"I can't believe this!"

"Of course you can't! You need a lightning bolt to knock some sense into you!"

"At least I have some sense! I'm not going around drugging people!"

"I never did that!"

"But that is your plan, isn't it?"

Chris calmly took another bite of his sandwich.

The five of them were back in his backyard, sitting on the same lawn chairs as the night of the fire.

The burnt husk of a tree trunk stood near the fence, a permanent reminder of the things they were dealing with.

He wasn't entirely sure that Miss Dahlia could be trusted, but he was starting to have some faith in their 'we-have-only-one-lead-so-we-must-follow-it' strategy.

The plan was to sneak into the medical school's archive room like Miss Dahlia had suggested, and look for any records under their names.

As far as plans went, it wasn't the clearest, most legal or the best laid one but it was pretty decent nonetheless.

The girls insisted that there was no way the staff at the school would help them, so inside help was not an option.

Noah had done some digging and found a virtual tour vlog of the school, from which they got to know the location of the archive room.

Being caught on CCTV was not a problem because even if there were cameras, it was a government institution and that meant there was no way the budget could be enough for a working security system.

So even if getting caught wasn't the issue, there was no way of knowing the filing system there, how and where the records were kept, and even whether they would find what they were looking for.

This meant the key was having enough time to search the place properly, without anyone finding out.

Kat had suggested that since it was a medical school, there had to be chloroform or something else they could use to drug people if they had to, to avoid awkward questions.

Justin argued that using chloroform would create more awkward questions than not using it and that bribing people to keep their mouths shut would be better.

Then Amy said that the people there would laugh in their faces if they threw money at them, and Justin told her to get over what happened at Chris's party, Kat demanded to know what happened, and the three of them screamed at each other for a few minutes.

Through all this, Noah was just staring at them in shock, wondering what he had gotten himself into.

Chris was the only one who was undisturbed, because screaming matches like these happened all the time when Justin was around, and Justin was around a lot.

Chris finished his sandwich, stood up and yelled, "Can you guys finish this later? This is not the only thing we have to figure out."

They stopped talking so suddenly that it felt a little unnatural.

Chris ducked his head and sat back down a bit self-consciously.

"So the locks", said Noah awkwardly, trying  to break the silence. "If the shelves are open, no problem. But if they aren't, there are three types of ways they can be locked, so we have -"

"See?", said Kat, looking pointedly at Justin.
"This is called research. Not throw-money-at-a-problem - "

"Better than chloroforming -"

"Stop!", shrieked Amy, pulling herself upright. "Can you two just give it a rest? I swear if I hear the word chloroform one more time I -"

Kat started to get up too, but Chris laid a warning hand on her wrist.

Her gaze softened a little as she looked at him, then she quickly pulled her hand away and turned her face without another word.

Was she... blushing?

Chris cast a quick look around to see if anyone noticed, but thankfully it didn't looklike they had.

He pulled a small metal lock from his pocket, the plain kind with the keyhole on it's front face.

He tossed the lock to Justin and said, "This is the basic type, and we can pick it with a hairpin or something like that"

"Same for the other types of locks, provided they need some sort of key to open them", added Noah. "We can try and grab a few keys from the watchman's cabin, but there's no guarantee that they will be the right ones."

"What if the locks don't need keys?", asked Amy. "Like, combination locks or those dial things on safes."

"This isn't a movie", said Kat coldly. "For your information, in the real world nobody takes the effort to remember so many codes and combinations."

"And even if there is a combination lock", said Justin, leaning back on his chair with a self-satisfied look on his face.

Chris paced himself to punch him if he said the word 'chloroform' again.

"We'll smash it with a hammer", Justin finished.

Chris breathed a sigh of relief.

                                    ***
Justin adjusted his stolen lab coat for the hundredth time, making sure only the very edge of his i-card was visible.

He kept his eyes trained on the worn notebook in his hands, pretending to revise and hoping people wouldn't disturb him.

