where Jason's hugs didn't have to be careful, where Rosa could grab his hand without worrying about crushing him. But the path to that future ran straight through the worst place they knew.
"We go prepared," he said. "We use what the notebook teaches us. We scout the building from a distance first. We find out how many walkers are actually there, and whether there's a pattern to their movements. And we take the best runners in the group."
Rosa's eyebrows rose. "You're suggesting we bring more people."
"Just one or two," Roy said. "Sandy's got the medical training. Amie's fast and quiet. We don't send a crowd, but we don't go alone either."
Lee tapped the diagram again. "We also need to know exactly what we're looking for. The magnet's the critical piece, but if we're going into that building, we should clear out anything else useful while we're there. The notebook mentions a collider schematic too."
"And the power cell," Jason added. "If the prototype needs one, we might as well grab every battery and cell we can carry."
Rosa was quiet for a long moment. Roy watched her, the way her fingers tightened around the containment tube, the way her jaw worked as she ran through the same risk calculations he'd just made. She was scared. Not of the walkers, not of the building, but of losing him again. He understood. He woke up some nights with the memory of the sewer cold in his chest, the feeling of being swept away from her, small and helpless and utterly alone.
"If we do this," Rosa said finally, "we do it right. Full planning. Gear check. Escape routes."
Roy nodded. "That's all I'm asking."
Jason's hand moved, so gently it almost didn't register, and his fingertip brushed Roy's shoulder. A touch that would have been a broad pat for someone his size, but for Roy it was a careful, deliberate gesture of affection. "We'll figure this out. Together."
The room settled into a new kind of quiet then, one filled with purpose instead of uncertainty. Lee began making notes on a separate sheet, sketching out the component list and cross-referencing the notebook's design. Rosa pulled out a fresh map of the campus, her finger tracing the route from Anderson Hall to the materials science building. And Roy watched them all, feeling the familiar warmth of belonging settle into his bones.
The lab was dangerous. But so was everything these days. At least this time, they would walk in with a plan.