Conundrum

Part 15

theSingingDragon

Lydia tried her best not to watch her brother pace the floor - it only seemed to encourage him. Instead she pulled her bag up and made sure it had everything she needed for chemistry. The last thing she wanted was to find out she'd forgotten something and end up spending more time in the lab. It wasn't as if she was paid by the hour, and she certainly didn't want to risk her life by lingering around the experiments there. Suddenly Lydia was aware of her brother standing over her and she closed her bag.

"Are you sure you haven't gotten a call yet?" Jamie seemed to loom over her.

"How many times do I have to say you would have heard it?" Making a point of rolling her eyes, Lydia slung her bag over her shoulder.

"Where are you going?" Jamie stared at her.

"Class."

"What if - "

"Text me if anything happens." Lydia headed over to the door of the dorm room.

"Um, I need to ask you something," said Jamie. Holding her breath and turning around slowly, Lydia turned to face her brother. "Mm?"

Her brother merely took Lydia's seat and messed with his hands. "The agent that arrested Spencer, the grey suit guy - he came by with a way to... expedite the process."

"Uuh, okay." This could either go really well.... "How?"

"I help them with a project."

Lydia fingered her backpack straps. "I... I guess that could... probably... be alright. Do they, uh." She fingered the straps again. "They pay you? For your help, I mean?"

"You really think I'd take their money?" scoffed Jamie.

"I mean, it's approximately worth the same as any other cash source, give or take inflation."

"Seriously?" Jamie stood up, staring at her. "It's practically blood money!"

Crossing her arms, Lydia shifted her weight. "Bro, give it a rest, you need it for college."

"No I don't, I'm doing fine."

"On Mom and Dad's money."

"And I'll pay them back when I get a job." Jamie checked his phone for any sign of the MDA, and Lydia took the phone out of his hand.

"Get the job now, help them now."

It was Jamie's turn to cross his arms. "Whatever MDA did pay me, it wouldn't be enough to do anything to begin with."

"Oh, I don't know, I seem to be doing fine."

"Yeah, but you only have one major."

"Yeah, idiot, 'cause everything I might ever need to know is related to one major and I don't need to sink pounds of money into any given specialty."

Jamie shifted his weight. "Give me one example."

"Biology and chemistry."

There was a pause of silence as Lydia stared her brother down before saying, "What was wrong with biochemistry?"

"Well, it's like you said, everything you need to know is related to one major. What about physics and engineering?"

His face had never seemed so punchable. Looking down at the ground, Lydia let out all her breath, hoping the tension would be released as well. It did, a little bit at least. That was all she really needed to not kill him.

"I need to go." Opening the door, Lydia paused to look back at her brother. "Text me, okay?"

Then she left.

.........

Lydia fiddled with the pencil in her hand, periodically forcing herself to take half-hearted notes. It wasn't really useful since the chapter they'd been going over recently was pretty straight forward chemistry.

A man sitting at the end of one of the middle rows stood up and walked towards the back of the room. Quickly looking down, Lydia wrote the first chemical equation that came to mind as the man approached. Closer. Closer. And he walked past her. Lydia kept writing, not daring to look up as the door creaked and closed. After a couple of minutes of no one coming out of the door and the man seeming to have actually left, Lydia peeked behind her. No one. Really, truly no one.

Loud rustling came from the front of the class and Lydia quickly looked back. The other students were leaving. As they passed her for the door she kept her eyes on her things that she packed in her backpack. With the last student gone the room had an uncertain silence to it, especially as Professor Abacus toddled up to her.

"I never realized how much I liked having someone sitting in the front seat, fascinated by every word I said, until you sat in the back today." The professor leaned against one of the tables, his hands in his striped brown suit pockets. Lydia nodded quickly, not knowing what to say or really what had just been said to her. It took a moment for the words to sink in.

"You didn't call on me today," she realized.

"No." Shifting his weight, Professor Abacus looked at the posters on the classroom wall. "I didn't want to draw attention to your... lack of attention. You're still good for lab, though?"

Lydia nodded again as she fingered her backpack straps. "I, I do need to tell you something."

"Mmm?"

"The MDA arrested my roommate yesterday."

The professor's eyebrows bent and he hunched over slightly more, but he continued analyzing the posters. This should really be worrying him. Why wasn't this worrying him?

"Professor." Lydia said, stepping more into his view. "You... I need.... Hm. It doesn't seem like a smart idea, at least from what I can tell, to do anything this soon after an investigation like that.... Uh, what do you think?"

"I think you're right." The professor tilted his head thoughtfully. "I'll probably be on their radar for a while now that they've brought me in."

"What?"

"Still, that doesn't mean we have to stop preparation work, just as long as the surface level seems to disappear for now."

"I'm sorry, what?" Lydia pulled her fingers out from under the backpack straps. "They brought you in?"

"Yesterday, but they don't have anything worth anything."

"They're closing in, Professor. Both of us, the same day."

The professor looked at her finally. "They didn't investigate you."

"No. They investigated my roommate. Come on, I'm not an idiot." Slowing down with the last couple words, Lydia paced a bit. "Wait, why MDA? Why us and the MDA specifically? Why not just the police?" Lydia stopped pacing and stared at the old man in the brown suit. "Who are you employing?"

"I thought you didn't want to know."

"Are they magics? Are you magics?"

"In fact, the first thing you told me was that the less you knew the safer you'd be." Professor Abacus stood up and Lydia took a step back. He studied her. This hunched, old man - she'd always suspected she was just in over her head, but something in his eyes told her she was thirty feet farther down than she ever thought she'd be.

"Your concerns about being caught are valid." His voice was utterly devoid of worry. "I know you've already planned out every detail of your future, so I sympathize that jail would greatly throw off those plans. Therefore, until the heat comes down, you may as well continue your lab work on your own for now and focus on keeping up appearances. And if I may add," he said as he doddled back to his desk, "I feel I should point out that the relative danger of our work hasn't changed." His back to Lydia, the professor sifted through some papers. "And it never stopped you before. I'll check in with you in a couple weeks about your new corrosive compound. Have a good day."

Standing there, staring at the brown suited man, Lydia's mind tried to sort out the combobulated yet discombobulated situation. Thirty feet might have been too generous. Eighty feet. Eighty feet under sounded about right.

"Have a good day, Professor." Lydia closed the classroom door quickly behind her.