Herber sighs and visibly deflates the moment the nobles are out of the shop.

“You okay? That seemed stressful,” Emily asks worriedly.

“Yeah I’m fine, it wasn’t that bad. I could do with a drink though,” Herber grumbles, turning and walking past Emily towards the kitchen.

“Really? They sounded pretty serious about the whole, stolen property, thing.”

“Nah, it would’ve just been a quick execution, nothing too bad.”

The colour drains from Emily’s face at that, as she thinks about the lightning stone still in her room. Herber pauses and turns back as he notices Emily isn’t following him.

“You alright Emi? You look a little pale.”

“Ye – Yeah I’m fine,” Emily stammers, hurrying to catch up to Herber.

“Wait. That was everything - right?”

“Haha, yeah of course it was. I’m not stupid enough to keep something stolen from nobles, you know.”

Fuck! I totally am!

Herber narrows his eyes at Emily for a few seconds as she walks past him, then shakes his head and continues into the kitchen. He walks over to a cupboard and pulls out a cheap bottle of whisky and a glass. He calls after her:

“I’m gonna start working on dinner. Let your sister know it’ll be ready in thirty minutes or so.”

“Sure thing. What we havin'?”

“Since you got your haul taken away, I’ll do some toasted salami sandwiches as a treat!”

“Yay, thanks Dad!” Emily runs back and gives Herber a quick hug before heading down the hallway again.

She knocks on Anna’s door lightly.

“Dinner in thirty minutes!”

“Kay!”

Emily continues to her workshop. Walking through the still-open door, she goes back to the open drawer and grabs a small sack. She walks over to the drawers on the other side of the room and opens one of them to gaze at the lightning stone again.

I’ve already hidden this from those nobles once. If they have a way of finding it, I don’t want them to realise it was me… I guess I’ll have to hide it somewhere else for a bit and see if they come after it.

After making her decision, Emily acts quickly. She grabs the stone and wraps it in the small sack, then heads back to her bedroom.

She walks over to her cabinet and grabs a stopwatch from the drawer, winds it to twenty-five minutes and drops it into the pocket of her shirt. Opening the window, she slips out into the side street.

Emily pulls the window shut, then runs down the street in the opposite direction of the shopfront. She falls into a familiar rhythm of weaving between back alleys and narrow streets, as she heads towards the wall of the city again.

She reaches a section with nothing notable other than a few pipes jutting out, and short buildings nearby. She moves along the length, checking the floor for any gaps in the paving. She quickly reaches a small patch of sand where the cobbles are missing.

Having learned her lesson at the scrap heap, Emily glances around to check for anyone watching her before crouching down. She drops the sack next to her, and digs out the sand with her hands, quickly forming a small hole. She places the sack into the hole and piles the sand back in.

Standing up, she brushes her hands off on her trousers and kicks the excess sand into the street to remove any evidence of having buried something. Content with the cover-up, Emily plays a familiar game and guesses how long her stopwatch has been going for:

Hmmmmm…. Fifteen minutes.

She pulls it out to check and clicks her tongue. Fourteen minutes and fifty-six seconds, just enough time remaining to get home. She starts to run.

She reaches the unlocked window and pushes it open before climbing back into her room.

Reaching into her pocket she slowly pulls out the stopwatch and begins counting down without looking at the face.

Three, two, one!

Click!

“Dinner’s ready!” Herber calls from the kitchen.

Emily glances down at the stopwatch, which is frozen at zero seconds left.

Perfect!

She grins as she heads out to join her family.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

***

Ding! Ding! Ding!

Emily wakes to the familiar ringing of her alarm clock. She springs out of bed and turns it off before throwing on a fresh shirt, trousers, and shoes. Grabbing her half-empty knapsack and walking out into the hallway, she knocks on Anna’s door.

“Get up!” She yells, heading towards the kitchen before hearing a response.

She grabs one of last night’s sandwiches from the kitchen and exits the shop.

Squinting and covering her eyes with the back of her hand as they adjust to the early morning sun, she bites into her sandwich before turning down the side alley next to the shop.

Harriot brought some nice ham in this time.

She muses absent-mindedly as she walks a familiar route between buildings.

Today marks three months since the day the airship, the Hollow Warden as she’s come to know it was called, crashed.

Three months since the nobles came and threatened Herber for the scraps of the ship.

Three months since Emily buried her treasure.

If it hasn’t been touched yet, they definitely don’t have a way of tracking it.

As she nears the hiding spot, Emily struggles to hold her excitement at bay.

If they can’t track it…. I can totally use it!

She reaches the wall, sandwich long gone, and follows her past footsteps along it.

The patch of sand, she soon sees, looks exactly the same as the day she left it.

That’s a good sign.

As her hope builds, she checks around for observers and sees a few children running along the end of the street. Leaning against the wall above the sand patch, she waits for them to move on, then takes her bag off.

