I caught up with the tour just in time to see Wonka twirl his cane in the air. Either our chat did him a world of good, or he was a pro at faking enthusiasm.

"Welcome to the chocolate room!" he said with a bow that, when combined with his ridiculous suit, made him look like a circus ringmaster.

Heads turned left and right, but no one gasped or applauded. I shivered from a one-two punch of awkward discomfort and excessive air conditioning. Good thing I still had my jacket. It gave me an excuse to avoid eye contact while I slipped it back on.

"I don't see any chocolate," Mike said with a sniff, and for once, I was glad he'd said what we all thought.

The "chocolate" room was as different on each side as a bedroom shared between warring siblings. On the right, a pristine computer workstation sat beside a digital microscope and boxes of slides. Rows of narrow tables displayed equidistant dessert plates, each with a single cube of modeling clay and a printed label.

The left side resembled an antique drawing room stuffed with so many heirlooms that I nearly missed the custom 3D printer buried in the mess. Among the stacks, I spotted portraits of cartoon heroes dressed like French kings, soiled soccer shoes with muddy cleats, an overloaded shelf of crumbling almanacs, and an iron doorstop shaped like a Boston Terrier. Absolutely bizarre.

Wonka chuckled. "It's all chocolate! Everything you see! Well—not the computers. But everything else. Chocolate!"

Nobody spoke. I eyed the cubes of clay and imagined they might be dyed fudge. Could that be what he meant?

He swung his cane to point at the plates. "On this side: Chocolate of many flavors! We're still working on the name. Chocolate of any flavor sounds better but would be misleading. Anyway! We have omelet-flavored chocolate! Curry-flavored chocolate! Broccoli-flavored chocolate! Chocolate flavored chocolate."

"Chocolate flavored chocolate?" Veruca asked.

He shrugged. "I like chocolate." His cane swung to the other side of the room. "And on this side: Chocolate of any shape! Well—not any. But most, within reason."

"Oh! I get it!" Mike said. "I saw a game show like this once, where contestants had to bite into ordinary objects and find out if they were real or candy!"

"Exactly! Only, there are no ordinary objects here. It's all chocolate. We have buttercream bicycles! Peanut-butter-cup caps! Cherry cordial carving knives!"

I perked up at the last one. Cherry cordials were my absolute favorite candies when made with perfectly liquified sugar centers. Even the box-store-boxes with waxy milk chocolate were hard to resist. I couldn't wait to try Wonka's version when he released it.

Mike was significantly less patient. He dove at the first thing in his reach—a rotary phone with a silver dial—and shoved one end into his mouth. Boy, was he going to be upset if Wonka was joking.

"Mmmmh!" He said through a face full of handset. "Iz cremh fulld!"

"What?" Violet asked. She still looked a little green from her experience in the gobstopper room.

"Cremh. Filld."

He held up the ruined phone to show her the fluffy vanilla cream inside, and she shook her head in disgust. Not her thing, I supposed. I turned to Wonka to find out how much trouble Mike was in and caught him laughing with delight. He wanted us to sample the chocolate! My heart fluttered around my ribcage like a dove.

"Go ahead! Take a bite!" he said through chuckles. "Try something new! Everything here is yours for the tasting! Well—everything but the red samples on the table marked off-limits. The seafood-flavored chocolate hasn't been approved for human consumption yet."

Veruca recoiled. "Seafood flavored chocolate? Eugh! Who would mix chocolate and fish?"

"I once tried a tuna and olive oil amuse-bouche with just a sprinkling of cacao, and it had a surprisingly sophisticated flavor," Augustus offered. It didn't help.

Wonka stepped between them and raised a hand. "You misunderstand. This isn't chocolate with flavor additives. It's chocolate with the flavor of other foods. We use patented chemicals similar to miraculin, if you're familiar. They contain proteins that bond to taste buds and alter the flavor of ordinary chocolate. It's mother nature's invention, not my own. All I did was figure out how to make the effects fade once the chocolate dissolved."

"Like agbayun, but sweet-to-savory instead of sour-to-sweet. That's brilliant!" Augustus said before making his way to the tables.

Veruca was less enthused. "Yay. You've invented vegetables with all the drawbacks of sugar. I can't wait to dig in."

"Actually," Violet said, "insulin sensitivity is higher in the morning than the evening. And spikes only occur if you consume sugar in larger doses, provided you have no other conditions." She glanced at Mike, who was stuffing a chocolate-sheet newspaper into his face, one crumbling page at a time. "So, if we pace ourselves this morning, we shouldn't suffer any irritability or breakouts later."

