Lindsay Buroker - Encrypted

Rias’s grip tightened. “Cursed ancestors, don’t say that.”

“ It’s the truth, though I’m going to be terribly disappointed if the preeminent military strategist of the era can’t outsmart a teenage assassin in order to avoid that fate.”

Whatever Rias’s retort was going to be, it was lost when the door hissed open.

Before Tikaya could do more than think of hiding, Sicarius strode in. His gaze swiveled upward to lock on them. The pulsing blue light painted his face in eerie shadows. Blood stained his short blond hair, spattered the side of his face, and painted his hands. As those dark hard eyes raked her, she had an unsettling hunch none of it was his. Two pistols were jammed into his belt, and he carried a dagger. A drop of blood fell from the blade and splashed on the landing.

“ Sicarius, good,” Rias said.

Good? The assassin looked like he was about to kill both of them. Tikaya stifled the incredulous expression that wanted to waltz across her face.

“ Do you have the door symbols from the journal?” Rias asked.

“ You assured Captain Bocrest you were placing the blasting sticks to provide a distraction, but the tunnels came down in such a way that he believed the weapons cavern had been buried and you with it.” Sicarius spoke in such an emotionless monotone it was almost possible to miss the accusation in those words. “I informed the captain that it was unlikely you would miscalculate so badly. The marines are searching the tunnels for you and her.” His cool eyes flicked Tikaya’s way.

She groaned inwardly. The plan would have worked if the emperor’s perceptive henchman wasn’t here. She glanced at Rias, almost expecting him to dive behind the railing and rip his pistol free for a shot, but he did not.

“ Demolitions are dangerous and sometimes unpredictable,” Rias said. “We can, of course, rejoin the others now, though why not get through the locked door and finish the mission while the relic raiders are too scattered to guard their cache? Do you have the symbols?”

“ Yes,” Sicarius said, no sign on his face of whether he believed Rias’s lies. “I already tried them.”

“ How?” Tikaya asked.

No doubt, he was agile enough to scale the side of that butte, but not with those invisible beams waiting to slice off limbs.

“ Bow and arrow,” Sicarius said.

Rias lifted an eyebrow toward Tikaya. He probably had not had as good a look at the entryway as she had. She nodded thoughtfully. If Gali had used telekinesis to nudge the symbols around, she supposed something thrown-or shot-against them could do the same job.

“ You lined them up?” Tikaya had assumed the numbers she copied were a different set than the ones that had appeared the day Lancecrest got in.

“ As close as I could. Not all the symbols matched those in the journal.”

“ Maybe you misread them,” Rias said.

Those dark eyes turned a shade cooler. “I did not.”

“ I’ve been told the symbols change periodically,” Tikaya said. “It was probably designed so people who knew the secret to the puzzle could always get in, providing they had the math skills, whereas others would have, well, the trouble Lancecrest’s team has had.”

“ You know the secret?” Sicarius glided up the stairs, eyes locked on her.

Rias dropped to the step in front of her, blocking the assassin’s advance. Sicarius halted.

“ I’m close,” Tikaya said. Or not even remotely close. It was one of the two. “It would help to see the symbols you have that worked before, even if they don’t now.”

For a long moment, Sicarius stared past Rias’s shoulder at her. Finally, he wiped the dagger, sheathed it with the myriad others he carried, and handed her the torn scrap of paper, neatly folded.

“ Thank you.” Half the numbers were the same. She would have to check the sphere to translate the others. “I have some ideas about how to get through the web.” Maybe pretending to include Sicarius in their plans would make him more likely to believe they shared the same goal. She put a hand on Rias’s shoulder. “Can you make something that causes smoke? A lot of smoke?”

“ With the right ingredients, yes.” Rias snapped his fingers. “Sicarius, can you get us some bat guano from the cavern?”

Tikaya almost choked. Bat guano?

Sicarius’s eyes narrowed. “There is no potassium nitrate in these labs?”

Of course. Potassium nitrate-salt peter-was harvested in bat guano-rich caves, and it was one of the core ingredients in black powder. The kid was bright. They would have to be very careful-and probably lucky-to trick him into helping.

“ I haven’t seen any,” Tikaya said. Which was true. With her spectacles missing she had not bothered examining the lab closely.

“ I’ll prepare the vats and put together the rest of the ingredients to make some smoke bombs,” Rias said. “And Tikaya will work on the entry code for us. We can finish your mission before Bocrest even misses you.”

“ Bat guano,” Sicarius said. “Very well.”

As soon as the door shut behind him, Tikaya and Rias grabbed each other’s arms and started to talk at the same time.

“ You first,” Rias said.

“ First, I think it’ll be a lot easier to find potassium nitrate in one of these labs than making it from scratch, but I assume you’re just trying to keep him busy.”

Rias nodded. “Yes.”

“ Second, can you look at this and tell me what you think? These are the translated numbers from the door pad.” She fished out the page with her solution for the puzzle, wincing as she handed it to him. It had seemed a logical guess during her in-cabinet mulling, but now that she had to share the hypothesis with someone else, she feared it a foolish one.

“ A Skiltar Square?” Rias asked. “It looks like you solved it. In Turgonia, you can get books full of them to entertain your precocious children.”

He smirked, and she wondered how many his parents had foisted on him. Her amusement at the idea faded quickly.

“ This can’t be right then,” she said. “Too simple for these people. And surely they wouldn’t have had similar puzzles to what we have.”

“ Why not? In your studies, haven’t you found that the fundamental properties of numbers are the same in every language, amongst every people? Mathematics surely transcends humanity, existing whether we do or not, so it doesn’t seem odd to me that another species would play the same sorts of games with numbers. And why wouldn’t this entrance code be simple? Do you think someone carrying a toxic weapon up a ramp would have wanted to stand outside the door for three hours making calculations? What if he dropped one of those poison-filled vials and it broke at his feet? Big oops, eh?”

Tikaya laughed. She had not considered that.

“ Besides,” Rias said, giving her an appreciative smile. “Those squares aren’t that easy to solve. Why don’t you translate the combination from the journal and see if it’s a solution to one.” He thumped a fist on the railing. “We still need a way to destroy the weapons. I was thinking we might find a formula for a powerful alien version of naphtha or kerosene, because even gas is flammable, right? At a high enough temperature… Tikaya, where are you going?”

Halfway through his spiel, she had charged to the cabinet where she left the cube. She raced back with the contraption clutched in her arms, and Rias lurched back a step at the sight of it.

“ It’s not active,” she said. “I’m not sure why, but it gives us the chance to experiment.”

Rias recovered, though he eyed the device warily. “Experiment?”

“ The cubes already clean things by incinerating them, right? All we need to do is add those weapons to the list of items its programmed to burn, throw it in that chamber, and close the door. You took one apart, right? Do you think you could alter its parameters? Like a punchcard in a steam loom?”