Patrick grabbed her arm before she reached the door.

"We have to warn them!" she said.

"No. We have to make sure they never find out, or they'll have the power to control the flux."

"But they need to know! If they keep experimenting—"

"We don't know how this works," he said. "Maybe it has to do with how many people know. Maybe if we tell them, the anomalies will suddenly get worse."

"I don't know if it works like that, Patrick."

"And you never will. We never will. We have to stop trying to find out."

"Okay, okay." She paced, weaving her fingers into her hair. Did it matter whether they were in range of Sam? They'd learn whether or not it mattered as soon as they came near him—was that a significant enough piece of information to worsen the flux? They might be putting him in danger just by being near him. But they couldn't just leave him—that would guarantee he would be in danger!

She took a deep breath. That's what Michelle would tell her to do. That's what her mom would tell her to do, too.

"Okay, here's the thing," she said slowly. "We can't avoid ever learning anything about Sam's anomalies again."

Patrick didn't look convinced, but he shrugged.

"Patrick, everything we do at least rules out possibilities. You can extrapolate from anything. So we have to assume those little pieces of information aren't significant. And if they are—well, there's nothing we can do about that."

"We can only do what we can do." The words sounded recited.

"Exactly." She took a pause before speaking again, even though she didn't need to. "We can't convince the scientists to stop experimenting on him unless we tell them what's going on."

He pressed his lips together and looked away. "But if we tell them what's going on, that won't stop them."

"I'm not suggesting we tell them. You're right." She had failed to listen to him before; she wouldn't be making that mistake again any time soon.

"Okay. What do we do?"

"Eventually, we're going to have to run again. They won't ever release Sam, not on their own."

He grimaced. "We ran the first time. That didn't work out well for us."

"We're not going to be on the run for long this time. We just have to get Sam to Michelle."

"Right. She'll understand all that science stuff, and she'll know what to do."

"No, that's exactly it. We don't tell her all the science."

His brow furrowed, then realization came over his face, and he smiled a little. "Right. Of course not. But—" he shook his head— "will she be okay with that?"

"She'll have to." Elena's stomach churned as she said it, but she had to trust that Michelle would still trust them even after everything that had happened.

"How do we get him out of here?"

"I'm working on that." In truth, she had no idea how to begin working on it. But if they could figure out the quantum effects of an anomalous superpower, maybe they could figure out how to sneak through security measures at Tech United.

Now that she thought of it that way, it didn't feel so plausible. She'd have to come back to that one.

"Okay, so it sounds impossible," she said. "We'll get there. Maybe we can get Michelle's help on that, too. In the meantime, we have to keep him alive."

"Right. Because they've got all sorts of machines and detectors aimed at him and maybe even hooked up to him. Their equipment is learning more about him by the moment, which means—"

"The flux just keeps increasing."

"Exactly. We need to get into there and, I don't know, turn some things off. But quietly."

"Maybe—" he wrinkled his nose— "maybe we can make him look uninteresting."

"I think that ship's sailed."

He shrugged. "Okay, but what if . . . what if we could feed them wrong information? Make the sensors read the wrong things. If they thought they were learning about Sam, but they really weren't—all the information was wrong—would that be enough to reverse the quantum effects, maybe reduce the flux?"

"It might." Her heart was beginning to pound. Maybe they could solve this. "First, we need to see what they think is happening."

Patrick nodded and headed out into the hallway, Elena following close behind. A large team of scientists had stopped short in the middle of the hallway. A screen had been mounted to the wall beside them, and Dr. Baker kept pressing buttons on his remote, but the screen remained black.

"What's going on?" Patrick asked.

"Our sensors read a sudden increase in, um, the quantity you were calling flux," Dr. Brooke said. "The anomalies have become powerful enough that our cameras are useless."

"But your other sensors still work?"

"Many of them don't depend on light in the same way," she said.

Elena glanced at Patrick, who was still staring at the screen. "Can we talk to him?" he asked.

"We turned off the speakers."

"Why?"

"Because . . ." She shook her head. "There was nothing to say."

"I want to talk to him," Patrick said.

"There's really no reason—"

"Let me talk to him!"

Dr. Baker whirled around. "They turned off the speakers because of the screaming, Patrick. Do you really want to hear that?"

Patrick went silent.

Elena reached for his hand and gripped it in hers. "Yes. We want to talk to him. In fact, I'd like to see him."

Dr. Brooke winced. "That, you won't be able to do. No one can go past this point in the hallway."

"Why not?" Patrick asked

"You want to go find out?"

Patrick stepped forward, but Elena squeezed his hand. "Patrick, it's the anomalies. They're—"

He reached a hand over the barrier Dr. Brooke had designated, then jerked it back. "I see," he whispered.

The cameras were out, but the sensors were still working. If she went in to the affected region, under the pretense of comforting Sam, she might be able to carry out their plan.

She could slip into the isolation chamber and switch out some of his sensors. The probes, she could switch from him to herself. She could adjust the dials on any equipment they had left accessible, little by little, skewing their results. The results might be weird, they might confuse the scientists, but they were already expecting the laws of physics to be changing as a result of Sam's interactions with the universe, so what was a little extra oddity?

No one would be able to stop her. They wouldn't see what she was doing. If she transferred the equipment seamlessly enough, they might not notice the gap. They were certainly distracted enough by the screens that had gone dead.

Even if her plan utterly failed, if they were wrong about the uncertainty principle, and the flux remained the same, she could comfort him.

It would be excruciating, and she would have to last for awhile. But Sam was already having to go through it. Of course, he didn't have much of a choice, and his cells had adapted somewhat to it—but they had said he was screaming . . .

She had told Patrick she wasn't a coward. Now was the time to prove it.

She slipped back into the lounge for a water bottle—it might help with the static, which could electrocute her if it became too powerful—then stood for a moment at the doorway, gathering her courage, before darting full speed down the hallway toward the isolation chamber.