That...was not my plan. I left the two to debate the merits of gradual candy consumption and searched through the stacks of chocolate knick-knacks. There were so many, and none of them made sense from a marketing perspective. I found a yo-yo without its string. A matchbox full of individual chocolate matches with raspberry-flavored heads. Five green toy soldiers in different poses...

"Looking for this?" Wonka held out a carving knife handle-first as if it was sharp. "I saw your grin when I mentioned it."

I was pretty sure I hadn't grinned, but I wasn't about to turn down a candy knife so realistic it raised goosebumps on my arms—or contributed to them, at least. The air conditioning required to preserve the chocolate shapes didn't help. Nor did the chill I felt along my spine at the thought of Wonka handing me, the man hired to expose his monstrous identity, a sharpened blade.

If Arthur's outlandish theories were somehow correct, and I found myself in mortal danger, did I really have it in me to drive a weapon into Wonka's chest? To watch my childhood hero die and know it was my fault? My gaze slid from the knife to his cartoonish sleeve, then up to his golden eyes, which glistened with expectation as he awaited my reaction. Hopefully, Arthur was delusional—driven to conspiracy theories by professional jealousy—and my courage would never be tested. I grinned like a guilty kid as I took a tentative bite of the knife's handle.

The liquid sugar gushed into my mouth and gave me a second round of shivers. It was divine—perfectly matched to the percentage of cocoa in the handle. But Wonka didn't hang around to watch me eat. He acknowledged my approval and hurried off to break up a brewing fight between Violet and Veruca, who were shouting about dermatologists and mineral-based makeup.

I shook off my negative thoughts and wandered toward the flavor cubes, away from Mike's germ-filled rampage through the any-shape section. Augustus' approach to taste-testing was the polar opposite of Mike's chomp-and-toss technique. He sliced small slivers of fudge from select doughy cubes with a butter knife and set them onto his tongue. Each time, he closed his eyes and moaned with delight.

"Do you know how long it's been since I've tasted a traditional Mexican tamale?" he asked.

I smiled politely through a bite of knife handle. A week ago, Arthur treated me to tamales at a local restaurant. It felt pretty fancy at the time, but it was probably not what Augustus meant. He moved on to the next cube and set a hand to his chest.

"Wagyu beef and black truffles! "

I had to ask. "What's that?"

He blinked as if I'd just asked what an apple was but humored me anyway. "Wagu is marbled beef from Japan. It costs more per pound than some electronics. And that's nothing compared to the truffles! If Wonka sells these candies at regular chocolate prices, it could put a whole world of otherwise unattainable flavors into the hands of average children!"

I wanted to point out that average children would be disappointed to discover their chocolate tasted of beef, but the emotion in his voice made me hold my tongue. He wasn't really talking about average children, after all. He was talking about himself as a child—which explained why he was so kind to me when the others were cruel. Food was his passion like candy was mine, and though he'd carved out a place for himself in that world, he remembered what it was like on the outside.

"Foie gras!?" Violet shrieked at a volume that made even Mike drop his latest treat.

Violet, Veruca, and Wonka clustered around the first of the flavor tables, still in a heated discussion. Violet was so puffed up she looked like she'd chomped into a ghost pepper cube. Which wasn't impossible, come to think of it.

"How dare you encourage the cruel force-feeding of sweet little geese for their livers?" she screeched at poor Wonka, who looked flustered.

"Please. There's no foie gras here. Miss Salt, If you would kindly read the labels before you taste—"

Augustus bumped my elbow with his. "Let's check out the forbidden fish."

A ten-year-old version of myself shouted inside my head that we'd been told not to touch the seafood, but I shushed him. There was no harm looking, and Augustus was an adult. He knew what he was doing. We approached the table in the back with its small red cubes, and Augustus read off the labels.

"Tuna nigiri with soy sauce. Fugu. Oh! Maryland crab cakes! I did a whole show last May where I sampled cakes from the top ten restaurants in the state. I concluded that the best were made at a hole-in-the-wall place a couple of blocks from the number one restaurant. Heh. Guess they let the wrong chef go."

I nodded as if I had any idea what he was talking about and snapped a piece of knife blade off in my teeth. It was bitter compared to the handle, but not bad.

"Oh my god!"

I followed his gaze to a plate labeled Bluefin Tuna. "Wasn't there already a tuna flavor?"

"Bluefin isn't just any tuna," he said. "It's the most expensive fish on earth. Even I haven't had any yet." He thought for a moment and declared, "I must try it."

I frowned. Hadn't Augustus just told a story that proved the most expensive food wasn't necessarily the best? My frown deepened as he unlatched the velvet rope separating us from the table. I should have listened to ten-year-old me.

"Wonka said those aren't ready," I reminded him like a little teacher's pet.

"Yet," he said. "A lot of food we know to be safe hasn't technically been approved yet. Regulations on novel foods can be ridiculous."

