barely had the presence of mind to curl into a ball with her hands protecting her head as further booms rocked the tunnel.
Nearby, rock shattered and cracked like gunfire. Tikaya cringed, expecting the ceiling to collapse at any second. Finally, the explosions ended, but rubble continued to pelt the floor. She kept waiting for rocks to hit her, but her tunnel seemed secure. Secure, but dark. Lifting her head to peer about was worthless since blackness pressed in from all sides. Worse, dust clogged the air and invaded her throat. She coughed and wheezed as fine particles smothered her tongue.
Distant, muffled yells made it to her ears, but she could not pick out words. She shifted to get to her feet. Her fingers bumped a hard edge. She jerked back. The cube. If ever there was a mess, surely an earthquake-or whatever that had been-qualified. She held her breath, expecting the cleaning device to flare to life, for the orifice to glow red, the beam to lance out.
But the cube remained inert.
Whatever the reason, she thanked her luck and hunted for the bow. She found it wedged under a pile of rubble. Rubble that blocked the mouth of the tunnel from floor to ceiling. Cave-in.
She hoped there was another way back to the cavern. And that she could find it in the dark.
Tikaya stood and started to brush herself off, but a new concern made her freeze. How far did the cave-in extend? What if it covered part, or all, of the cavern? And the tunnels beyond? Her heart lurched. What if Rias or Parkonis had been caught? She still didn’t know if Rias had been shot. Damn, damn.
She clawed at the rubble, trying to dig a hole. She had to get back in and check.
A minute later, her fingers were bleeding and she had made no progress. Breath rasping in her ears, she backed away. She would not get in that way. She needed to find another way around. She needed to-
No. Tikaya wiped sweat from her face and forced herself to calm down, to think. Rias would want her to continue with the mission, not tear off, hunting for him. For all she knew, he might have set this all up. She remembered the clinking. Had the marines been crawling around in passages beneath the floor, placing blasting sticks?
She turned around and felt her way along the wall, trying not to feel guilty for walking away from Parkonis and Rias. She had to ensure those weapons were destroyed, and she could not assume the cave-in had done that. In fact, she would be shocked if it had.
The darkness made the trek feel longer, but she doubted she had walked far before she came to a four-way intersection labeled with glowing runes. Three possible directions, three labs. Biology, alchemy, and… She touched the last one, a new combination of symbols. Mechanical? That sounded promising, but she ought to let Rias know which way she had gone. She dropped her hand and snorted because her bloody fingers had already smeared a sign on the runes.
She padded down the hall. A door whispered open, and she stepped onto a landing. She expected darkness inside, but low blue lighting pulsed from the walls. Some kind of backup illumination, perhaps.
This lab was larger than others she had visited and had an upper level as well as a lower. She chose the upper, less out of any notion of what she might need, but because it would not be immediately visible to someone walking in.
Upstairs, blurry cabinets lined the walls and high stations dominated the center. She had to wander close for the edges to sharpen. They reminded her more of woodworking benches than alchemy stations. Intricate black tools she could not identify were mounted to the table tops and hung from the ceilings on articulating arms. Rias would probably be fascinated by them.
Her gut twisted with concern at the thought of him, but she forced herself to focus on the one thing she could accomplish here. She dug her notes, the sphere, and a pencil out of her pocket.
Tikaya put more obstacles between herself and the landing before stopping at a countertop that was not too high for her purposes. She thumbed the sphere on and identified the rest of the numbers from the door pad. More primes, but not the first sixteen as she had guessed. The sequence skipped a few: three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen, seventeen, nineteen, twenty-three, twenty-nine, thirty-one, thirty-seven, forty-one, forty-three, sixty-one, sixty-seven, and seventy-three.
“ All right, Rias,” she muttered. “Where are you? I’ve translated them and done my half.” As soon as the words came out, she snorted at herself. Yes, they made a good team, but she had done this sort of thing before she met him.
There had to be some significance in the missing prime numbers. Maybe these were the first sixteen that could be turned into a combination that allowed one particular thing. She drew a bunch of four by four boxes, mimicking the layout on the door pad, and scribbled the numbers in. Four rows, four columns, sixteen numbers. She added and multiplied. She looked for patterns.
The door hissed open.
Rias? Tikaya lifted her head and almost called out, but could not see the landing and caught herself before she could give away her position. She waited for the sound of footfalls, thinking she might be able to identify his tread, but there was no sound at all.
The door hissed shut.
Quietly, oh so quietly, Tikaya picked up her work. It was possible someone had looked in, not seen anything interesting, and left, but she doubted it. That cursed assassin was the only one who walked without making a sound, and she had no idea what his intentions might be for her, especially now that she had, from the Turgonian viewpoint, escaped with the enemy. And if Rias had run off, too, Sicarius would know he had no intention of accepting the emperor’s offer.
Tikaya twisted the symbols to open a couple of cabinets beneath a nearby workstation. One was empty enough she thought she could fit inside.
She stuffed the cube in one cabinet and knelt before the larger one. Careful not to make a sound, she slid boxes and tools out of the way. She could barely breathe, but she fit.
She pulled the door most of the way shut. Since the cabinets had to be opened with a turn of the symbols, she assumed she could not get out if she locked herself in. Terrifying thought that. No one would ever find her, and the cabinet would be her tomb. The assassin might spot the door slightly ajar, but she had to risk it.
Silence reigned in the lab. Tikaya could hear her heart beating in her ears, her shallow breathing. The awkward position cramped her diaphragm. Minutes dragged past.
She closed her eyes and rearranged digits in her head. The four-by-four box reminded her of a Skiltar Square, those puzzles where the goal was to arrange the numbers so that every column, row, and diagonal added up to the same sum. It seemed unlikely an alien race would have the same math games, but she rearranged and totaled the digits in her head anyway, seeing if she could find a combination that worked from all sides. It surprised her when she found an arrangement where each option added up to one hundred twenty. Could that be the way into the weapons cache?
Her fingers tingled with excitement. Or maybe numbness from sitting scrunched up in a cabinet. Her tailbone ached. She longed to crawl out and check her math with pencil and paper. Maybe Sicarius had left, or had never been there to start with.
Tikaya lifted her hand to the door, about to push it open. Then someone glided past the crack.
Black clothing, blond hair.
She held her breath and closed her eyes, as if the assassin might feel her stare through the crack. He had sensed the clairvoyant watching him, after all.
A minute later, the door hissed again, and she spilled out of the cabinet. Sitting on the floor beneath the pulsing blue light, she checked her math with pencil and paper. Every row, every column, and even the diagonals added up to one hundred and twenty. Maybe it meant nothing. Or maybe it was the solution to the puzzle.
She hopped to her feet, longing to go check it, but thanks to the cave-in she was not sure how to get back to the cavern.
The door hissed again. Tikaya cursed to herself. Now what?
Footsteps sounded on the landing. She reached for the cabinet door, ready to hide again.
“ Tikaya?” Rias.
Relief swarmed her. “Up here!”
She skirted the workstations and almost crashed into him at the top of the stairs. He wore his rucksack and carried a rifle, but he managed to envelop her in a fierce hug. She clamped onto him just as fiercely, burying her