Out of the bag, she pulls a small hand trowel, then swiftly crouches down and begins digging. Her heart beats loudly in her ears, a mix of hope and trepidation. Then, she sees it, the familiar brown hue of the cloth sack she wrapped her prize in.

A grin spreads across her face as she quickly pulls the sack out of the ground and drops it into her bag, the trowel along with it. Standing up, she pushes the small pile of sand back into the hole, then walks away ignoring the small depression left behind.

She glances around once more, and upon seeing no one, breathes a sigh of relief while turning off the street.

Looks like I was needlessly paranoid. Ah well, better safe than sorry.

A small skip enters her step as she backtracks her route back home.

“Hehe, let the experiments begin!”

***

Upon returning to her workshop, Emily sits down at her workbench and takes out the lightning stone to inspect it.

Soft glow, check. “Lightning”, check. All the same as before I buried it, good.

Satisfied with the stone, Emily begins setting up the tools she’s prepared over the three months of build-up.

First, she sets up nine articulated mechanical arms, the size of a finger each, attached to a heavy iron base plate with inlaid chunks of tungsten. The arms are a work of art formed from a subtle balance of gears, springs, chains and dials.

Emily clamps eight of the arms to equidistant points on the stone, suspending it in the air at chest height before her.

Next, she puts on her old and worn leather apron and gloves that Anna made her after her first run-in with black powder. It’s joined by a heavy metal face mask strapped to her head. Herber had prepared it for her after she mentioned the idea of power tools three months back.

With protective gear now on, Emily stands up and walks into the corner that used to house a spare chair for Herber, and in its place now sits a small steam engine.

She flips a lever on top, causing the steel doors to butterfly open. Inside the engine is a preset pattern of coal lining the edges with a wooden cradle in the middle. She grabs a piece of wood wrapped in cloth off her workbench; then douses it in cheap alcohol before lighting it with a match. Tossing the burning log into the centre of the wooden cradle, she pushes the lever back and then sits back down in her seat.

The backboard of Emily’s workbench has been modified with the addition of several gauges and dials to monitor the engine. Checking the oxygen levels are sufficient, she reaches up for one of the handles of wood suspended from pulleys above her and yanks it down. When the water level dial reaches three-quarters, she releases the handle.

As she waits for the water to reach boiling, Emily pulls out one of her new power tools, a handheld rotary drill. The drill has a smooth, cylindrical body with small tubes pointing away from her hand and arm at the back. The front end has a circular disc coated in fine tungsten powder and adhesive attached with a short shaft to the gears extending past the edge of the body. The back has a metre-long tube of coated rubber with a fully actualised quick-release connector fastened to the end.

She presses the connector to a corresponding one fastened to the underside of the workbench and twists to lock them together.

Finally, she places a custom loupe, with an anti-glare coating on it, in the ninth arm, positioning it between her and the lightning stone. She then returns to the steam engine for a moment to place a shovel full of coal on top of the burning wood, to keep the fire burning for longer.

Emily calms her nerves as she goes over her plan in her head.

Start with the smallest fragments of gem and cut out the metal surrounding them. Use the semi-transparency of the gems to gauge the gem's dimensions from the inside and avoid cutting into them instead. Take it slow, don’t cut a gem…

Emily flips her mask down and leans in, twisting the rock in the air, and positioning the loupe to gaze into the smallest gemstone fragment she can see.

“You can do this!” With one final mental push, Emily presses her foot to the pedal below her and hears a familiar hiss, as steam flows through the tubing to her tool. A jet of steam shoots out of the piping as the rotor spins to life.

She holds the drill firmly between two hands and slowly presses it against the metal to the side of the fragment. The drill screeches as the metal is slowly cut away. She traces the drill around the edges of the gem, carefully avoiding pushing too close and nicking it. Once the gem is only held in by a small bridge of metal, she reaches out and snaps the gem off.

Setting the gem down to the side, Emily turns the rock to the next smallest fragment and continues her work. After removing all visible gems, the metal is reduced to half its volume. She splits the metal in half, pausing and adjusting her cutting angle when she hears a gem crack inside, before removing the two gems that were buried within.

She releases the foot pedal and pulls the handle to bring the water level back up to three-quarters, before placing down the rotary drill and detaching the steam connectors.

Emily picks up the sack again and removes the two halves of metal from the mechanical arms, then drops them in. She sweeps the metal filings from her desk into the sack too, before placing it in a drawer. She turns to the eleven fragments of azure blue gemstone sitting in a pile next to her.

Each gem emits a small, fractured glow, blocked by the small shards of metal left fused to them. Emily raises her mask and sets a clear loupe into an arm. She inspects each gemstone for any chips or scratches left by the drill and finds eight of the gems don’t have a single imperfection. The three other gems each have a single point from which a small web of cracks grows.

Curious, do these gems have weak points or something? I would have expected a lot more scratches even though my hands were steady.

Emily pushes her questions to the back of her mind to focus on the next stage of her preparations, the sanding belt.