Page 91 of Ashes of Gold
Niggas be a gold mine of skills, I swear.
He taps again, chipping away at the crack, and the tiniest hole appears, a ray of light barely visible there. We listen.
“No one’s there,” I say, grabbing a chunk of wall. It’s cold and brittle in my fingers, crumbling like cake as I toss it away. “Let’s get this hole bigger.”
It takes several minutes, but we pull apart the pieces of the crumbling wall enough to really see inside. It’s definitely a room. Bri was right about that.
“They sealed this one with a veil,” Bri says, noticing the same thing I am. “No one would ever know there was a room here because there’s no door. Smart.”
There are tables and storage containers everywhere. Wires hang from above, but from the hole, that’s about all I can make out.
“Here, let me. My HologrifX might…” Bri shoves a metal sphere about the size of a golf ball through the hole in the wall and brings her wrist to her nose. Orange light from her watch slices the darkness, flickering the room into view. A hologram 3D image of the room hovers above her wrist and she rotates our view by spinning a finger.
Glass vials line the tables along the dusty walls. Flames dance in a stone bowl in the room’s center, and around it hangs all sorts of metal equipment. Tongs and trays, syringes, wide glasses, aprons, and long tubes snaked in circles lie in piles all over the ground.
“This isn’t a library,” I say. “It’s a lab. Could Bati be in there? Does it show bodies?”
“I don’t know. This is my first time using this thing.”
“We can’t risk not knowing. I have to go in.”
“I’m going with you.”
“No, you stay here with Julius.”
“Rue, no. I understand I could get hurt. That’s part of it. It’s not your job to protect everyone, least of all me. And besides, it’s a lab. There could be useful stuff in there.”
“I’ll keep watch,” Julius says. “And I’ll birdcall if I hear or see anything.”
“Of course.” I roll my eyes.
“What?” he says. “That’s how they—”
“Do it in double-o seven, I know.”
Bri looks between us.
“Don’t even try to understand.” I pull myself through the hole, rock scraping my sides. I take Bri’s hand, and she gets through easy enough. The sphere she’d dropped through the hole snapsto her feet the minute her foot touches the floor.
“Whoa, how’d you get that thing to come back to you?”
“I modeled the performance coding after the heat-seeking fire arrows we ran into. The idea is that they seek out whatever material or form of energy I set it to.” She tosses the hologram ball in her hand. “So, with this, I just set it to seek out the rubber sole on my shoe, mixed it with some of my DNA. Spit, if you’re curious….”
“Oh my god,gross!”
“And voilà! This ball will snap like a magnet to any whiff of my DNA.”
“That’s nasty as hell. But foreal, Bri, your ability to take shit and make new shit never ceases to amaze me.” I offer her a fist bump and she pounds back. “Glad you riding with me, friend.”
“Ride or death.”
I don’t even correct her at this point.
“Jue, you good?”
“All clear out here. I’ll birdcall, remember?”
If the fire weren’t burning in the room’s center, we wouldn’t be able to see anything. Bri is already inspecting lab supplies and dropping things in her bag. She plucks leaves from a far wall, where it looks like someone planted a floor-to-ceiling garden.