All five of them had taken turns to hang around the campus, noting how the students behaved and how to blend in.

The girls had it comparatively easier, because there was a school-level girls' cricket tournament being held on the campus ground, so all they had to do was wear cricket whites and no one would be suspicious.

The three of them, meanwhile, had to sandwich the school lab coats between their journal and textbook, walk back to class and try not to look like they were doing something wrong, slide the whole thing into their bag and hope nobody noticed.

The i-card thing had been a stroke of luck; Amy had seen a few empty card holders and lanyards on the receptionist's desk and grabbed them when no one was looking.

The campus was busy that time of the day, with students milling around in groups, shielding their eyes from the brilliant afternoon sunlight.

The timing was absolutely perfect, because it wasn't during their school hours and it was when the peon had his lunch break which gave them plenty of time to snoop around the archive room.

He made his way into the packed waiting room and stood near the wall, nose still buried in his notebook.

He was terrified that someone would try to talk to him and his cover would be blown even before they got to the archive room.

Luckily, no one paid any attention to him.

After a few minutes, he saw Amy enter the room, clutching her stomach and walking like every step hurt her.

There was a brownish-red smudge on the edge of her shirt, which was probably supposed to indicate that she'd been hit with a cricket ball.

There was no way the act would hold up in front of a real doctor, but they hoped it wouldn't come to that.

He quickly tucked the book into his backpack and went over to her.

"Amy?", he asked, pretending to be surprised for the benefit of the others in the room. "What happened?"

"Cricket - ball -", she wheezed painfully.

"Never mind, just sit here and wait, I'll get you some water", he said, loud enough for everyone to hear, and quickly ran through a side door, down a narrow hallway and through another door.

He wasn't sure whether he was technically allowed to be there, or whether the receptionist had seen him.

But he couldn't do anything except stay in the shadows and wait.

Almost immediately, he heard Katherine's loud voice floating from the waiting room, asking Amy where the 'doctor' had gone.

A few minutes later, he heard rushed footsteps and saw the girls entering the room he was in.

"You think Chris and Noah nervously asked Katherine with a worried glance at the room's second door, which was bolted shut from the other side.

That door was the one of connecting doors between the hospital wing and administrative wing, which Noah and Chris were supposed to open.

They had decided that all five of them just waltzing into the administrative wing would be too suspicious, so Chris and Noah would be the only people to enter from there, and the other three would pull off their drama and enter from the hospital side.

Amy nervously checked her watch and looked back at the door.

Just then, with a too-loud creaking sound that made everyone's heart jump into their throats, the door swung open and Noah and Chris grinned at them, both of them with cobwebs in their hair.

"All good?", confirmed Justin as he shut the door behind them, seeing the picked lock hanging off it.

"Yeah", said Noah. "It's just one flight of stairs down from here."

Careful not to make more noise, they went out into the corridor and padded as quietly as they could down the stairs.

The archive room door was shut with a simple sliding bolt, so they eased it open quickly and without much difficulty.

When they stepped inside the dusty room with its rows of filing cabinets, they saw to their relief that the cabinet keys were hanging on a hook by the door.

There was also a thick logbook with unraveling binding kept on the cabinet nearest to the door, which Katherine immediately grabbed and started flipping through.

The others looked on nervously, till she finally paused at a page and called them over.

Justin saw the entry she was pointing at, dated 10 years prior, with the words 'Experiment Log : K Lancaster, A Turner, N Green, J Canmore, C Watson' crammed into a single line.

She moved her finger to point at the serial number of the log, and whispered excitedly "This is it!"

Justin couldn't keep the smile off his face either, and they split up and started scanning the shelves for labels which indicated the serial numbers.

After more than fifteen tense minutes, when Justin was about to stop looking and ask the others if they had made any progress, he saw Amy through a gap in the shelves, waving a thick, yellowing file in the air, mouthing "I got it!"