Dr. G said, “His God is an umbrella.”

“Better than a wet blanket,” I said aloud.

She walked away from me, flexing her wings. “Here’s the guy,” she said.

A figure had stepped out of the back, where the storeroom used to be. My first impression was of an Olympic mid-weight wrestler: bullet head, powerful arms that wouldn’t hang straight, and a posture that suggested a readiness to shoot the legs. He wore a T-shirt with an unreadable logo, old jeans, brown-and-orange CAT work boots. His skin tone fell in the Mediterranean end of the spectrum.

“Luke. Good to see you,” he said. His accent was Mexican. “And your friends.” He held out his hand to me, and I noticed a black tattoo lurking under the lip of his sleeve. “I’m Rudy.” I shook hands. Hootan didn’t lift his hand, but conspicuously put it into the front pouch of his sweatshirt.

Rudy smiled curiously. If he was nervous, I couldn’t see it.

I said, “Luke’s been telling us about your church, how much it changed his life. We also hunger and thirst after righteousness.” I didn’t bother to sound sincere.

He looked at Hootan, then back to me. A tilt of the head that said he didn’t know what was going on but was willing to play along. I saw another tattoo on his neck: the number “13” in Gothic script. He said, “You must have a lot of questions.”

Oh did I. What was going on in the pastor’s head right now? Was he taking his own juice, or only passing it on? It was impossible to tell. He seemed as laid back as a Buddhist monk, but that could have been an act, or his natural chemistry. Behind him, Dr. G drifted along the perimeter of the room, taking in the mini-shrines. I got an impression of Aztec gods, clouds of cotton swabs, black-and-white photo collages. It was an Anti-Science Fair.

Pastor Rudy said, “Do you come from a Christian background, or…” He nodded to Hootan. “Muslim, maybe?”

Hootan said, “We’re here for the drug you gave Luke.” Across the room, Dr. G laughed. So much for playing along. Perhaps Hootan was incapable of ironic banter.

Pastor Rudy frowned in confusion, or at least an impersonation of it. “I’m not sure what he told you, but—”

“I told them, there’s no drug.” Luke said.

Dr. Gloria had reached the doorway at the back of the room. She glanced in, then nodded to me.

“You mind if I look around?” I asked.

Pastor Rudy glanced at Hootan. The kid kept his hand in his front pocket, calling attention to a Bulge of Significance. “I can give you a tour,” the pastor said.

“Nah, that’s okay,” I said. “Why don’t you just take a seat out here? That okay with you, Hootan?”

I didn’t wait for an answer and walked toward the back doorway that Rudy had stepped out from. Dr. Gloria waited there, wings half-unfurled. The doorway opened to a large space that used to be the store’s warehouse. Heavy steel shelving units sat empty except for a few cardboard boxes, a selection of power tools, and building materials: plywood, paint cans, stacks of drywall. Two big doors at the back of the space looked like they led to a loading dock. There were two other smaller doors along a side wall.

“Where do you want to start searching?” Dr. G asked.

“We could split up,” I said.

“Very funny.” She flipped an imaginary gold coin and caught it in her palm. “Heads, that’s the warehouse.”

“I’m checking the side rooms,” I said.

Dr. G sighed. “You don’t have to keep proving you have free will.”

One of the small doors opened to an office. The room was empty except for a metal desk and filing cabinet, a futon covered by a bedsheet, a couple folding chairs like those in the front room. Bars guarded the single window. No other exits.

On the walls hung three brightly colored posters under Plexiglas. They looked like extreme close-ups of plants, or machinery: gleaming tubes that could have been roots; wet silvery blobs like mercurial seed pods; broad swathes of orange and red and yellow that suggested the skin of tropical flowers. Where was the “Footprints in the Sand” poster? Hell, even a crucifix?

The only liturgical supplies were crowded together on top of the filing cabinet: a pair of wooden offering plates; a box of white communion wafers; a two-liter bottle of chianti, half gone; and a sleeve of plastic shot cups. I opened the wafer box, crushed one of the squares, and sniffed. Nothing. I popped another of the wafers into my mouth.

“You don’t know what’s in that,” Dr. G said.

“The body of Christ,” I said. “As dry as ever.” I didn’t detect a psychotropic hit. I unscrewed the wine bottle and inhaled. It smelled like … cheap wine. I thought about taking a swig, but I knew where that would lead, and did I really want to end my sobriety (and it would end, it always ended) on Costco Kool-Aid?

On the desk lay a ten-inch tablet and a separate keyboard. I swiped the tablet’s screen, and it opened to a music player, the cursor paused a couple minutes into something called “Gary Gygax Attax.”

“Smell that?” Dr. G asked.

I looked up. Caught a faint tang of ammonia, and then it was gone. “Someone’s been printing,” I said.

I began opening desk drawers. One was locked, but it was too narrow to hold what I was looking for. I went through each drawer of the filing cabinet, looking for stacks of rice paper, or at least printing supplies. I found nothing but ordinary paper, file folders, tangled computer cables.

Hootan yelled from the front room, “What’s taking so long?”

“Shut up,” I yelled back.

I walked out of the office. Caught another whiff of amines. I started for the warehouse, then stopped, turned toward the other small door. It was unlocked. I pushed it open and flipped on the light, expecting a scattering of cockroaches. It was a bathroom, newly renovated and sparkling clean: white tile, new toilet, a shower stall guarded by a white rubber curtain. I pulled back the curtain.

“Here we go,” Dr. G said, excited.

A new-looking chemjet printer sat on a wire crate positioned in the center of the shower stall. The printer’s exhaust fan and runoff port had been covered by an elegant filter and valve system. Plastic tubes snaked down into the shower drain. In the corner of the stall was an open FedEx box agleam with foil c-packs. Many of them were labeled with the hexagonal sperm symbol of phenethylamine, the yeast of artisanal drug manufacturing.

The chemjet wasn’t a model I recognized. Most of these machines were made in China or Malaysia and stamped with generic-sounding names like “Print Pro,” but this one had no markings that I could see. And those valves were a cut above the usual hobbyist price point.

The printer wasn’t turned on, so I thought it safe to pop the lid. It was like opening the hood of a Chrysler K-car and discovering a Ferrari engine. No, an art project. I recognized many of the components—copper tubes, mini-ovens (each costing thousands of dollars apiece), ceramic refrigeration coils, glass reaction chambers—but others were a mystery to me. Tubes and wires crossed and recrossed in a web that reminded me of neurons, or those graphs showing every possible relation in a social network.

This was like no chemjet I’d ever seen. A normal printer was designed to cook multiple recipes within a certain range, like a home bread maker. No reaction chamber connected directly to another, because you might have to plug in other steps—for drying, mixing, or distilling—to make whatever drug you programmed.

But this engine was so convoluted, so complicated, I knew I didn’t have the skills to take it apart and put it back together to see how it worked. The best I could hope for was a kind of brain scan: watch it in action and try to figure out what was happening.

“Why does this look familiar?” Dr. G asked.

“No idea,” I said. “But this thing makes Numinous, I’m sure of it. We have to take it with us.”