8~

Marcie didn't want to admit it openly, but she was glad that her father was still at work when she left her bedroom with her cell phone in her jacket pocket. She needed its camera and wasn't too eager to hash it out with Winslow over whatever perceived or imagined slight he believed she had done to him.

Getting some snap shots of the tilt-a-whirl's sabotaged speed governor when all was said and done with the case was paramount. That might go a long way to placating or even pleasing him, somehow.

Leaving the house, Marcie went into the backyard and made a beeline to her laboratory.

Schrödinger, lounging on the lab's counter that dominated the room, stood lazy watch over the unfolded paper that Marcie had took from the aquarium earlier.

With a half-consumed glass of water Marcie had been nursing keeping him company, he lifted his head upon hearing her enter, pass him, and then open a top drawer from the counter. From there, she presented a tray on the black countertop that the cat could see displayed four syringe bulbs.

"What's that?" he asked.

"These are my newest invention," Marcie said, with a noticeable touch of pride in her voice. "Quick Keys."

"They don't look like keys to me," Schrödinger observed, dryly.

"The Quick Keys are inside," Marcie sighed. "I created a chemical that will harden in contact with air. Sorta like liquid cement. I squirt some of that into a lock, it'll harden into the perfect shape of a key that fits that lock. All I have to do then is draw enough of the chemical out of the bulb to make a turning handle, and voila, instant access."

Schrödinger gave the pantomime of a thought, then quipped, "It still doesn't look like keys to me."

Marcie ignored him and went back into the drawer. This time, she presented something that look like a small jewelry box.

"And what's in that?" the cat asked while preening himself. "A diamond ring?"

"I wish," Marcie muttered as she slowly opened the container, revealing a tiny sphere. "This is a knockout capsule. And before you ask, I can only make one, and that's if I'm lucky."

"I wasn't going to ask, but why?"

Marcie carefully closed the box and placed it on the countertop. "Because the chemicals used to make it are really hard to come by. They're expensive and I can't synthesize them. I'm lucky I had the materials needed to make my prototype Quick Keys."

Schrödinger's ears pricked in surprise. "So, those things are untested, then?"

"After tonight, they won't be. I'll be using them to get us back into Ocean Land." Hearing herself say that, along with the anticipation of a nighttime action that could possibly go wrong, secretly thrilled her. "The knockout capsule is for Big, Green and Ugly, though. I only get one shot at this. Hopefully, it'll be enough."

The cat whipped his tail back forth in response. "Well, I have complete confidence in your chemistry skills," Schrödinger said with what Marcie thought was a touch of sarcasm lacing his voice.

"Thanks," she said, raising her head from handling her prototypes skeleton keys in time to watch as Schrödinger's tail whipped too hard and knocked her glass over, spilling water across one side of her paper clue.

"Hey, watch it! Ugh, look what you did!" she scolded him as she rushed over and picked the sheet up from the puddle. "I was already having trouble trying to read what was on it because the printing's so old.

"Terribly sorry. I guess I was too excited about tonight."

"I don't see how," Marcie said, shaking the excess water from the clue and lying it back on the countertop. "You're essentially along for the ride. If I'm caught, at least security won't think twice about you. You're a cat."

"Yes, I do have that advantage," Schrödinger purred. He gave the paper a casual glance and then saw something being brought out from the water. "Marcie! Look! The paper!"

Marcie gazed over the wet side of the paper and eventually, she, too, could finally make out a word...and a number.

"Floor 1?" she read.

"Floor 1?" the cat echoed in puzzlement.

"Sound like something to do with the aquarium's layout, I suppose," Marcie surmised. She then walked back to her tray and small box and pocketed two of the bulb syringes and the knockout capsule into her wool jacket.

With a determined and anxious gleam in her eyes, Marcie told the cat, "Okay. Let's go."

Marcie hunched in front of Ocean Land's main entrance double doors, taking out one of the bulb syringes from her pocket.

Her heart was pounding. She could hear it in her ears, just as she fought to ignore or rationalize against the voice that nagged in the back of her mind that was telling her to turn away from this course of action.

'What would your father think if he knew you were gallivanting about town at night?' the voice vexed her.

Considering the tiff they had that morning and the distance their respective actions had created, Marcie countered that what Mr. Winslow Fleach didn't know wouldn't hurt him.

She fought to keep her hand from trembling as she placed the narrow opening of the syringe against the keyhole and gave it a steady squeeze.

The thick chemical ooze flowed into the spaces of the lock mechanism, becoming firmer and stiffer with each second that passed. True to form, the liquid soon hardened into the specific shape of the lock's tumblers that a true key would have fit into.

