Page 2 of The Captain’s Bounty (The Collectors #2)

He scrambled back from the unstable edge just before it too began to crumble, and down she went, clawing at the sand as she was swallowed up to her shoulders, her chin, and then she was completely engulfed.

The scrape of sharp rocks raked her ribs as she was pulled under, down into whatever hole she’d opened up. Sand was in her ears, nose and mouth, while everything around her vibrated to the pulse of falling debris.

Being buried alive wasn’t a kind death. The sudden pressure of so much earth packing around her chest, refusing to allow so much as the smallest gasp for air, was both a blessing and a torture.

She was already fighting that inevitable urge to suck air even as the press around her ribs pushed back against her lungs…

until suddenly, the crushing grip around her feet was just…

gone. She kicked in panic and dropped rapidly until her hips were wedged in this unseen opening.

She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t struggle, could only kick in futility while the pressure of all the earth above her built and built and finally the cork of her apparently abundant booty popped out of the bottleneck and she plummeted out into the empty black.

Her last words would have been, “Oh shit!” but she only had enough time to suck in the air to scream it before she hit the top of a conical mound of sand, still warm from the sun, and tumbled blindly down it onto an unseen floor and ultimately crashed hip-first on an uncompromisingly hard corner. Of what, she couldn’t see.

She scrambled the instant she stopped rolling, flailing to get out from under the sand still raining down from the ceiling above before it could bury her again.

Blind in the absolute darkness, her hands and feet slapped against the unnaturally smooth surface under her, peppered as it was with loose sand.

She got as far away from the danger—she hoped—as the wall she knocked into would allow before swiping at her face, spitting the sand from her mouth and nose, blinking wildly through stinging tears of irritation, and scrubbing with both hands to get it out of her hair.

She was alive! Not only that, but the pouring sand was already slowing to a trickle, allowing sunlight from the world above to filter in through the hole her shovel had made.

“Shit,” she breathed belatedly, staring in disbelief at the obsidian black walls, covered in alien markings so blue they seemed almost to be glowing.

In silence broken only by the faint trickling of falling pebbles and her own ragged breath, she stared around at the long-buried temple proper that her father had spent his life searching for…

and which she had now officially re-discovered.

“Lissa!” her foreman bellowed from above. “Lissa, answer me!”

“I’m okay, Dex,” she called, her voice quavering. She wasn’t the emotional sort and never had been, but this...

This was it. This was what her father had spent a lifetime seeking, and if there was any justice in the universe, she hoped he could see it now, if only through her eyes.

This made all the groveling to Corporate worth it.

Even if it turned out to be nothing more than this room, it was undeniable proof of an alien race more advanced than anything humans had thus far encountered.

It was the discovery of a lifetime.

The sort of discovery that just might be enough to overshadow her family’s infamy, undoing the damage her idiot brother had done, and once more get them reinstated as archaeologists in good standing with GIASS.

She covered her mouth with both hands, taking it all in before her practical side took over.

“Looks like I broke through a weak spot in the ceiling,” she called, giving the rest of the room a quick assessment.

“Ceiling?”

“Ceiling,” she confirmed through a fierce smile. “There’s a room down here.”

“Like… a chamber? A rock chamber?” Oh, it did her heart good to hear the note of uncertainty in that Corporate voice. Almost as much as it annoyed her when he followed up with, “You got a scanner? What are the mineral readings?”

“The walls seems stable enough,” she called, ignoring the questions. “I don’t think I’m in any danger. I’m going to look around.”

“No, you’re not,” Dex said tersely from above. “Don’t move. We’re looking for the sling-foot. We’re getting you out of there.”

Well, if she had to wait around for a rope anyway, not moving seemed like a waste of time better spent exploring.

“Never mind that,” she called. “Reinforce the point of entry and get down here.”

“Why? What do you see?”

Six different doorways, all bricked in with stone and covered in glowing blue alien writing.

“Just get down here,” she repeated, turning in a slow circle.

Four pillars stretched from floor to ceiling, with what looked like a square-cut pool in the center, giving her the impression of a temple.

The tile inlay was an oceanic mosaic that showed dark orbs stored under water.

