“You guys are gonna love each other.” Miles grinned, warming to the event.

We met at Chance’s place, an off-campus “co-op,” which was basically a hippie dorm where you cooked your own food and didn’t have to shower.

Chance Worthington took a long drag off his joint and passed it to Miles. His eyes were bloodshot. His hair moved in wild curls. He tapped his middle finger nonstop on the table. He bit at a nail, then started tapping again.

Finally, he stopped tapping. He took another quick hit, passed it to Miles, and relaxed back into his chair.

“So, whad’ya have for me?”

“I’m sorry?” I said.

“You guys are gonna love each other,” Miles said again, examining the glowing tip of the joint. He laughed and started coughing. “What Chance means, I think, is start at the beginning.” Miles offered me the joint. I waved it off.

“Well, I got this invitation-”

“Skip to something interesting,” Chance interrupted.

“What?”

“I don’t want to hear any tea party crap. Give me something new.”

I looked at Miles. He nodded, then wiggled his eyebrows.

“Okay…” I said. I thought about my tour of Mr. Bones’s house. “How about the Capuchin Crypt?”

“Commissioned by Pope Urban the Eighth’s brother in 1631, creepy bones and so forth, blah, blah, blah. What else?”

This guy was getting under my skin.

“I saw a map to a place called Bimini.”

“Do you even know where Bimini is?”

I had a hint of a memory, something out of elementary school adventure books, but then it was gone.

“No,” I said.

Chance made a big show of sighing.

“In the Bahamas, supposedly.” He smiled. “But they didn’t find what they were looking for.”

“What were they looking for?”

“Ah, but you were supposed to tell me something new. I’m not your teacher.”

“Fine. What about King’s water?”

“What about it?”

“Well, you know, the Nazis were coming. They dissolved the Nobel Prizes…”

“That’s what you know about King’s water?”

“It’s not true?”

“Of course it’s true. The story’s on the Nobel Prize website, for crap’s sake. You’re not exactly through the looking glass here.”

I gave Miles a who is this guy look. Miles smiled and turned to Chance.

“The story does relate to passing through.”

“But the money’s on transmutation.”

“All right, c’mon guys,” I said, “you know I don’t speak Pot.”

Chance looked at me. He stopped tapping his finger. He sighed and shook his head.

“You raise an interesting topic. It’s just that King’s water has a long history. Much longer than World War Two.”

“Okay. I’m listening.”

“Well, aqua regia-King’s water, as you call it-was invented around ad 800 by a Persian alchemist named Jabir ibn Hayyan. The same man who discovered hydrochloric acid.”

Chance lit a cigarette and blew a sour cloud between us.

“What do you know about the alchemists?” he asked me, his face drifting in the smoke.

“Not much. They were sort of New Age scientists, but from the Middle Ages.”

“In a sense. They were the first chemists. They invented gunpowder. Metalwork. They made inks and dyes and alcohol. They were also philosophers, physicists, mystics, astrologers, you name it. This wasn’t exactly an era of specialization. You can trace alchemy back to ancient Egypt, Rome, China, Greece, India, Arabia. Their motto was Solve et Coagula: ‘Separate and Join Together.’”

“Okay. So that’s King’s water, right? Separate and join together? They did it.”

“Sadly, no. Hayyan saw King’s water as part of a much larger quest; in fact, the central quest of alchemy. The transmutation of metals.”

“Turning lead into gold.”

“Exactly. King’s water was like an ancient attempt at reverse engineering. If you could dissolve gold, maybe you could figure out how to build gold… The alchemists, including Hayyan, were searching for what they called the Philosopher’s Stone: a substance that would turn something worthless into something precious.”

“So this is all about money?”

“Ha! Never underestimate money. I can crack almost any story by asking: ‘Who profits from this?’ But, no, in this case I think there is something more.

“The alchemists survived a long time. Thousands of years. They survived the fall of Rome and Greece. They survived the Crusades. The Spanish Inquisition. Some people think it’s because they were clever about hiding their true intentions.”

“Which were?”

I leaned in. It was all hocus-pocus bullshit, but the guy could tell a story. Even Miles was quiet now, a half-smile on his face.

“The alchemists’ texts are dense. Some of them don’t even have words, just symbols. And nothing ever means just one thing. There are whole alchemy books dedicated to decoding alchemy books.

“Did they want to turn lead into gold? Sure. Who wouldn’t? But what if that was just a cover for something else?”

“Like…”

“See Paracelsus. Alchemical Catechism. ‘When the Philosophers speak of gold and silver, from which they extract their matter, are we to suppose that they refer to the vulgar gold and silver? By no means; vulgar silver and gold are dead, while those of the Philosophers are full of life.’”

“What does that mean?”

“Many people believe ‘lead and gold’ were metaphors for ‘vice and virtue.’ What if the Philosopher’s Stone wasn’t about material transmutation? What if it was about something immaterial, metaphysical even?”

“A substance that would make evil people good?”

“That’s one theory.”

“Why would they need to hide that? Who wouldn’t want everyone to be good?”

“Soulcraft, at that time, was the domain of powerful institutions. The Church. The King. To lose that kind of authority… But…” Chance used his cigarette to light another. He ground the butt out on the table. “Maybe you’re more right than you know. Maybe virtue and vice were just another layer of metaphor, in a quest for something even more sought after. What if the Philosopher’s Stone actually turned weak, vulnerable, sinful flesh into…”

The memory clicked. I knew what Bimini was.

“… into something that never dies,” I said. I smiled. “Bimini. Ships in the Bahamas…”

“Ponce de León.” Miles nodded.

“ ‘Peter Martyr saith that there is in Bimini a continual spring of running water of such marvellous virtue that the water thereof, being drunk, maketh old men young.’”

Chance recited it from memory, his eyes stoned, half-closed.

“‘Let us go where we can bathe in those enchanted waters and be young once more,’” Miles replied. “‘I need it, and you will need it ere long.’”

“Peter Martyr was secretary of the prothonotary under Pope Innocent the Eighth, archpriest of Ocana under Pope Adrian the Sixth,” Chance added. “Friend of Columbus and Ponce de León.”

I felt the disconnected pieces swirling, snapping into place.

“What about amaranth?” I asked. “She quoted Milton.”

“ ‘Immortal amarant, a flower which once, in paradise, fast by the tree of life, began to bloom; but soon for man’s offence, to heaven removed.’”

For man’s offense. Adam and Eve-they ate from the forbidden tree: virtue fell to vice, and man was cast from Paradise and became mortal.

“The ancient Greeks ground up amaranth petals to treat infections,” Miles said. “Across the world, the ancient Chinese did too.”

Immortality… to beat death…

The obituary!

Were things like this really possible?

I pulled it out and pointed to the picture. To the man who apparently knew the precise date he was going to die and didn’t seem terribly concerned about it. What if he didn’t plan on dying in two days? What if his “death”-the obituary-was just a cover story, because he had no intention of going anywhere, ever…

“What if…” I said. “What if the V and D found a way…”

“ ‘What we are now, you will be,’ said the skeleton.” Chance smirked.