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

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

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

  “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 stoill 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 seds as she walks past him, then shakes his head and tinues into the kit. He walks over to a cupboard and pulls out a cheap bottle of whisky and a gss. He calls after her:

  “I’m gonna start w 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 sami sandwiches as a treat!”

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

  She knocks on Anna’s dhtly.

  “Dinner in thirty minutes!”

  “Kay!”

  Emily tio 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 oher 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 e after it.

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

  She walks over to her et 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 dowreet in the opposite dire of the shopfront. She falls into a familiar rhythm of weaviween back alleys and narrow streets, as she heads towards the wall of the city again.

  She reaches a se with nothing notable other than a few pipes jutting out, and short buildings nearby. She moves along the length, cheg 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 gnces around to check for ag her before croug down. She drops the saext to her, and digs out the sand with her hands, quickly f a small hole. She pces the sato the hole and piles the sand ba.

  Standing up, she brushes her hands off orousers and kicks the excess sand into the street to remove any evidence of having buried something. tent with the cover-up, Emily pys a familiar game and guesses how loopwatch has been going for:

  Hmmmmm…. Fifteen minutes.

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

  She reaches the unlocked windoushes it open before climbing bato her room.

  Reag into her pocket she slowly pulls out the stopwatd begins ting down without looking at the face.

  Three, two, one!

  Click!

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

  Emily gnces down at the stopwatch, which is frozen at zero seds left.

  Perfect!

  She grins as she heads out to join her family.

  ***

  Ding! Ding! Ding!

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

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

  She grabs one of st night’s sandwiches from the kit as the shop.

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

  Harriht some nice ham in this time.

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

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

  Three months sihe 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 trag it.

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

  If they ’t track it…. I 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 ed her prize in.

  A grin spreads across her face as she quickly pulls the sack out of the ground and drops it int, the trowel along with it. Standing up, she pushes the small pile of sand bato the hole, then walks away ign the small depressio behind.

  She gnces 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 bae.

  “Hehe, let the experiments begin!”

  ***

  Upourning to her workshop, Emily sits down at her workbend takes out the lightning stoo i it.

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

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

  First, she sets up icuted meical arms, the size of a finger each, attached to a heavy iron base pte with inid ks of tuhe arms are a work of art formed from a subtle bance of gears, springs, s and dials.

  Emily cmps eight of the arms to equidistant points oone, suspending it in the air at chest height before her.

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

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

  She flips a lever on top, causing the steel doors to butterfly open. Ihe engine is a preset pattern of coal lining the edges with a wooden cradle in the middle. She grabs a piece of wood ed in cloth off her workbench; then douses it in cheap alcohol before lighting it with a match. Tossing the burning log into the tre of the wooden cradle, she pushes the lever bad 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. Cheg the oxygen levels are suffit, she reaches up for one of the handles of wood suspended from pulleys above her and yanks it down. Wheer 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, drical body with small tubes pointing away from her hand and arm at the back. The front end has a circur disc coated in fiungsten 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 ector fasteo the end.

  She presses the ector to a corresponding one fasteo the underside of the workbend twists to lock them together.

  Finally, she pces a loupe, with an anti-gre coating on it, in the ninth arm, positioning it between her and the lightning stone. She theurns to the steam engine for a moment to pce 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 pn 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 ro the air, and positioning the loupe to gaze into the smallest gemstone fragment she see.

  “You 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 nig it. Ohe 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 smallest fragment and tinues 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 craside, before removing the two gems that were buried within.

  She releases the foot pedal and pulls the ha the water level back up to three-quarters, before pg dowary drill aag the steam ectors.

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

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

  Curious, do these gems have oints 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 stage of her preparations, the sandi.