She’d have loved to crawl down into the ‘pool’ with a light for a closer look, but there was so much to look at already and when her feet at last moved her, it was toward the glowing blue writing of the nearest door that she gravitated.

“Tell me there’s treasure,” someone else called down.

Probably Boaz, Dex’s second-in-command, a man she’d never really liked, but that was all right.

It was rare to spend this much time on a dig and still get along with everyone by the end.

People and personality traits didn’t quite work that way.

And although Boaz had a way of looking at her that she could practically feel crawling around under her clothes, he’d never said or done anything out of line.

She just didn’t like him as much as she did Dex.

And Dex worked for Corporate, which cared less about knowledge than it did about money, so she wasn’t all that fond of him either.

“This whole place is a treasure,” she replied instead, reaching up to trace a glowing word. The instant she did, the glowing became lights and they went wild, flashing under her fingertips until she snatched her hand back again.

“Uh,” Boaz said. “What was that?”

“You saw that?” she asked, surprised.

“Those flashes of light? Uh, yeah… we did.”

“Please stop touching things,” Dex wryly added. “At least until we get down there.”

Really? Like this was her first dig and little ol’ her just couldn’t manage without the help of some big strong men? Rolling her eyes, she glared up at the hole in the ceiling and their moving shadows working directly above it.

The end of a rope dropped through the opening in the ceiling, the looped end plopping directly into the conical pile of sand deposited on the temple floor.

“Well, that wasn’t as far as you made it sound with all that screaming,” Boaz remarked.

“I’m coming down,” Dex called.

Lissa backed from the wall, the strange words of which were once more only mildly glowing. Slowly, to avoid touching the lettering, she dragged her fingers through god only knew how many layers of dust while Dex’s soft grunts of exertion accompanied his descent to join her.

The walls weren’t obsidian, as it first appeared, but black and gray tile every bit as dark as a cave. Dragging her finger through it revealed the faint cracks that ran vertically and horizontally, separating the letters until they no longer looked like glowing words, but rather like buttons.

Like a keyboard. Or a control panel , she thought, backing away again. If this was a temple, it was like nothing she’d ever seen.

“Shore up those walls,” Dex called back up the ladder once he reached the bottom. “Lissa, we’re leaving. Get over here.”

Lissa gave him a withering stare over her shoulder. “You haven’t been entirely useless on this excavation, Mr. Morgan, but you have an annoying tendency to forget which of us is in charge.”

Dex’s heavy brow furrowed slightly, betraying an actual human emotion before he smoothed it away into his usual bland Corporate face.

“And for all your experience, Ms. Blackwood, you have a tendency to forget archeological discovery protocol. Rule One: In the event that an unidentified site of possible significance is unearthed, all work shall cease at that site and for fifty meters around that site. Rule Two: The foreman—that’s me—shall shut down all machinery and secure the site.

Rule Three: The site manager—that’s you—shall confirm that the site is secured and notify GIASS to request further assessment by a guild member.

The hell are you thinking?” he demanded with a hint of exasperation.

“I thought you were trying to get back into their good graces. Isn’t what you’re doing guaranteed to piss ‘em off more?”

Yes and yes, but… that door… those lights…

Her fingers itched as her eyes traced every faintly glowing line of every alien character.

“That’s what I thought. Now, come.”

Lissa did not ‘come.’ She went where her feet led her, past the pool to the nearest sealed door.

Sliding her finger through the dust there revealed nothing but what her eyes had already told her.

It had its own controlling keys beside a door that had been bricked in long, long ago. Hastily, by the looks of it.

“Why would they do that?” Dex wondered, as if reading her mind. She turned to find him almost directly behind her, his gray eyes narrowed as he made his own assessment of the sealed doorway.

“I don’t know.” She went to the wall, skimming the glowing lights with her fingers again. “But watch this.”

The lights surged in every button she touched, flickering wildly. Having seen it once already, this time her eyes were ready and she picked out the pattern.

“Wait.” Dex grabbed at her arm, but she shifted, putting herself between him and the buttons she had pressed, following the pattern in three quick taps that hit four buttons total.