Page 60 of Asher

It only takes a minute, and then Asher sighs. “Dammit. This proves my theory wrong.”

I frown. “How so? It’s still a door.”

“But the hinges are on the other side,” he points out. “Nobody puts hinges on the outside and then locks the door. It’s stupid.”

“Unless you’re trying to keep something inside,” guy-I-don’t-know points out, and as one, we turn to look at the crates.

So of course, that’s the moment Micah teleports back in, scaring the crap out of us all. Zac yells, and someone (maybe me) throws their phone at him. But I’m not great at throwing, so it just hits the cave floor between us.

“What the fuck?” Micah demands, scowling. I’m too busy trying to get my heart rate back to normal to care about how scary he looks.

“You better not have cracked the screen,” I snap, flouncing over to pick it up.

“Me? You’re the one who threw it. Why would you do that? I thought we were friends.”

As I pick up my phone, dust it off, and check it for damage—none. That case was worth every penny—Zac explains what’s happened since he left.

“So those crates might contain something smart enough to know how to take a massive door off its hinges?” Micah asks. “That have lived in boxes without food or water for probably more than fifty years?”

“Well, when you put it like that…” Asher concedes. “Did you find out what the symbol means?”

He shakes his head. “Similar stuff came up, but it was all for fiction books and some movies. And nothing exactly the same.”

I take a deep breath. “I’m going up.”

“Maybe—” Asher starts, but I shake my head.

“Nope. Let’s do this.” This time, I’m the one who leads the way to the ladder. I take Zac’s phone, start recording, and climb. Then I immediately climb back down. “Did we bring like a crowbar or something?”

“I’ll get it,” guy-I-don’t-know says, and I take advantage of his brief absence to lean over and whisper to Asher.

“What’s his name?”

My husband blinks at me, then says, “Lon.”

Lon returns with the crowbar. “Here you go.”

I smile at him. “Thanks, Lon.” Asher makes a choked sound as I turn back to the ladder.

This time, when I reach the top, I’m ready. I balance the phone on the second rung from the top, wedging it against the side rail so it stays upright and the camera can mostly see what I’m doing. Then I test a few places around the edge of the lid, find a likely spot, and put the crowbar to work.

The lid comes off a lot more easily than I expected. I definitely needed the crowbar—especially since the ladder doesn’t allow me a lot of leverage—but I didn’t need to strain at all. It pops right up, and I grab it, adjust my grip, and push, sliding it back to rest on the crate behind. With the crowbar gripped firmly in hand, I peer into the crate.

CHAPTERTWENTY-SIX

Asher

Waiting anxiously,I put my hands on the ladder. If Garrett gives even the slightest indication that things aren’t okay, I’m ready to shove it out of the way and catch him.

“What’s in it?” Micah calls impatiently.

“Metal bits,” Garrett says, his voice puzzled. “Like the ones on the wall. Do you think they were planning to expand it?”

“I thought we’d decided it was a door?” Lon asks. “How do you expand a door in a cave?”

By blowing up the mountain, I think, and turn an alarmed look on Zac. He must be thinking the same thing as me, because he shakes his head. “The reader is calibrated for explosives. There aren’t any in this cave.”

“Come down,” I call up to Garrett. Zac might have confidence in his reader thingy, but I’ve invested in enough new tech to know that things are being invented all the time. Who’s to say that the explosives in these crates aren’t some kind of super-advanced product his gadget wouldn’t recognize?

---