Large chunks of rock dislodged from the ceiling and came crashing down, scattering his fellow soldiers in every direction.
A massive chunk of rock hit the ground right next to him so hard, it knocked him off his feet. He scrambled forward and began running for the exit.
He wasn’t the only one. Everyone ran screaming through the collapsing cave toward the same small entrance that they had been forced to go through single file on their way in. If he wasn’t one of the first ones through that opening, he might get stuck behind the clog of panicked bodies as everyone tried to get through.
Unfortunately, he had been one of the farthest from the exit, and it quickly jammed with soldiers trying to get out.
A terrified scream was cut short by a chunk of ceiling flattening another soldier. Through the chaos he heard someone scream, “The box! Get the box!”
He quickly scanned the trembling chamber and found the box lying on its side next to a hole in the floor where the pedestal used to be. Leaving behind the whole reason they had come here in the first place seemed like a stupid thing to do. At the very least, he could sell it if he got it outside.
Screams of terror erupted from the entrance. He watched in horror as the walls of the thin tunnel that led out of the cavern slid closed, crushing the few who had already pushed their way into it.
He raced across the floor, keeping an eye on the ceiling above him as he dodged falling chunks of rock and slid to a stop next to the wooden box at the same time as the burnt old man. He was one of the few who knew that this old man was Nero, even though everyone thought Nero was dead. His troops had been told his name was Alexander.
His muscles tensed as he prepared to fight Nero for the box when Nero suddenly pushed it toward him.
He started to reach for the handles on the side of the box when Nero grabbed his wrist and shouted over the chaos. “I need you to tell me if this is a way out?”
He didn’t have time to say anything before Nero shoved him head first into the hole. His stomach lurched as he fell into blackness. He reached out with his arms and legs and pressed against the walls of the tunnel to slow his descent. The tunnel walls were as smooth as glass and he couldn’t slow himself down as he rocketed toward the unknown.
Even if he had seen it coming, and had taken a deep breath to prepare, when he hit the water at the bottom of the tunnel, it was so cold, it forced what little breath he had out of his lungs.
He somersaulted in the ice-cold water as the fast current pulled him along. He struggled to find which way was up until his head finally broke the surface. He gasped for air briefly before being pulled under again by the turbulent underground river.
He tumbled along alternating between holding what little oxygen he had in his lungs until they burned and gasping for quick breaths anytime he felt his face break the surface in the inky blackness.
If he had never taught himself how to swim in response to the village bully who, on a seemingly monthly basis, tied him into a burlap sack and threw him in the nearby lake, he would have drowned by now.
The trap, triggered by the removal of the box from the pedestal, had closed off the only entrance to the cave, but had opened a second. It was too risky to send the box down first without knowing if it was safe. Nero shoved the wooden box down the hole after he heard the kid splash into the river below. He never went into any enclosed space without first determining if there was another way out.
He ignored the terrified screams and cries for help all around him and instead focused on memorizing the face of the boy. Being able to recall that face perfectly would help him find the box again.
He took three deep breaths to force as much oxygen into his body and plunged headfirst into the hole, right before a massive chunk of ceiling crashed down on top of it, sealing the hole and the fate of those still alive in the cave.
They wouldn’t be alive for much longer.
Jasper hauled himself out of the icy water and onto the rocky shore. He had burst from the pitch black darkness and into the bright sun when the turbulent underground river became a fifty-foot waterfall that tossed him like yesterday’s garbage into a small, but thankfully deep, lake.
At least this time he was not tied up inside a burlap sack and he quickly made his way to shore.
He removed the blunderbuss strapped to his back and stripped off the heavily soaked leather armor. He poured a gallon of water out of his blunderbuss when he tilted it upside down. His small bag of gunpowder was now a bag of black mud. It didn’t matter, his blunderbuss had been too heavily dented from the fall, and from banging into rocks in the underground river, that it wouldn’t be shooting anything ever again.
Something caught his eye and he focused on an object bobbing in the center of the lake. It was the wooden box. He took a deep breath and dove back into the lake.
He dragged the box up on the rocks and felt a chill run up his spine that had nothing to do with the temperature of the lake. He had developed his instinct for survival by growing up in the most dangerous place in the world. A continent sized prison was not the place for a boy of seven to be orphaned and alone on the streets. He had to grow up fast, and grow up fast he did.
His instincts had been sharpened to an almost supernatural level.
He glanced around him before he scanned the skies and spotted the black dot in the middle of the crisp blue sky that could mean only one thing. An airship was coming.
He dragged the box into a dense thicket of bushes halfway up the hill and had just returned to collect the leather armor and blunderbuss when he heard a loud splash at the base of the waterfall. He didn’t bother looking because he knew what it meant. Somebody had followed him out of the cave.
He scrambled into the bushes and peered out as Nero clawed his way, coughing and sputtering, out of the water.
Nero flopped over onto his back and gulped in air for several minutes before he finally caught his breath and sat up.
Jasper crouched perfectly still in the bushes as he watched Nero look up and down the river and all around the waterfall and tiny lake. He held his breath every time Nero glanced in his direction for fear even the slightest movement of his chest expanding and contracting might shake the leaves and give away his hiding spot.
A shadow passed over the lake and settled on Nero, making him look up. Jasper craned his neck and saw an airship had already arrived and floated only a dozen feet above them.
Every airship he had seen before was slow and loud. It was why they were never useful in combat. Either the enemy saw them coming, heard them coming, or both, in plenty of time to prepare a proper defense. This one was different. It was long and sleek; and nimble. And it had come in silently on the wind.
He watched it spin around quickly to face windward and hold position without needing to be tethered to the ground. He could barely hear the propellers. And he was less than a hundred yards away.
