Dangerous by Default

48. The eureka moment

Caine poked his head in the kitchen of their apartment, but Mina barely noticed. Clifford Brown was playing from a cell phone stuck in a coffee mug, the tinny sound reverberated from the wood island where Mina had spread a myriad of tools she had grabbed from the lab. She was placing a sample of the goo under a desktop microscope, the image appearing on her laptop screen. Beside it was the artificial womb. Mina's eyes darted from goo to womb, goo to womb.

"You know, we have a speaker system in here, bubba."

Her head was still, but her eyes raised to meet Caine's. "I am aware. But this is how I've been listening to music when I need to focus. The heavy bass makes me want to wiggle. I don't need the distraction."

The tone in her voice carefully suggested to point Caine's attention to the word 'distraction'. This wasn't just bringing work home, something she avoided religiously. She would have prefered to be helping Janus look for Ami, but since that was off the table she had to keep her hands busy. It was the perfect time to unlock the meaning of Ami's text. She glanced back up at her husband. She was being uncaring. Don't forget to be a human while you're saving the world.

"You are my hero. You know that, right? How's the arm, love."

Caine laughed. "Artemis has me all fixed up. Damn convenient having our own surgeon in house. I've never seen someone, well, something do stitches so fast."

"It's not exactly stitches, but Ultrasound waves. I'm just glad you're alright."

"Alright.. Ha. Mina, What the fuck is going on? Your lab was broken into. Your chief scientist and best friend was kidnapped. You were about to lose funding only 12 hours ago. You were attacked by a woman wearing a read cape trying to steal an artificial womb. And now you're all business!"

"Caine, I don't have time for this."

"Well then make time!" The angst in his voice made her step away from the computer to face him fully. "Just this morning Janus was grilling me about the museum, about the murder of the SFMOMA's head curator. She knows about the hat, the stunts, she even thinks we're in cahoots with Pechaude! How do you think we look as the only witnesses to Ami's disappearance?

"This is not good." was all Mina could escape from her lips.

"I'll say. All she needs is a single lick of evidence. So please explain to me. Of all the things you could be doing given everything to have happened lately, why are you staring at goo under a microscope?" Caine's hand rushed to his mouth, trying to stop the flow of words pouring out of him.

They both soaked in silence for a moment, the intensity of not just that moment, but everything that had transpired that week floating around them.

He sighed deeply, scratching nervously at his freshly cauterized wound. "Is this what it's like to run a start-up?"

"If I told you I knew about any of this, or what I'm doing, I'd be lying. The only thing I know for sure is that someone has seriously targeted Dimensions, and that Ami is gone. Since this is the last thing she was working on, I'm going to see what I can find. Before Janus, or whoever has it out for us, decides to take it all away."

As Mina pulled Caine in for a long hug, her mind swirled once more.

What was the Eureka moment?

She never knew what to expect with Ami. Mina was used to asking for something, and in a reasonable amount of time, the request would arrive complete. Most people do what they are told. With Ami, it was a totally different story, her brain didn't work that way. It would solve not only the problem you thought you were solving, but one step deeper to discover a problem you didn't realize existed, the problem that had you known about in the first place, you would have seen your request as idiotic. Ami challenged Mina at every level, intellectually, personally, even by her sheer compassion. She was practically her mentor. How could she just peer into Ami's work and expect to understand what she was looking at?