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“We might want to expedite our snooping,” I said to stop Duncan from straining at the bars.

Earlier, I’d been joking about him fainting—mostly — but when he slumped against the wall, weary from his exertion, I worried it was a real possibility.

He noticed my concerned expression and straightened, then nodded firmly. “Right. We’ll likely have company soon.”

“Maybe they’ll know how to open the gate.”

“One would hope. Though I do have more grenades.” Duncan opened a pocket on his pack, pulled out two, and handed one to me. “They’re in limited supply though, so let’s make sure we don’t need them for something else before hurling them at those bars. Especially since we’re inside the building now.”

“Okay.” I didn’t see evidence that the first explosion had damaged the structure, but it might be different if we detonated one from within the building.

Duncan cocked his head. “Is it my imagination, or are the magical items we’ve been sensing moving ?”

He pointed at the floor.

“I get that feeling too.” I thought of the magical bats that had dive-bombed me in a cave not that long ago.

We walked down the hallway, pausing at the infrequent doors. Like the one we’d blown up, they were made from metal, all shut and locked.

As Duncan had pointed out, I sensed magic in what had to be a basement or crawlspace underneath us. More than ingredients for potions. Something moving. Something alive?

Before we reached the elevator, a bing sounded. One of the green circular lights brightened.

“Uhm.” I pointed my flashlight in that direction, picking out a stairwell next to the elevator. From down the hallway, it was hard to tell, but it looked to offer up and down options. “We may want to?—”

Run up the stairs to avoid being spotted, I’d intended to say. But the elevator doors opened first.

I crouched, tensing. Duncan also crouched, his fingers curling, and growled. Could he summon the bipedfuris in his weakened state?

Rapid tinks sounded as something skittered out of the elevator. A giant metal… bug?

The mechanical construct was beetle-shaped, its carapace more than a foot wide.

Including its eight legs, it rose equally tall.

It lacked a distinct head, but when it rotated toward us, two glowing red eyes pointed in our direction, and something like a jaw lowered to show a round orifice.

One might call it a mouth, but it didn’t have teeth or appear flexible.

Without moving its legs, its body rotated left and right, though those red eyes never shifted their focus from us.

The jaw opened and closed a couple of times, and a faint cloud of vapor wafted from its orifice, reminding me of one’s breath on a cold morning.

It hazed the air in front of the glowing eyes, but only for a moment before dissipating.

Then the mechanical creature skittered back into the elevator, and the doors closed.

“Huh,” Duncan said.

“Nothing you’ve seen before in any of their lairs?”

“It is not, but I did sense that it was magical.”

“Yeah. If it’s what we’re sensing in the basement, there are a lot more of them.”

The tinks I’d been hearing continued on, drifting up from the stairs. The sounds of mechanical beetle legs on a hard floor? I imagined a horde of those bugs down there.

“Why don’t we see what’s upstairs first?” I suggested.

“I’m amenable to that. Though the garage doors on the far side of the building would be that way, if we want to see if we can escape through one of them.” Duncan pointed toward a metal door at the end of the hall.

“We haven’t accomplished our mission yet. Besides, the garage doors probably have bars over them now too.”

“A distinct possibility.”

I headed for the stairs, hoping the upper level held offices filled with filing cabinets of information, or something else useful. Such as a collection of potions that could lift curses…

As we reached the stairs, the door at the end of the hall opened, seemingly of its own accord. I expected a squad of Radomir’s potion-enhanced thugs to charge through it with guns. Instead, another large metal bug tinked out, red eyes glowing. It was identical to the first one.

The construct looked at us for a long moment, then skittered back out of sight. I had a glimpse of a dark cavernous room that might have been the garage before the door thudded shut.

More tinks sounded behind us, from the direction we’d come.

A side door along the hallway had opened, one that we’d tried and had been locked.

One of the bug robots skittered into view.

It stopped in front of the bars of the gate that had descended, then turned to face us, as if it were a guard dog prepared to defend that exit.

If we needed to depart that way, I would happily throw one of the grenades at it as well as the gate.

“Upstairs we go.” Duncan glanced uneasily at the creature watching us, then took the lead.