"Sure, but—"

"Keep an eye out for me, will you, Charles?"

I sighed. He remembered and used my first name because he knew Mike's teasing was getting on my nerves. How was I supposed to say no after that? I stepped between him and Wonka as if there was any way I could hide his taller form and watched the ongoing argument in the center of the room.

"Mmmmh...It's better than I imagined!" Augustus moaned behind me.

That was a relief. "Yum!" was way better than "Oh no! I'm poisoned!"

He smacked his lips. "Gone way too fast, though. I'm going to sneak one more slice."

I kept my eyes on Wonka and spoke from the corner of my mouth. "If you take too much, he'll know you got into it."

He didn't respond. I heard the ping of his knife on the plate, followed by another happy moan and another ping. He was going to get the both of us in trouble.

"Hey—"

I turned just in time to see him ditch the cutlery and shove the remainder of the cube into his mouth.

"What that all there was?" he asked between chews. There was a hint of desperation in his voice. "Did you see another plate of it?"

He reached for the closest seafood plate, some type of eel, and shoved that cube into his mouth without reading. Half-chewed crimson fudge dripped from his lips. When he advanced on the next two and grabbed one in each hand, I had to admit something was wrong.

"You need to stop," I said with as much authority as I could muster.

To my shock, he gripped my arm and flung me aside like a stuffed animal. I came within inches of crashing onto one of the tables before I caught my balance. Teacher's pet or no, it was time to get help. I called out as I wove around the remaining tables.

"Mr. Wonka!"

Wonka either didn't hear me or was prioritizing the ongoing argument. As I approached, he slammed his cane against the ground and scowled at Veruca, his smooth cheeks flushed a blotchy pink. "You most certainly do not!"

Veruca picked imaginary lint from her half-sweater as if his frustration was only feeding her cool. "I do. It was four summers ago in London. My birthday. I wore Dolce & Gabbana."

"Mr. Wonka! Augustus is—"

A clattering behind me drew my attention, and I realized Augustus had already made his way through the next few tables and was eyeing Mike's half-eaten pile of antiques with blood-shot eyes. The red drool on his chin had become a beard of aqua and pink that stained the front of his crisp white shirt.

"I don't care if you wore apples and bananas! Your flawed human brain is not capable of recalling a four-year-old flavor better than my trained digital—"

"Mr. Wonka!"

I grabbed his free hand to get his attention and immediately regretted the decision. He gasped as if struck with a bucket of ice water and spun on me, mouth and eyes wide with shock. The pink splotches on his cheeks darkened to a deep crimson, like my father's face used to when I was in deep trouble. There was no time to dwell on my professional faux pas, however.

"Something's wrong with Augustus!" I spat out, and his head jerked towards the former home of the forbidden fish.

"My seafood! Mr. Gloop!"

Augustus wasn't listening. He was halfway through a caramel-filled softball, mere feet from a posturing Mike Teavee. Mike held a fake folded umbrella at arm's length, either in self-defense or as a sacrificial snack should Augustus try to eat him instead.

"Mr. Gloop!" Wonka repeated. "Stop! You're in violation of your contract!"

"It's not going to work," I said. "Something in the tuna cube set him off."

Wonka groaned and lifted the cane's lollipop handle to his mouth for the third time since the tour began. "Security to room two. One of our guests got into the fish."

Mike gave a war cry and hurled his umbrella at Augustus just as two security officers barreled into the room. They stomped through the candy heirlooms, crushing sweets beneath their boots, and gripped Augustus' arms.

For a moment, I envisioned him tossing the smaller officers through the air like a furious supervillain. I was in decent shape, and he'd pushed me aside like a toddler. But the officers had no such trouble. They dragged him to the exit, his torso twisted and arms stilled by their grip, then shut the chocolate room doors behind them.

The room fell silent.

Once it became apparent that no one else would speak, I asked, "Will he be okay?"

Wonka nodded. "With a stomach pump and some rehabilitation, yes. He'll be good as new. The chemicals in the seafood are highly addictive, but they pass through the body quickly."

"Oh." I allowed the muscles in my shoulders to relax.

"I think," he said, "we should take a breather."

"You think?" Veruca snapped. She gestured to a hyperventilating Violet as if she hadn't been tormenting the same woman two minutes before.

He nodded. "On to the break room, then."

There was no joy in his voice, and this time, I couldn't bring myself to comfort him. The mental image of Augustus' thrashing body pinned helplessly between two average-looking officers haunted my memory. It was like a staged detective drama where you instinctively knew the criminal could overpower the police but accepted his capture anyway because it was time to roll credits. Completely unrealistic.

What exactly was the fitness plan for full-time employees, anyway?