“I’m not seeing anything, but I’ll keep looking,” said Carter. “What happened to our other teammate?”
“I’m busy,” said Adi testily.
Sierra scowled. She had a reputation on this show. She wasn’t about to be out-sulked by an amateur. “Play the misunderstood loner later. Right now we need to know what you’ve got.”
“I’m trying to decipher a code,” he said. “Got a fake name that’s an anagram, and a whiteboard to work it out. ‘Deleted.’ ‘Timeline.’ ‘Middle.’ ‘Meddle.’ ‘Divide’—there are heaps of options.”
“Okay . . .” said Sierra. “But we need numbers to open our pad-locks.”
“I get that. I can make ‘ten’ or ‘eleven,’ but that’s it.”
“Will each door unlock with the same three-digit combination, or will they be different?” said Carter. “Anyone got a twelve-digit number? Person with the whiteboard—Adi, right? How long is the fake name? Maybe you can replace the numbers with letters, like A is 1, B is 2, you know.”
“Nah, it’s fifteen letters long.”
“Try it anyway,” Sierra said, and she hated that she heard Elijah’s voice in her head, telling his team that every idea was worth exploring. He’d been wrong. Most ideas were worthless. But time was ticking.
Adi rattled off the numbers faster than she’d expected, which was a promising sign. But the numbers didn’t amount to anything.
“Does anyone else have a piece of torn paper stuck to their door?” asked Beck. “I’ve got ‘no one nor.’”
“Right!” said Carter. “I was so busy looking at these books, I forgot about it. Mine says ‘anything can.’”
“‘Silence me,’” added Sierra.
“Oh, the torn paper is where I got the name,” said Adi. “Dmitri Mendeleev.”
“Dmitri who?” said Beck.
“Exactly. I’m working on it. Give me a sec to—”
“Mendeleev-comma-Dmitri,” said Carter. “Found him!”
“Found . . . who?” said Adi.
“Dmitri Mendeleev.” Then, more hesitantly, “That’s what you said, isn’t it?”
“Hold on,” said Adi. “He’s a real person?”
“Says here he was the creator of the periodic table of elements.”
“Oh,” said Adi. He sounded disappointed.
“The words are a quote,” said Carter. “No one nor anything can silence me,credited to Dmitri Mendeleev.”
“What does that mean?” Adi said.
“Elements!” Beck sounded like a sugared-up preteen. “All these things in the jars. They’re elements. Like the battery. Lithium, right? The glove is a dishwashing glove. So maybe latex or . . .”
“Silicon?” said Sierra. “Hey, Carter. Do you have a periodic table in that book?”
Flipping pages, then—“Yes, but . . . I don’t see anything unusual. Nothing handwritten on the page. Oh, maybe we use the page number? I’m gonna try it on my lock.”
“Wait,” said Sierra. “Beck, you tell us the elements. Carter, look them up. Adi, write them down.”
“I’m not your secretary,” Adi said.
Sweet Jesus.
