The room would only get more crowded as the night went on. By eight o’clock the only place that would be busier than the lounges was the computer room on the first floor. Albert tried to go there once just to check out the facilities, in case his own computer ever failed to meet his needs, and he was not even able to get in the door.
Brandy leaned back in the chair and looked sternly at Albert. “So what does it all mean then?”
“I don’t know.”
“Someone went to all the trouble of getting us together to open this fucking thing, so what are we supposed to get from it?”
Albert met her eyes for a moment and then dropped the button back into the box. He’d heard plenty of swearing in his life, as much from women as from men. Hell, his sister swore like a sailor when they were growing up. And he’d already heard Brandy swear plenty of times in the short time he’d been acquainted with her—she always seemed to be coming up with some delightfully creative expletive during their lab experiments—but it still surprised him somehow every time he heard something vulgar pass from her lips. She projected such a girlishly polite image that it was hard to imagine her as anything but young and innocent, virgin even. Of course, that wasn’t to say that it was unattractive by any means. On the contrary, he actually found it to be something of a turn-on.
“I really don’t know,” he said after a moment. “You’d think there’d be something more.”
Someone walked into the room and looked around, as though looking for someone. Albert glanced at her and recognized her as Gail from across the hall. He wondered vaguely if her presence here might indicate that Derek was no longer in her room. If so, he hoped he wasn’t hanging out when he returned to his room. After a quick look around, Gail turned and left the lounge. Whoever she was looking for obviously wasn’t here.
“This is ridiculous.” Brandy closed the box, lifted it off her knees and dropped it into his lap. “I don’t get it. I don’t really care to get it.” She grabbed her purse and stood up.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m leaving. You can keep all that. The key too. I’m not interested.”
Albert stared at her, surprised. “You’re not even curious?”
She half turned as she slipped the thin strap of her purse over her shoulder. For a moment she paused, as though struggling with herself. “Yes,” she said at last, her eyes fixed on the door. “If you come up with anything, let me know tomorrow in lecture.”
“Okay.” He could not believe she was just walking away from this. How could she? It was such a delicious mystery. Sure, the lack of answers inside the box was discouraging, even aggravating, but it was also all the more intriguing. These new questions were even more alluring than the first. How could anyone just walk away from such an enigma? Perhaps she was only being the more mature one, even the smarter one, but to just drop it and walk away? The very ability to do such a thing seemed so alien to him.
“I just don’t like it,” she explained before she walked away, as though she could feel the weight of his eyes and read the questions inside his head. “It’s just… I don’t know. It’s just too much. I don’t want to be a part of something I don’t know anything about.”
Albert nodded. He understood. It was probably the right thing to do. Nonetheless, he was disappointed.
“Bye.” Brandy walked out of the room as a very pretty redhead entered and dropped into one of the soft chairs with a textbook.
Albert watched her go without getting up. It felt surprisingly sad knowing that this mystery was once again his alone.
Chapter 3
After leaving the second floor lounge, Albert slowly made his way back toward his room, his mind flooded with questions both old and new. He intended to go straight to his bed and lie down for a while, perhaps even retire for the night if his mind would take so long a break, but when he saw the door to his room standing wide open, he walked on by without pausing. He was in no mood for Derek this evening. He was particularly in no mood for Derek’s horrible taste in television. Besides, right now he wanted to be alone with his thoughts.
He walked to the far end of the hallway, descended the stairs and then exited the building through the back doors. He did not have any particular destination in mind. He merely wanted to take a walk, but he’d barely reached the steps when he remembered that he had not yet eaten dinner.
He crossed the street, climbed the steps of the University Center and then made his way downstairs to the cafeteria. This was where he’d eaten every meal since his arrival at Lumey. There was a larger cafeteria over in the Cube, where he’d been told the selection was far greater, but so far he’d seen no reason to walk halfway across campus when he was not yet bored with the menu here.
The dining area was pretty busy at this time of night, but it would be slowing down soon. Already the lines at the registers were beginning to shorten. Albert selected a cheeseburger, chips and a soda out of convenience—ham on a croissant from the sandwich shop would have been better, but he didn’t feel like relaying his order to the lady at the counter—and then sought out a relatively private table at the far end of the room.
Often when he’d come here, the noise and the crowd would bother him, but tonight he actually enjoyed the atmosphere. Tonight, there was something very comforting about being alone in a room filled with people.
He unwrapped his cheeseburger and took a bite. He didn’t feel terribly hungry. In fact, there was an unpleasant warmth in his belly, a sick sort of knot. He told himself he was merely tired, his mind overworked from trying to solve the riddles of the box all day, but he knew the feeling was mostly to do with Brandy.
That she could just walk away like that… How could she not want to know? How could she just leave and go about her life like nothing happened? He supposed she only did the responsible thing. Perhaps he was nothing more than a fool for thinking such a ridiculous box deserved such obsession, but he couldn’t help it. The box was simply too intriguing to pass up. It was a riddle. And he’d always loved a good riddle. It was his thing. It was what he was good at. He was smart like that.
…Too smart to actually believe that this was really about any of that.
It was simple disappointment.
Still chewing his cheeseburger, he withdrew the key Brandy gave him from his jeans pocket and looked at it. It was so simple; just a perfectly flat piece of metal, less than an eight of an inch thick, with no grooves of any kind. Only the simple shape of the teeth on either side allowed it to open the box, and yet the box itself was so finely crafted, with such an elaborate locking mechanism. The two just didn’t seem to go together.
Sort of like he and Brandy, he supposed. But for just a few minutes…
A loud outburst from a few tables over drew him from his thoughts. He glanced over and surveyed the five people sitting there—two young men, three girls, all about the same age, perhaps a year ahead of him—and then turned his eyes back to his dinner.
He focused his concentration onto the key itself and began to review the things he’d found inside the box. The feather. The broken, rusted blade. The brass button. The silver pocket watch. The stone. What did they all mean? It all seemed like so much junk, but at the same time there was something else. There was something about them that tickled his brain, a strange sort of sense to be made from all the items in the box. It was a strange sort of sense in the simple fact that they made no sense. None of the things in the box fit together and that was exactly why the whole thing fit together. It was like a game, a tangled web of mysteries that each promised a key to solving the others. If someone meant it as a practical joke, they were good, and they knew him well enough to know that he’d be hooked. And this was precisely why he did not think that it was a practical joke.