Read Online Ann Marie's Asylum (Master and Apprentice Book 1) by Christopher Rankin - Free Book Online

in red light. Except for the sensors and the wiring harness that covered most of his pelvis like tight underwear, her boss was naked.
    Under the fume hood across the room, he was performing a complex chemical synthesis with a mess of glass tubing. The whole thing looked like an interchange of a superhighway.
    “Is this stuff only stable in red light?” she asked, trying not to stare directly at his nearly naked body.
    “You got it,” he said. “It’s very sensitive stuff. The blues will rip it apart.”
    Ann Marie looked at the sculpture of glass and metal, which ended in one Erlenmeyer flask. This is where the end product, the strange hallucinogenic chemicals, collected. Needlelike crystals, like quills on a porcupine, glowed inside the flask. She put her face up to the fume hood to get a better look. The crystals started to flicker like lightning bugs.
    “I thought I knew about chemistry,” she said, looking at the stuff like a zoologist admiring a bizarre new species. “This stuff is really weird. Where did you get the recipe?”
    Dade glanced over to the tank and told her, “Same place I get most of them. In there.”
    “How do you test it before you take it?”
    “I don’t.”
    His answer shocked her more than the strange chemicals in front of her. “What!” she said. “How do you know it won’t kill you?”
    “I don’t.”
    “You’re telling me that you’re just gonna inject yourself with a completely untested psychotropic drug? You don’t even have a clue what it will do.”
    “That’s one of the reasons why I have the tank.”
    “What? So you can drown if something goes wrong?”
    “Exactly,” answered Dade. “The acrylic is seven inches thick. When it goes dark, it gives me full sensory deprivation and, if something happens and I become dangerous for some reason, the tank should be able to hold me.”
    The monstrous cylinder stood close to eleven feet tall from floor to ceiling. Dade climbed to the top of the ladder and unsealed the lid.
    He stopped for a minute. There seemed to be something he wanted to bring up to her. “The other day,” he said. “The Sheriff told me that you saw something strange by the road. You OK?”
    “Fine,” she answered quite unconvincingly. “It was just weird. Nobody tried to hurt me or anything.”
    “You told The Sheriff it was a woman.” He asked, “You did say she was wearing a robe, right?”
    “I saw a whole bunch of women out there. It looked like some group of weirdos.” She remembered the writing on her window. “What’s MoneySexPower?” She asked. “I had to wash that crap off my window.”
    Dade seemed bothered by that piece of information but not surprised. “Sick kids abandoned by their parents, abandoned by everyone,” he told her. “It’s easy for something dark to get in.” He added, “They’re no threat to you. They just like the laboratory grounds. They think it gives them magical powers.”
    “Does it?” She asked, expecting some sort of snide remark.
    “In a manner of speaking,” he told her quite seriously, “it does. What we’re doing, all these experiments in the tank, it does something.”
    Taking a seat on the edge as he prepared to lower himself in, he remembered that he wasn’t alone. “This should be a short trip,” he said. “Twenty minutes max. All I’ll need is your help out of the tank when I’m finished.”
    “What about the compound?” She asked. “How are you going to take it?”
    Dade held up a syringe containing the flickering liquid from under the hood. “I always inject myself once the tank is sealed,” he said as he prepared to submerge.
    “Wait!” she stopped him. “How will I know if I need to help you or get you out? What if something happens?”
    “Under no circumstances can you ever let me out before the experiment is over. No matter what I do. Even if I’m drowning, don’t open that latch until the computer tells you its OK.” He reinforced his point saying, “Don’t