Neil moved through a narrow service corridor, through the outer edge of what appeared to be a disused administrative wing, and down a short drop into a lower passage where the stone walls were older and the air carried the specific quality of somewhere that did not get much use.

Cynthia was waiting in a small empty room off the main passage, standing near the far wall with her arms folded, her expression the particular kind of calm that meant she had been thinking carefully and had arrived somewhere useful.

She looked up when he came through the wall and her expression shifted into something slightly warmer.

"You took longer than I expected." She said quietly.

"I didn’t want to look like I was leaving in a hurry." Neil replied, letting Escape drop now that they were alone.

"Fair enough." She said, then turned and gestured at the wall behind her. "Come and look at this."

He moved beside her and she pulled a small device from her coat, projecting a faint schematic of the section of the settlement they were currently inside. She pointed at a marked room two levels down and across a central junction.

"The treasure is in there." She said. "It is called the Eye of the Future, though some records name it the Fruit of the Future.

It looks like a golden apple with an iris pattern across the surface, and it has been sitting in that room for at least three years according to the acquisition records I found." She paused.

"It is not the only thing in that room. There are other valuables stored there, which is actually why the security on the Eye itself is not dedicated. It shares the room’s protection with everything else."

"What is the security?" Neil asked.

"Three guards in the outer passage, two more at the door itself, and the room has layered seals, four of them from what I can read, each needing a different approach to dismantle." She said. "The seals are the real problem. The guards are manageable but fighting them means noise, and noise in this section will bring people from the event hall quickly."

Neil looked at the schematic. "So we can’t go through them directly."

"No." Cynthia agreed. Then she reached back into her coat and produced a small flat object, round and dull grey, that sat in her palm without doing anything dramatic. "Which is why I brought this."

Neil looked at it. "A bomb."

"A small one." She said. "Set it far enough away from the treasury room, something structural but not critical, it creates noise and movement in the opposite direction and gives us a window while the guards respond." She looked at him. "The window will not be long."

"How long?"

"Enough, if we move immediately." She said, with the quiet confidence of someone who had done the math on this already.

"I will set it on the east junction, three rooms over. When it goes off, most of the movement in this section will pull toward it. We go in through the west approach, I handle the seals, you watch the passage."

Neil was quiet for a moment, considering the layout on the schematic.

"Alright." He said.

Cynthia placed the device carefully against the base of the east junction wall, set the timer with two precise touches, and they moved back to the west passage without rushing. She positioned them in the small room again, off the main corridor, in the shadow beyond the door.

They waited.

The silence in the passage had the particular quality of somewhere that was about to stop being silent.

Neil stood beside her in the dark, close enough that he could feel the faint warmth from her without either of them having moved deliberately to create that distance. Neither of them commented on it.

’Thirty seconds.’ He estimated internally.

Cynthia’s hand was resting near the device in her second coat pocket, the one that held the seal-breaking tools. Her breathing was steady.

BOOM

Not enormous, contained and directional, but loud enough in the quiet of this section that it hit like a physical thing. The wall to the east shuddered slightly and dust came off the ceiling of the passage outside their room.

Then the sound of movement, rapid and disorganised, boots on stone going the wrong direction, voices overlapping without coordinating, exactly what a group of guards did in the first twenty seconds of an unexpected explosion when no one had told them what the protocol was.

Cynthia was already moving.

Neil followed her out of the room and down the west passage at a pace that was fast but controlled, not running, running looked like someone who had done something, this looked like two people moving with purpose through a space they were supposed to be in.

Through two corridor bends and then down a short stair that the schematic had shown and the current guards clearly didn’t use as a regular route.

The door to the treasury room came into view.

One guard remained at it, the other had gone toward the explosion, which meant the one left was alone and uncertain, his head turned in the direction of the noise, hand on his weapon but not drawn, the posture of someone waiting for instructions that weren’t coming.

Cynthia touched Neil’s arm once, lightly.

He understood. She moved past the guard’s sightline through a shadow approach that made use of the column beside the door, and Neil watched the passage behind them while she worked.

The guard turned further toward the explosion sound.

There was a soft click.

Then another.

Then silence, and Cynthia’s hand appeared from the shadow and gestured once.

Neil moved to the door. Four seals, she had said, and he could see them now, layered over each other like translucent pages, each one carrying a different energy signature.

Cynthia was already working on the outermost one, her fingers moving with precise and unhurried confidence, pressing specific points in a sequence that meant nothing to Neil but clearly meant a great deal to the seal.

The first one dissolved.

She moved to the second without pausing.

Neil watched the passage. The sounds from the explosion site were starting to reorganise, the initial chaos settling into something more structured as whoever was in charge started directing people. They had maybe two or three minutes before the guards returned to their posts, possibly less if someone was thorough about checking the perimeter.

The second seal dissolved.

The third was more complex. Cynthia stopped once, moved her fingers back, pressed a different sequence, and it opened. She exhaled very quietly.

The fourth took the longest. Neil did not watch her work on it because he was watching the passage, but he could feel the concentration coming off her in the way a room feels different when something precise is happening inside it.

Then the door opened.

They were inside in seconds, the door pulled shut behind them without a sound.

The room was not enormous but it held a great deal in a small space, shelves along two walls carrying sealed containers, locked boxes, and items wrapped in preservation cloth, the accumulated valuables of someone with the resources to acquire them and the discretion to store them away from obvious sight.

Cynthia moved directly to the far shelf without hesitation, and Neil understood that she had already known exactly where it would be, had done this part of the work before tonight.

She lifted a sealed container from the third shelf, pressed the release on its sides, and opened it.

The Eye of the Future sat in a fitted hollow of dark cloth.

It was golden, genuinely golden, not gold-coloured, with the particular depth of something that carried energy inside its surface.

Across it, unmistakably, was the pattern of an iris, the lines spreading from a darker center point in a way that caught the faint light of the room and made it look for a brief moment like it was looking back.

Neil looked at it.

’Huh.’ He thought, which was the full extent of his internal reaction.

Cynthia took it carefully with both hands, examined it for three seconds, and placed it into the interior pocket of her coat with the ease of someone completing a task they had been thinking about for a long time.

"Done." She said quietly.

"Good." Neil replied. "Now let’s leave."

She sealed the container and replaced it on the shelf in exactly the position it had occupied, the empty shell sitting in the same hollow. Without the item inside it was indistinguishable from a sealed container that still held its contents. Anyone checking casually would see nothing changed.

Neil opened the door by a centimetre and looked through the gap.

The guard was back at his post.

And there were two more with him now who had not been there before.

Neil closed the door again, soundlessly.

Cynthia raised an eyebrow.

"Three at the door." He said, just above a breath.

She was quiet for a moment, then she looked around the room. There was no secondary exit, nothing in the walls that suggested a maintenance passage, no window because they were below ground level. The only way out was the door they had come in through.

"The east passage?" she asked.

"More guards by now. They will have secured it after the explosion." Neil said.

She pressed her lips together slightly. Not worried exactly, thinking.

"We wait." She said finally.

"They will rotate eventually, the additional two are here because of the explosion, not because they know anything has happened here. Once things settle they will redistribute."

❖❖❖

Thanks for reading...