With a grin that would have made the Cheshire Cat jealous, Marcie pulled the bulb away from the keyhole slowly, drawing out a thick, straight strand of chemical, like liquid silk from a spider's spinneret. The strand petrified in the night air and with a firm snap from the end of the syringe, it became a working handle to carefully turn the keyhole open.

Marcie gripped the makeshift handle between thumb and forefinger and slowly twisted. The lock on the double doors gave way to her genius and that night, the Quick Key became a new tool in her arsenal.

"Hmm, don't get too cocky," Schrödinger muttered.

Marcie ignored Schrödinger's skepticism as she and he slipped quietly into the forward gallery of the visitor's area where they first met so many hours ago.

Now it was dark and deserted, lit dimly by the surrounding aquariums' atmospheric lightning. Fish still swam in its confines, but in the gloom, they gave a hypnotic, surreal effect that threatened to hold the girl and cat spellbound.

Forcing themselves to focus on the matter at hand, they crept past the archway that opened up toward the central hub, led by Marcie's penlight. The hub gave the appearance of a quiet, shade-filled gallery in a gothic house with the circular staircase promising terrors to any who dared to ascend.

Marcie took a tentative step and forced herself not to think as she took another step, and then another, slowly climbing higher towards, she hoped, Doctor Redding and his abuse of Professor Arthur Angstrom's crowning technological achievement.

"Do you even know where Doctor Redding is?" Schrödinger asked from behind her, silently bringing up the rear.

Marcie stopped in mid-ascent to consider that question. The answer to it made her uncomfortably foolish.

"Uh, I didn't think that far," she confessed. "But he might in his office, if he's still here."

"You better hope so. Otherwise, we'll, or rather, you'll be in trouble for breaking and entering."

That warranted an annoyed glance from Marcie. "Hey, I never said I was a professional at this. I'm learning as I go. Now, c'mon."

Marcie was spared anymore of the cat's bellyaching when they finally made it to the top of the stairs and entered the wide, curving main corridor that housed the offices, storage rooms and laboratories along with the aquarium's windowed tower that extended from the main building that the resident scientists were privy to.

With no sign of security patrolling in their area, as of yet, Marcie breathed relievedly and flashed her penlight across every door that she approached, until her light revealed the office of Doctor Morris Redding.

"Found it," she whispered.

Her elation grew all the more when she looked down and saw what she had hoped to see. A light glowing from under the door. He was there and probably in the middle of wrongdoing.

"Gotcha."

She twisted the doorknob, stepped into the office with authority...and saw the wholly unexpected.

The doctor was sitting behind his desk, which wasn't at all surprising if he were working, but he sat frozen in terror before the snarling visage of the Sea Beast, who was clawing the air by his fear-stricken face with promises of striping it from his skull.

"What is he doing here?" Schrödinger blurted out.

"I-I heard a noise in The Vault room," Redding sputtered, wide-eyed. "I went in and found the Sea Beast standing by one of the air grates. I ran back to my office to call security, but it caught up with me and yanked the phone cord from the wall."

"You mean you're not it's partner in crime?" The fact that Marcie, an admitted amateur, found herself making such a devastating mistake made her feel like a computer that was crippled by a serious error. "You're not using Professor Angstrom's communicator?"

Redding was almost struck speechless by the accusation. "Are you crazy?!" the doctor managed to scream, despite his fear. "It's trying to kill me!"

The Sea Beast decided to ignore all of this human babbling and, with a snarl, shifted his bulk to focus its deadly attentions on Marcie and the cat.

Schrödinger instinctively knew that a creature that size was not to be trifled with, no matter how clever the feline thought he was. So, he fearfully backed up, hoping to exit the room without turning his back to a predator.

Unfortunately, he backed into the door, which was half opened when Marcie stepped in, closing it.

The sound of the door closing and the sight of the Sea Beast moving in on the two of them caused Schrödinger to run and hide behind Marcie for safety.

Marcie, for her part, backed away from the approaching creature, but didn't notice the cat cowering by her feet, causing her to stumble and fall onto her posterior hard.

"Isn't this how we met?" she asked in vexation as the cat extricated himself from her tangled legs.

Schrödinger ignored her words, so intent was he upon watching the Sea Beast stalk them. In his panic, he instead dove inside Marcie's jacket, letting his paws dig into every inner pocket in an anguished bid to find one thing that he was certain would save his life.

"Schrödinger!" she cried out, trying to pull the frantic cat from her jacket. "What-What are you doing? Get outta there!"