“You’re not intimidated by those little bugs, are you? You tore a robot dog to literal pieces not long ago.”

“I did. There was only one of it, though, and an intriguing water-filled hole behind it to explore.”

“The things you find intriguing are a little odd.”

“I find you intriguing.” He smiled over his shoulder at me.

“Yeah, and my kids would be the first to tell you that’s odd.” I thought of Austin’s letter and what he might have discussed with Cameron but pushed the musings away. This wasn’t the time to be distracted.

As we climbed the cement steps, I wondered if the bugs were capable of clambering up them. Maybe they always took the elevator. How they pushed the buttons from the floor, I couldn’t guess. Magic? Access to a wireless network? Who knew?

“No bugs up here,” Duncan said as we stepped into a hallway similar to the one below, though small square windows marked each end instead of doors.

Bars had come down over those windows, bars that hadn’t been in place when I’d looked at them from outside.

I eyed my single grenade, hoping it would be as easy to leave when we were done as Duncan believed. After watching the cameras track us, I had little doubt that someone besides the guard bugs knew we were here and was probably on the way.

We looked through an open door into what reminded me of a break room in an office building. It had a fridge and cabinets but wasn’t a full kitchen.

“I was expecting a potion-making factory, like the other place,” I said, heading to the next room.

“Maybe that’s done in the basement.”

Which I wasn’t eager to explore if it was full of mechanical guard bugs.

But the other rooms we checked upstairs weren’t any more promising, most holding desks or bedroom furniture.

None of the drawers had anything in them, nor did I find my sword propped in the corner anywhere.

Not that I’d expected that. I didn’t sense any magic on this floor.

We didn’t find any stairs leading up to the roof and debated our options when we returned to the elevator.

“Can you tell if any of the magic we can sense down there belongs to tools or artifacts?” I pointed at the floor. “Something important ?”

I doubted the bugs could lift Duncan’s curse.

“It might,” he said. “There’s enough magic that it’s hard to identify individual signatures. My senses suggest there are a lot of those bugs down there.”

“Mine too, unfortunately.”

Duncan pressed one of the elevator buttons. When the doors opened, I braced myself, expecting the bug we’d seen earlier to walk out. But the elevator car was empty.

We stepped in, and Duncan held his finger over the two options. Level 1 or Basement. He looked at me.

We hadn’t checked all the rooms on the first floor, but my gut told me we wouldn’t find anything of interest on that level. We also might not have much time before the security squad arrived.

“Let’s find out what the guard bugs are guarding.” I held up the grenade to show him I was ready for trouble.

“Agreed, but don’t throw that unless you really need to, especially not in the basement.”

“Afraid the entire building would come down on us?”

“That is a possibility.” Duncan pressed the basement button.

As soon as the doors opened, dozens and dozens of tinks reached our ears, and numerous sets of glowing red eyes turned toward us.

It had been dark upstairs, but down here, it was pitch-black, save for those eyes.

The air smelled both floral and musty with a hint of decay.

I remembered the odor of the mushroom farm and suspected the ingredients that had been mailed to this address were stored down here.

Duncan turned on his phone’s flashlight app and swung the beam over the red eyes.

In the cavernous space, it shined on metal vats, wood and plastic crates, and white barrels that held chemicals or other liquids.

A couple of those barrels had skull-and-crossbones stickers on the side.

One claimed its contents were radioactive.

“Another reason not to throw a grenade down here,” I said.

The flashlight beam also reflected on the metallic carapaces of dozens and dozens of metal bugs, all rotated to face us.

A couple of them puffed out soft breaths of vapor, the same as the one above.

Well, not breaths , I supposed. They wouldn’t have lungs and be breathing; at least, I couldn’t imagine that.

But guessing what those little clouds might be made me uneasy.

With so many other odors in the area, I couldn’t tell what the vapor smelled like or guess what it was.

Something toxic?

“I don’t see a light switch,” Duncan said.

“Maybe the lights are voice-activated, and you have to know a secret word to turn them on.”

“Could be.” Duncan pointed toward a door behind the bugs, one of a couple off the cavernous room. “Think they’ll let us go that way?”