Lily looked at Shay. “It wasn’t before?”
“Nope. I just had the vault and stuff sitting inside it on shelves.”
Lily furrowed her brow. “Why did you automate it then?”
Shay shrugged a single shoulder. “Here’s a little test. Why do you think I might have automated it?”
“I’m guessing it’s not just because you’re lazy.”
The tomb raider snorted. “Nope.”
The Gray Elf teen stepped toward the plexiglass and tapped it with her index finger. “My father told me that a lot of people don’t get that magical artifacts aren’t like technology. A lot of them will respond to you, and maybe respond badly if you’re using them for something you shouldn’t be.”
“Yeah, Tubal-Cain has gone on about that several times to me. After about the fiftieth time he told me that, I bought a clue and decided that I don’t know if some asshole artifact is judging me, so the less I’m handling things directly, the better. Don’t want to get turned into a bird or something one day.” Shay nodded toward the artifact vault. “So I had this system created. Better safe than melted or winged.” She marched over to the keyboard. “By the way, just to make it clear, you can’t tell anyone about this place. Peyton knows something like it exists, but he has no idea where. I’d strongly prefer he not know.”
Lily blinked a few times and stepped toward the plexiglass. “And I thought I had trust issues. You already threatened to kill me over Warehouse Two’s location, so…what, you’ll kill me two and half times as much if I rat out this place’s location?”
“Something like that.” The tomb raider nodded. “This is a whole different level of secret. This is the kind of stuff that very dangerous people would kill everyone in your tunnels over, so it’s as much for your own safety as mine.” She tapped in some commands on the keyboard. An automated arm descended from the ceiling and whizzed into the dark distance. About thirty seconds later, it reappeared with a long, curved sword in a scabbard—Shay’s enchanted Masamune tachi.
Lily nodded. “So this is where you’ve been keeping it instead of Warehouse Three.”
“Yep. Had to get a new scabbard, though, because my boyfriend broke my old one on a little field trip to Oriceran. Fortunately, it wasn’t magic, so I was only seriously pissed instead of completely pissed. It was damned nice, though. I still yelled at him about it.”
“Well, when you date the Scourge of Harriken you have to expect that kind of thing.” The teen shrugged.
“Yeah, true enough.” Shay smirked and entered a few more commands. A window opened in the bottom of the plexiglass, and she reached into it and grabbed the scabbard. She handed it to Lily.
“I don’t keep my adamantine knives or my lockpick at Warehouse Five, but most other shit I do.” More commands followed. “Now if we’re lucky, and the egg is the size we expect it to be, I’ve got a solution that should involve no melting.”
Again, the arm whirred into the darkness.
Lily peered into the glass. “An artifact solution to a dangerous artifact? Isn’t that doubling-down on risk?”
“Nope. It’s more about managing risk.”
The arm brought back what appeared to be a simple wooden lidded box. No writing or decoration adorned it. You might find it anywhere in the world.
An opening reappeared in the plexiglass, and Shay grabbed the box. “I got this on a quick but nasty tomb raid for a client who unfortunately kicked the bucket before he could pay me. I took this as my payment.”
“What’s it do?”
“It’s supposed to be able to protect whatever is held inside of it. I’m just hoping the egg will fit.”
Lily eyed the box. “Supposed to? You’ve never tested it?”
Shay shrugged and handed the girl the box. “I did some low-level tests. Put an artifact in there and shot it. It didn’t dent, but it’s not like I’ve had a chance to test it against flesh-melting magic. That doesn’t come up all that often even in my line of work.”
She winked. “If you get anything out of my training, you should learn that most of these things we find out as we go. That’s just kind of what it means to be a tomb raider.”
Chapter Five
Static crackled in Shay’s earpiece.
Lily frowned and tapped at hers. “Can you hear Peyton?”
Shay shook her head. “Nope.” She nodded at the phone built into the SUV’s console. “I haven’t even been able to get a satellite signal for the last hour.” She pulled out her earpiece. “Might as well just turn it off for now. It’s useless.”
Everything from their flight to the trip to their target location had gone well, so Shay wasn’t surprised that something had finally gone wrong. It didn’t matter. She had all the data she needed to complete the tomb raid already downloaded to her phone. She’d half-expected something like this to happen.
Lily glanced at Shay. “Is that why you kept sticking your arm out the window? To check your satellite phone reception?”
“Yep. Point is, we have line-of-sight to the sky from this road. If I can’t get a signal, that means general interference and not just some weird magnetic field or something.”
Lily furrowed her brow. “Jammer?”
Shay shook her head. “Don’t think so, but there isn’t a magical storm or anything, so it’s natural, or magically natural. You sense anything? See anything?”
The girl shrugged. “Nothing in particular, and the only thing I see in our future is more driving.”
Shay snickered. “Don’t have to be clairvoyant to guess that.” She shrugged. “But it doesn’t matter. The interference will clear up once we get out of the mountains, and it’s not like Peyton can hack anything up here to help us. Drones are often not all that great in small caves. If anything, this might be a good thing.”
Lily laughed. “How is a bunch of