He realized that the only reason he had seen it at all when he looked up into the bright blue sky was that it was painted a deep midnight blue with random white pinpoint dots all along the underside to match the night sky.
This airship was designed to sneak up on the enemy under cover of darkness. And it was not small. The long gondola that ran the entire length of the sleek airship could easily hold a hundred men.
He had never seen anything like it before and guessed that the owner would kill him immediately if he knew he was looking at it now.
The airship dropped to hover effortlessly ten feet off the ground. Nero stood defiantly facing the airship, not even attempting to run away. A ramp lowered from the front of the gondola. At the halfway point, the stairs along the ramp looked like the jagged teeth of a dingo, its gaping mouth threatening to swallow Nero whole. The ramp continued tilting downward until it settled lightly on the ground.
Jasper risked parting the branches of the bush wider to get a better look at the airship that floated rock steady in the shifting breeze without being tethered to the ground first. Even this close to the ground, the sound of the propellers could easily be dismissed as the slight rustling of leaves on some distant tree.
The adrenaline his body created while he fought for his life in the underground river was starting to dissipate and his body complained, with each lifting of the breeze, that he was still in wet clothing. To make matters worse, he had settled into a crouch in the bushes and his calf muscles were beginning to cramp. He had hoped to use the sound of the airship to mask his movement so he could sit down and relieve his leg muscles from their hunched stance, but this airship was too quiet. If he tried to reposition his legs to sit down, it might shift the loose rocks under his feet and Nero would hear him.
If Nero could hear him, so could the man walking down the ramp followed by a group of heavily armed soldiers.
For now, his muscles would just have to deal with the pain.
Nero stood there feeling like a drowned rat, and probably looking like one too, as Levi strode victoriously down the ramp like a conquering hero with his elite guard in tow. Every one of the nine-member guard was decked out in a modernized version of the armor worn by the Praetorian Guard, the personal bodyguards of Roman Emperors until they were disbanded in the fourth century, complete with crimson red heraldic crests mounted on top of their helmets.
Levi himself looked the part of an ancient Roman Emperor readying his troops for battle. The only thing missing was a laurel wreath on his head.
Nero did his best to stand up straight and appear stronger than he felt as he squinted up at Levi through the bright morning sun. “You’re early.”
Levi looked down his nose at him. “From the looks of you, it would appear I’m already too late. The Directors should have chosen me to come to this place instead of you.”
Nero thrust his chin out defiantly. “I can only guess that it was you who convinced the Directors I needed to be replaced.”
Levi frowned. “Take a look at yourself, Nero. Trust me when I tell you that it did not take much convincing.”
“What makes you think you could have done any better?” Nero asked.
“Because I would have never cared about the natives,” Levi replied as he held up a small device. “And I would have used one of these.”
Nero shook his head. “It was buried under tons of rock; underground. That detector would never have led you to it.”
Levi regarded the device in his hand. “The goddess of Rome sings, and this little toy can hear her.”
“There is no goddess inside that box,” Nero corrected him.
Levi smirked. “That’s right. We live in an enlightened age. We are men of science. We don’t care whether you call what’s inside that box the evils of the world released by Pandora herself, or the God of the Hebrew’s when they carried it around inside their ark, or even the Roman goddess Cybele, believed by the Oracle of Delphi to be encased in black meteoric stone. We don’t believe that there is some mystical or magical being living inside the box. We believe that what is inside is quantifiable by science and ultimately controllable through scientific means.”
Levi let out a sigh and looked down at Nero as if he were admonishing a small child. “I don’t care who believes what it is. When the Hebrews had it, nations fell before them. When the Romans had it, they conquered their known world. Now the Directors want it, and they don’t care how or why it does what it does. They only want it to do it for them.”
“You are never going to find it with that thing.”
“We’ll see about that.”
Levi flipped the switch on the detector and his face registered surprise. “If I am reading this correctly, it is very close.”
Nero resisted the urge to glance at the bushes where the kid was most likely hiding with his box. When he first clamored out of the water, he noted the wet and overturned stones making a straight line from the water to the bushes. He had followed them both down the hole soon enough that there was no way he could have gotten any further. By the time Levi arrived and blathered on, the water had dried up enough that there was no visible indication anyone other than him had climbed out of the lake.
If he had any chance of keeping what was inside that box out of the Directors’ hands, he had to convince Levi the box was not here.
He took a step toward Levi and paused when the two forward guards took a step toward him. “I pushed the box ahead of me down the hole right before the cave collapsed on my soldiers. If we leave now, we can catch up to it before it gets too far downriver and out of range of your detector.”
Levi squinted at the device in his hand. “No. According to the gauge, when I walk this way the signal is stronger.”
Nero took a sideways step and came between Levi and the bushes. “That’s because your machine is detecting me.”
Levi frowned at him. “What makes you say that?”
“When I fired a gun into my emerald laser to destroy it, the explosion embedded a piece of emerald shard inside me. Go ahead; wave your little trinket close to my chest.”
Levi held the detector close to him and the needle on the gauge jumped.
Nero breathed a silent sigh of relief. He hadn’t known whether the emerald shard would interfere with the detector or not. “This river goes by a town less than three kilometers from here. If someone else spots that box floating in the river and fishes it out, it will be even harder to retrieve.”
Levi smiled. “I highly doubt that. I have an armada of a hundred airships, just like this one, due to hit the northern coast within a week. If we have not recovered the box within that time, my army of ten thousand soldiers will tear this place apart until we do.”
Jasper’s legs trembled under the strain of not having moved while he stayed in a half-crouched position in the middle of the bushes. Nero glanced back in his direction and gave a slight nod just before he disappeared up the ramp into the airship.