Archenemies (Renegades, #2)(69)
Snapshot wouldn’t arrive for hours. Until then, she had the vault all to herself.
She hoped it would be enough time.
A brilliant idea had come to Nova the day before. She was never going to magic her way into the chromium box that held Ace’s helmet. The box would never be chopped open with a mystical ax or smashed with an indestructible hammer. Adrian would never draw an opening into it for her, no matter how much awkward flirting she suffered through.
But Nova had forgotten what she was capable of. She may not have superstrength or psychic powers or control over the natural elements, but she had science, and she had persistence, and she was going to get into that box.
She didn’t hurry, knowing there was someone in the security room right now who could be watching her slow progress down the aisles. They might be curious why she was there in the middle of the night. They might even be suspicious. But they would lose interest by the time she got to the helmet. Nova kept her actions slow and trivial. She and the cart ambled from row to row, its squeaking wheels grating on her nerves. She made frequent stops, checking the clipboard that hung off the side of the cart, pretending to make notations from time to time. She pulled mundane items from the cart and spent time organizing them neatly on the shelves.
Nova had never been in the vault when she didn’t have Callum’s constant jabbering in her ear, and she noticed for the first time how a number of the relics seemed to hum, as if with a quiet electrical current. Some even emitted a subtle coppery glow, not unlike Ace’s helmet.
The similarities made her hesitate as she was passing the Infinite Hourglass, where the glittering white sand was being pulled upward into the top half of the container. Stepping closer, Nova placed her finger against the ebony wood base. That glow. It was familiar. The exact shade and vibrancy of all the wonderful things she’d watched her father create when she was little.
She peered down the length of the aisle. Now that she was searching for them, she could easily spot the glimmering artifacts. She knew there were probably things in the vault that had in fact been made by her father, but not all of these. Not the Ravenlore Quill, which had been around for centuries. Not the Arctic Saber, which had been forged on the other side of the world.
She shook her head and turned the cart back into the main aisle.
“Stay focused,” she whispered to herself. She would have time to dwell on the many mysteries of the artifacts department later. For now, all she cared about was Ace’s helmet and how she was going to free it.
Nova turned into the last aisle, past the RESTRICTED sign posted at the end of the shelf. Halfway down the row, she positioned the cart a few feet away from the chromium box, keeping her back to the camera at the far end of the aisle. She opened her plastic crate and pulled out her equipment—a battery and connector clips, a large bucket full of an electrolyte solution that Leroy had mixed up for her earlier, and a steel wheel she’d found in the gutter on Wallowridge, which she’d painstakingly cleaned in a bath of sodium chloride and acetic acid.
She checked the clipboard again, pretending to be dutifully following orders from above. Then, opening the bucket, she dumped the solution into the bin. The smell of chemicals wafted up, making her nose wrinkle. Smothering a cough, Nova grabbed the wheel and submerged it inside the vat.
Taking a deep breath, she wrapped her hands around the chromium box. The metal was cool to the touch, and though it was heavy, she managed to lift it into the bin with only mild straining. The solution sloshed up its sides. She wasn’t sure how thick the walls of the box were, but she hoped the solution was deep enough to corrode the entire base. She hoped there would be enough time to complete the process. She hoped no one bothered to come to the restricted section while the experiment was underway.
She hoped a lot of things.
Electrolysis. The idea had struck her like one of the Sentinel’s laser beams. It was the process that was used for metal plating, and chromium was used to plate other metals all the time. Using a battery, she could alter the charge of the neutral atoms at the box’s base. The atoms would lose electrons, turning them into positively charged ions, which would dissolve right off the box. Over time, the positive chromium ions would move through the solution, attracted by the electrons that were being pushed out from the other side of battery, and be turned back into solid metal on the surface of the wheel.
The result: no more chromium box.
Or, at least, a big hole in the chromium box.
As an added bonus, she might even have a newly indestructible chromium-plated wheel once the process was complete.
It was so simple, so obvious, she couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of it before. She’d even begun to wonder whether the Captain himself could be weakened this way, although it would be considerably more difficult to hook him up to a battery or dunk him into a vat of chemicals.
She attached the conductors.
Crossing her fingers, Nova switched on the battery.
And hoped.
She half expected the battery to flare to life with sparks and the sizzle of energy, but of course it didn’t. Only the digital readings on its side indicated that amps were flowing through the system. Nova adjusted the dials, increasing the voltage.
She inspected the wheel, not really expecting to see any visible change. The process would take time.
“A watched cathode never plates,” she muttered to herself, then pushed the entire electrolysis cell back into the shadows of the shelving unit.