Relentless (The Hero Agenda, #2) by Tera Lynn Childs, Tracy Deebs Page B

want to reassure him and tell him that it will. That my mom was a genius and that the instructions look easy enough to follow. But the little flop in my stomach reminds me that nothing is guaranteed. One misstep. One timing error. One drop too much or too little, and Mom’s perfect formula could turn into a placebo. Or, worse, a poison.
    But I’m not going to think about that right now. I’m going to focus on positive thoughts. I have to succeed so we can stop knocking Rebel out every time she so much as blinks.
    “It has to work.” I pull out the bag of safety gear from the chemistry lab. “It just has to.”
    None of the materials I’m working with are dangerous, but just in case, I put on goggles and latex gloves. Then I hand a set to Draven and he does the same.
    “What?” he asks when I flash him a half smile.
    “You look like a science geek.”
    He flashes me a cocky half smile of his own. “You know you love it.”
    I do. I really do.
    When this is all over—when we fix Rebel, when we stop Rex, when we find my dad, when I’ve mourned my mom—I can take time to indulge in my fantasies about Draven in a science lab. But for now, I have work to do. Work that requires my complete focus and attention to detail.
    I pull the formula up on Mom’s phone and prepare the first step.
    “What’s wrong?” Draven asks.
    “Nothing.” I line up the chemicals I need for the first phase of the process. “Why?”
    “You’re frowning.” He presses a latex-gloved fingertip to the spot between my eyebrows.
    I force my forehead to relax.
    “It’s nothing,” I insist. “It’s just…”
    He doesn’t push me to finish, to explain, which is probably why I do.
    “I’ve read over the formula at least twenty times since I found it. And one thing keeps standing out as really weird.”
    I fill a flask with 300 milliliters of distilled water.
    “Yeah?” he asks.
    “I don’t know why it’s supposed to take so long.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “It always took Mom three days to make a new batch. But see, here.” I point to the spot in step seven where she adds the orichalcum chromate to the serum and puts it all in the vacuum chamber for two days. “This compound is a retardant. It slows down the chemical reaction.”
    “And that means…?”
    “If she added a catalyst instead, it would get done in a fraction of the time.”
    “Maybe it needs that time to, I don’t know, cook or something.”
    I shake my head. “This isn’t like putting cookie dough in the oven. More like putting it in the freezer instead of letting it thaw.”
    “Maybe your mom didn’t know she could do that.”
    I give him a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding look. When it comes to powers-related chemistry, my mom is—was—unrivaled. If any of her hero-sponsored work could have been made public, she would have won a Nobel Prize for sure. There’s no way she didn’t know a catalyst would cut the production time by eighty percent.
    So the question is…why? Why do it this way when there is a better, faster way available.
    “She must have had a reason,” I say, staring to measure out the chemicals I need. “I just can’t figure out what it is.”
    And right now, I don’t have time to wonder. Rex could find us at any moment. Or Rebel could wake up again and bring the whole cabin crashing down around us. Someone could get hurt, and I won’t let that happen.
    For now, I’ll try it both ways. I’ll make one batch per Mom’s exact recipe and another using my shortcut.
    One of them has to work.
    • • •
    While the first batch is cooking, Draven and I join Dante and Deacon on the porch. The twins are sitting on the thick pine railing, eyes unfocused as they stare out into the woods. They seem to be content with the silence.
    Good for them. Personally, I’m not so sure I want to be alone with my thoughts. But I don’t want to break them away from theirs either, so I leave them be. Instead, Draven and I cross to the pair of Adirondack