A rumble that sounded like a collection of glassware bursting against the floor.

The birds outside the dome flap their wings, frightened.

Recovering from the jump scare, Adam pivoted to his partner and discovered what had happened.

Malin had thrown one of her Photias against the Ita-Hu, and now she watched how her mass of energy disintegrated against the invisible wall. She had just confirmed her powers there were as useless as they said.

“Miss Viveka, I thought I made it clear. Kappa radiation suppresses any type of discharge.”

The District Chief’s comment was a spike in her ears. She endured the urge to send him to hell, and turning to Adam, gestured for him to come forward.

“Mr. White, would you be so kind…?” Halstein was impatient.

Adam took a breath and advanced toward the Ita-Hu.

Assuming that Adam’s white flames would counteract the invisible force, perhaps because the scientists claimed so, Malin stepped back as a precaution, in case there was an unexpected outburst or any of the sparks from the shot jumped toward her or toward the plastic cover of the dome which in that case could catch fire. A red-light alert had lit in her mind, a call to be prepared. Willing to collect the sample and hurry back to camp, she searched her tool belt pouches for something to do it with and found a small plastic vial and a tweezer.

‘How hard can it be to splinter a rock and put the little piece in a container?’ she had told Anderson earlier; she only hoped she had been right.

Adam moved closer to the huge black egg until his field of vision was occupied solely by it. He observed it, just as a karate fighter would do with a pile of bricks that he must break with his bare hands. He took a deep breath, raised his fist, and loaded it with electrical threads.

“Remember to moderate your blow,” Halstein warned. “Gabor’s tests say that, with a small discharge from your Photia, the force field will give way. I don’t want to risk you drilling the field and pulverizing the Ita-Hu. A minor fracture is all we need.”

Adam released the air in his lungs and decreased the size of the energy mass flaming in his hand to the size of a baseball ball; he didn’t feel like arguing with the District Chief. Measuring the impact his shot might have, he considered the distance that separated him from the rock and took a step back. Finally, he vented his Photia, not with a backhand as he had intended to do, but with the same subtlety with which he would throw a ball of paper into a trash can.

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The white fireball hit the invisible surface, and a long ffuuuushhhh resembling the sound of a blowtorch sounded.

With that bubbling noise in his ears, Adam bit his lips and hoped Gabor’s studies were spot on. Although everything happened so fast, nobody had time to doubt the theory of the biophysicist.

The little Photia, which for a few seconds danced on the same point suspended in the air, stretched like a rat would do to sneak into a tiny slit, pierced the invisible wall, and touched the Ita-Hu. As with Malin’s shot, there was also a cloud of sparks, although in this case there was no electrical click but more of a crunch; a crack, crack-sound, similar to an eggshell shattering.

This time, the noise caused no stir among the birds; it only shocked Adam, who got horrified to see how his shot had ripped a cloud of dark splinters from the massive rock.

“Shit!” He had spoiled it.

Silence reigned inside and outside the dome, and both Adam and Malin, as well as scientists and the District Chief—who followed the action from the camp through the holographic monitors—held their breath and waited for the glow of the explosion to disappear.

When the cloud of dust and debris cleared, a hole of about twenty-four inches in diameter appeared in the dark Ita-Hu.

No! It should have been just a tiny fracture, not a hole the size of a car wheel. He had ruined the operation!

Adam freaked out. However, after seeing what his action had exposed, he fell silent.

The inside of the huge oval rock was hollow, and there was as much darkness in there as its color was black on the outside. The comparison of the Ita-Hu with an egg was now quite true.

Something flashed on the ground, capturing Malin’s eye; it was a small piece of the black rock that had ended up jumping there. No. Not only one; there were several pieces scattered on the arid ground, glittering like precious gems in the daylight. Any of them could be the fragment they needed to end the mission and thus buy her to stay in this country and abolish her sentence of deportation. Using the tweezers, she picked up one of the many pieces, and before putting it in the plastic vial, held it up to have a better grasp of it.

The fragment had two distinct sides. One side was the surface of the Ita-Hu, a rocky layer about an inch thick, and the other was its interior: a crystallized and shimmering violet mineral of a purplish color that looked like amethyst.

Yes, the interior of the Ita-Hu was made of crystal. The rock embedded in the ground was some gigantic—

“—Geode!” In the camp’s main tent, Dr. Anderson jumped out of his chair and leaned toward the monitor to make sure what he was seeing. “It’s a geode!”

Luciano Green moved to another console board and activated the electromagnetic spectrum scanners.

Just as Dr. Gabor had predicted, White’s three-point electromagnetic charge had caused a slight imbalance in the two-point charge of the rock, dissolving the force shield completely. According to the systems, the Ita-Hu was still emitting radiation, but its invisible shell was gone.