"The knockout capsule! We have to use it! Where is it?" he asked in a fear-broken voice. Then, he found it. "There it is!"

"Wait! It's an enclosed-" Marcie warned, but it was too late.

The cat reared up on his hind legs and blindly threw the pellet. It broke against the bottom of Doctor Redding's desk, releasing it pressurized contents and filling the room immediately.

If Marcie wasn't so quickly overtaken by the chemical assault on her consciousness, she would have marveled at the speed and effectiveness of her concoction.

However, as she and everyone else succumb to the capsule, she had time to wonder why the Sea Beast was seemingly immune as he closed in on her.

It was the pangs of a headache that woke Marcie from her chemically induced slumber. She opened her eyes and could more clearly feel the tight onset of pain in her temples.

"Wow, what a kick," she muttered. "I'll have to recalculate the strength of the gas when I get back to the lab."

"Who are you talking to?" asked an already awake and distraught Doctor Redding.

Marcie noticed that she was in some form of motion, a subtle rocking. She sat up and soon gathered that she and Redding were in a small raft that floated in the center of a large tank.

"Uh, no one," she answered him. "Where are we?"

"One of our shark tanks," Redding answered back. "I don't know why, but that beast must have put us on this raft and set us adrift here. But that's alright. As long as we don't capsize, we'll be fine."

"Uh, you said shark tank," Marcie reminded him with a gulp. "What kind of sharks are with us?"

"Carcharhinus leucas. Bull Sharks. Two of them, but suffice it to say, if we sit quietly we'll be safe." Redding said, trying not panic the girl or himself, for that matter.

The echoing sound of someone climbing up the ladder that hung from the side of the tank made the two turn to it. It wasn't who they expected.

The hulking mass of the Sea Beast cleared the top rung and shambled over towards the railed, low-lying platform that extended over the rim of the tank.

Used primarily for feedings, extractions and insertions of marine animals, the metal platform creaked from the creature's weight, and, to Marcie and the doctor's puzzled looks, the creature stuck a very strange image when it reached behind itself and produced a fishing rod.

"Okay, that's different," Marcie said to herself.

"What's he doing with that pole?" the doctor asked.

"Some serious game fishing, it looks like," she quipped.

The monster's wide, frog-like visage gave what looked to an approximation of a smile as it raised the rod in its clawed, webbed hand like a coachman's whip and gave it a surprisingly accurate and sharp cast.

Terrified, the girl and man could see the fish hook glitter under the work lights over the tank as it soared over to their direction. They both scrambled to the farthest side of the raft, desperate to avoid the hook's bite when it landed.

The raft rocked violently and threatened to tip over from the sudden shift in weight, but at the moment, neither cared.

Marcie's hands tried to find more purchase against the raft's rubber interior, which was now slick with water, and in her panic, she didn't feel the hook land lightly against her shin, which was exposed by her slouching knee-high sock.

With a cruel flick of the wrist, showing a deftness that belied the natural awkwardness of the beast, it whipped the rod back and reeled in the line.

As the line slid back along the raft, the hook twisted and its barb found the water-softened skin of Marcie's shin, scraping a red furrow across it.

The pain of the cut exploded through her, and her wail distracted Redding enough that neither saw the hook then claw into the other side of the raft and rip a terrible gash out of it.

Redding quickly yanked out a handkerchief from his suit jacket pocket and tied it around Marcie's thin leg, the white fabric turning a slowly spreading crimson.

"Are you alright, my dear?" Redding asked, worryingly. "Did it go into your leg?"

"No," she said through her teeth. "It just cut me."

"Unfortunately, that hook tore a hole in the raft," Redding reported. "We're sinking!"

Marcie gritted her teeth and saw through the throbbing pain to witness the Sea Beast shuffle off the platform and slowly climb back down from the side of the tank.

"Probably his idea," she growled.

"That's not the worst of it," the doctor added, glumly. "Because you're bleeding, when you enter the water, you'll attract the sharks to us."

Marcie grimly thought of that, as well. And then another thought hit her. The wound on her leg was tended by a man she was quick to suspect and slow to understand, in spite of his gruffness.

Now, they were both in the center of a watery death trap, made all the more deadly because her legs, which were now treading water over a sunk raft, was now ringing the dinner bell for the residents of the tank.

"I'm sorry I suspected you, Doctor Redding," Marcie morosely said, before kicking off and swimming towards the opposite end of the tank.

"What are you doing, girl? Get back here!" the doctor yelled from the distance, torn between safely swimming to the platform or joining Marcie.

"No sense in both of us getting eaten! You've got a chance! Get to the platform and call the police!" Marcie managed to call out from between breaths. "I'll lead them away!"

