“A nutty conspiracy theory I found on the internet,” he said. “Total waste of time.”
“A week ago, that’s what I would have thought about this.” Joyce leaned over and bent down, to pick up the files that she’d brought over from the bedroom. “After everything that’s happened the last few days, though . . . ?”
“This is about the stuff you found under Tyler Campbell’s fingernails?” Patrick asked.
“Yep.” Joyce nodded.
“That was the drug dealer I was telling you about,” Izzie said, turning to Daphne. “The one whose body Patrick took me to see the first day I was in town.”
“I remember,” Daphne shot back, and then looked back to Joyce. “So was it Ink? Under the dead man’s nails?”
“That’s a little hard to say,” Joyce answered, “given that we’ve never had a verifiable sample of Ink that we could compare it to. But then, it’s easier to say what that stuff isn’t than what it is.”
“Mind clarifying that?” Patrick asked, and then hastened to add, “In layman’s terms, please.”
Joyce took a deep breath and let out a ragged sigh.
“The lab techs thought that this was a prank,” she said. “Or some kind of test. I think they’re still waiting to see if I show up to deliver the punch line, or give them gold stars for passing with flying colors. You see, the thing is, the stuff that I sent them to test didn’t turn out to be anything.”
Patrick looked around the room, and saw that the others were just as perplexed as he was.
“You mean it vanished?” he asked.
“No, it was still there,” Joyce answered with a shake of her head. “It just . . . wasn’t anything. They were completely unable to identify its chemical makeup. The stuff was completely non-reactive. Its surface texture was completely featureless, even under an electron microscope. They even put a small sample of it into a mass spectrometer, and all that they were able to prove conclusively was that it had mass. The electrons just passed right through it. Heck, it had volume, but it didn’t appear to have any appreciable weight.”
Something was itching at the back of Patrick’s thoughts, an echo of something that he’d heard recently.
“So why did they think it was a prank?” Izzie asked.
“Because after spending three days wracking their brains trying to figure out what the stuff was,” Joyce answered, “the other night one of the techs left the sample sitting on a workbench under a window, and when he came back the next morning . . .”
“It was gone,” Izzie finished for her.
Joyce nodded. “They think I had someone come in and switch out the sample trays in the night, just to mess with them. They’ve got a small wager going about what was really in that sample that I sent them, and they want me to fess up so they can settle the bet.”
Patrick’s brow was furrowed as he rummaged through his memories, trying to find the one that echoed what Joyce had said.
“I’m guessing that there was sunlight through the window?” Daphne asked.
“That’s my thinking, yeah.” Joyce put the file on the coffee table and reached for her wine glass. “The stuff was buried pretty deep under Campbell’s nails, which were pretty grimy, so it’s possible that was the first time the sample had been exposed to daylight.”
“Weakly interacting particles . . .” Patrick finally said under his breath.
The others turned to look in his direction.
“You remember what Professor Kono told us the other day?” Patrick asked Izzie. “About what Undersight was designed to look for?”
“The leaked gravity stuff, you mean?” Izzie said, and then turned to Daphne and Joyce. “Nicholas Fuller had this idea that gravity is weaker than the other forces like magnetism because most of the gravity is leaking out into the higher dimensions.”
“No, that’s not what I’m thinking of.” Patrick shook his head. “Or not exactly, anyway. I meant the type of matter that should be there but that we don’t detect.” He thought for a moment, knowing it was on the tip of his tongue. “Dark matter.”
“Oh, right,” Izzie said. “And there was dark energy, too. But Fuller thought they were all part of the same phenomenon. The missing energy, the missing matter, the missing gravity . . . all of it the result of the higher dimensions.”
“Wait, I’ve read a few articles about dark matter,” Joyce said. “I thought the whole point of it was that we couldn’t detect it, we just see its effects. Like, we wouldn’t be able to see it, even if we were looking at it, because it doesn’t emit or absorb light. Right?”
“Yeah, I guess,” Patrick said, feeling out of his depth. “But maybe . . . I don’t know, maybe whatever this stuff is, it shares similar properties?”
“It certainly lines up with what we know about Fuller’s research.” Izzie had her hand on her chin, a thoughtful expression on her face. “I don’t know that any of that helps us any, in practical terms, but I guess it gives us a little bit of a better idea what we’re dealing with.”
Daphne had finished off her first glass of wine, and reached to grab the bottle on the table. “I think the real question is . . .” She paused, and then hefted the empty bottle. “The real question is, do we have any more wine?”
“Just a second.” Patrick hopped up from the couch and walked to the kitchen. He picked a bottle of decent pinot noir, and then fished around in the drawer until he found his corkscrew.
He couldn’t quite hear what they were saying in the living room, but when he came back in carrying the open wine bottle, the conversation stopped suddenly and all three women turned to look at him with abashed expressions on their faces. Izzie even held her hand over her mouth as she stifled a laugh.
“What?” Patrick couldn’t quite keep a note of defensiveness from creeping into his voice. He
