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“Wouldn’t that be ironic? No. They’re on an island in the Java Sea.”
“Let’s get real here. Would you take this formula and sample it, not knowing what it will do in a human?” Chanti asked.
“That is one of the pieces that is freaking me out. This is a tiny island nation that is extremely poor. I sat in my car and looked it up before I called you. Here’s my terror: What if Lionel and Amanda offered several—a bunch of people—a hundred, two hundred people, I don’t know, everyone in a village—money in exchange for taking one of these shots. And then, they watched what happened.”
“Oh shit. Do you think that’s possible? I mean a real, serious reality, Piper?”
“I think that the Harcourts have never experienced financial hardship. It’s a rare day that someone says no to them. Did they mean to harm people? I honestly don’t know whether or not they’d care. Someone else’s well-being is a price to be paid on their way to more billions. Isn’t that the narrative on the news every night while corporations poison our waters with forever chemicals?”
“How long does it take for the rejuvenation to happen?” Chanti asked.
Piper sat up to focus on her wall calendar. “If I was extrapolating my findings out to humans—it’s a guess—months. Three or four months.”
“How long have the Harcourts been gone?”
“That I don’t know. The last time I saw him was a year ago at my annual check-in. So, it’s possible they took some of this formula over to the island, tested it on all the people, saw a good result, and then put it in themselves. It’s also possible that I’m hatching a conspiracy theory and am losing my mind.” Piper thought she was going to vomit.
“That would be a terrible thing to do to those people, and it sounds like an equally terrible thing to do to themselves. But if it’s true, those are consequences that land specifically on the Harcourts’ heads, not yours.”
Piper pulled her trash bin over and put it between her knees. “It’s my formula.”
“You came up with a formula to specifically help people with this Runker-Bailey Syndrome.”
“My worry is the whole idea of the spa,” Piper whispered.
“I’m imagining this. The elites can go to the spa and have massages, yoga, and healthy foods—”
“With lots of beta carotene to make their skin bright and rosy,” Piper mumbled, leaning forward.
“And then they lie in the sun, get a mani-pedi, and all the things. And before they leave, they also get a shot and in three or four months, time falls away.”
“I have another conspiracy theory,” Piper panted into the phone.
“Might as well vomit that one out, too.”
Really, Chanti could be unnerving the way she picked things out of the ether. “What if someone knows about the formula, and they were trying to kidnap Amanda to get their hands on it?”
“Okay,” Chanti’s voice grew stern, “let’s be rational.”
“I would love that. Thank you.”
“Do the Harcourts have access to the formula?”
“The formulation is in their computer system. I make the formula in batches at the Alabaster lab, then take it, as needed, to the mouse lab.”
“There are three possible scenarios. One, Lionel and Amanda look exactly the way they should. Two, they look a lot younger than they should, but that could be traced back to going away so that they could get extensive plastic surgery. I’ve seen some that’s amazing, but recovering from it looks kind of horrible, and everyone knows what they did. So they needed to be away for an extended period of time where people weren’t seeing them heal.”
“That would be ideal,” Piper whispered, knowing in her gut that wasn’t it.
“And third, they took your formula and, being the kind of people they are, they didn’t have a problem doing human testing on those people.”
“The cancer,” Piper whispered.
“I know.”
“The babies.”
“I know.”