Her heart pounded as she forced herself to ignore her fear and the man's desperate protests. And part of that impetus that propelled her was the effort to not have the doctor's death on her conscience, even as her own was, at the moment, pending

Marcie got as far as the wall before fatigue overtook her and she had to slowly tread water again with her burning leg.

To keep her mind off of the impending shark attack, she remembered what she told Schrödinger about how dangerous not getting all the facts could be. Now, she was learning that lesson firsthand as the first of a pair of dorsal fins gently cut through the water in her general direction.

'Probably checking me out,' she thought, fearfully.

An assumption that was sadly proven correct when the dorsal fins submerged.

A nervous Marcie had just enough time to say, "Uh-oh," to herself before she suddenly felt an awesome force yank her by her loose sock with ridiculous ease into the warm depths of the tank.

Redding, managing to dog-paddle over to the edge of the low hung platform, turned his head in time to see the teen swiftly go under.

Terrified, he screamed her fictitious name, helpless to do anything except try to escape before the predators rounded on him.

His stomach was knotted and cold from fear as he tried to chin-up onto the edge of the platform. A chill soon danced across his body and he figured it was the air coming in contact with his soaked clothes.

But then, that chill grew deeper and more pronounced and his spine spasmed in panic when he suddenly felt something hit the side of his waist.

In horror, Redding clambered up to the platform in a fit of haphazard splashes, trying to get away from the shark that he assumed had found him.

Breathing hard and wheezing, it wasn't until he settled on the platform and scanned the surface of the water, that he discovered what all of the commotion was.

The surface of the water was choked white with ice floes, either already floating or ascending from the depths. No where could he see dorsal fins and he was dumbstruck as to why ice suddenly appeared in the tank.

Then, as if a miracle had manifested before his eyes, the doctor could see Marcie awkwardly breach the surface and slowly climb onto one of the flat ice floes. She then rested on her back in utter exhaustion.

"Margo!" Redding cried out. "Are you alright?"

Marcie wearily gave him a shaky thumbs-up. She waited for a few minutes before she finally, slowly, picked herself up and began carefully hopping from one floe to the other while giving Redding the benefit of an explanation.

"I'm fine," Marcie called out, weakly.

"Why is there ice all over the tank?" Redding asked.

"My Insta-Ice capsules," she told him after catching a breath on a closer floe. "I had to use them all up to get this trick to work. The water in the tank was warm. That told me that our guests like it that way, so I hoped that the ice would cool the water enough to confuse the sharks. Luckily, it worked."

She finally alighted on the last floe that was closest to the platform and was helped upon it by Redding's gratefully outstretched hand.

Now that they were safe from the animals, his professional side began to emerge. "Where are the sharks now?" asked the doctor. For Marcie and himself, self-defense was totally acceptable, but he didn't want them hurt if they could help it.

"Don't worry." Marcie consoled him. "They dove to the warmer water below. The ice should keep them honest until it melts. Oh, and my real name is really Marcie."

"Very well, Marcie. Now, let's get out of here," Redding said as they headed towards the ladder.

Once they made it to the floor below, Marcie stopped Redding with a gentle hand on his arm.

"Like I said earlier, I'm sorry for pulling you into this. If I wasn't so eager to solve this case by making you a suspect, you'd be home by now," she apologized again.

For the first time since seeing him, Marcie saw the doctor smile.

"No. I'd be finished by the Sea Beast. It's alright, though, as long as we learn from our mistakes," he told her, warmly, thankful that they both managed to cheat death that night.

Marcie was content to just stay in this moment of forgiveness and inner understanding, even if she and the doctor looked drowned rats, but a troubling thought intruded it.

"Oh, wow. I hope it didn't get ruined," she fretted.

"What?"

"This." She carefully reached into her drenched jacket pocket, took the folded piece of paper out and gingerly opened it up.

Although she could see faded words printed on its face, she still couldn't make them out, as she couldn't earlier in her lab, until Schrödinger spilled water on it and the word, 'Floor 1,' appeared.

Now that the whole thing was wet, she could actually make out more writing on its face. The words, 'Floor 1, Floor 2, Floor 3 and Vent-,' was written in descending order down the side of the diagram.

"Floors...Vent..." Then it hit her, even as it seemed such a strange thing for a monster to have lost in the cotton candy he tracked in the basement. "Of course! I wonder..."

Marcie turned to Redding. "C'mon, Doctor."

"Where are we going?" he asked, following her out of the tank room.

"We need to find a photo of Ocean Land and Schrödinger!"