Chapter Nineteen: Terracotta Ingenuity

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Steach, from the tall backside of the burro, kicked with his back foot to urge the animal forward. It reacted, but not in the way the well-bred horses he grew up riding did. It didn't move so much as an inch but its long fuzzy ears twitched and he could feel the muscles below his legs tense. It was dark but the burro had been on stoic watch over a large herd of sheep. The bray it had loosed when Mr. Steach approached it might have woken the dead but no lights came on in the shepherd's trailer and the thing that made the ear-splitting sound resumed its watch, having found no threat from the man in blood-soaked gray. When Mr. Steach had mounted it, the girl's limp form stretched over his shoulder and challenging his equilibrium, the burro jumped and nearly bolted. Feeling the weight of two people on its back, it froze and waited for their burden to be removed. Spoiled with herd-watching instead of pack-carrying, it was stubbornly refusing to carry. As Mr. Steach tried again to urge the animal forward, he realized that he had seconds before the ornery animal launched—
Steach shook the plan from his head. He was stationary on the floor next to the girl and he had calculated that at least three hours had passed since he'd entered the vault and approximately two hours since the girl had awakened from the knock he'd given her chin. She'd relaxed into a stupor of repeating el curso and San Luis until her mouth dried and the words caught. She still mouthed the words in the dim light and the terror in her eyes never ceased.
He considered that he'd probably have to incapacitate her again once night had fully descended, but he hoped that she would come along willingly if she was still entranced by her own words. She would offer nothing further than those four words and she clutched at her chest as if something burned there.
His own burning wound had dried, his shirt sticking to the edges and wet with oozing plasma, and he kept the knife she'd used against him in his hand and ready should she decide that she was prepared to fight again. To pass the time until nightfall, he scanned his perfect memory and tried to plan his next move. The burro would be out of the question—to much noise, too ornery of an animal, too third-world for his traveling tastes—even for heist mode. While driving through and around the town in his clunking rental car, he'd remembered several trucks and small cars parked in the streets and each presented its own challenge and benefit to the acquisition.
He looked down at his new accomplice, for that was the only thing he could bring himself to call her—she wasn't a friend, wasn't strong or powerful enough to be an enemy, and he was uncomfortable calling her a captive. He bade her again to shut her mouth and cease her rambling, to save her breath and strength for showing him the way to the statue, but it was useless. He resumed his plotting.
The only entrance to the room was where he'd slipped in through the curiously designed door. He'd needed a key, and he'd had to dig up a corpse to get it. So how, in any scenario, did this girl come to find herself inside the vault, not only among the broken and discarded pieces of Aurelio's life, but living there? The door had been closed—dust had rained down upon him as he opened it—so, it stood to reason, no one had entered over that threshold in some time. Upon his initial examination of the room and three subsequent inspections, he'd not found a single other point of entry and he had already ruled out the holes in the ceiling being of any use to the girl or anyone. Not even a walking little bronze statue could have wiggled through those.
"Enough," he told himself again. "No more thoughts of magical or mystical walking statues."
The girl failed to agree and continued her silent mumbling of the cursed statue. The clothes she wore, worn thin and extremely dirty, hung loose on her frame. Her skin was pale—the same color of the bones that protruded just under the surface. Her eyes were large and might have been pretty (if Mr. Steach was such a person to make such observations in anyone) but were sunken and jaundiced. He would never venture a true guess at the girl's age, but he rationalized that due to her size and development (he was disgusted to have noticed any at all) she must have been thirteen or fourteen years old.
"How did you get here, girl?" He asked himself more than her. He walked around her, palming the knife hilt firmly and shuffling his feet in thought.
He picked up the lantern, it still burning on a generous supply of fuel, and turned the valve up to flood the room with its light. His shadow cast in a bent angle on the rear wall and over the open safe. The ground at his feet was tiled with terracotta and the grout work between the tiles was thick and unblemished by time. Except for a portion of the floor to the right of the safe. The grout there was soft and was, perhaps, not grout at all. Mr. Steach hadn't noticed the damage before due to his preoccupation with examining the safe itself.
"And being mauled," he said, finishing his thoughts that criticized and then forgave himself for his failure to notice.
He crossed the room in just a few strides, wincing as he felt the sides of his wound break loose from the cloth of his shirt. As he set the lantern on the floor next to the safe, he drew in a breath of surprise and admiration. He set the knife on the floor beside him.
"Ingenious," he announced. He looked back to the girl, momentarily thinking that he should congratulate her specifically, but, seeing again her weakened state, he knew she hadn't been the cause of the damage or designed the fantastic secret he had laid his eyes upon.
The combination-secured behemoth sat squarely on the tile, its flat and heavy bottom barely allowing a hair's width between it and the tile floor. Next to it, the original grout had been broken apart there and replaced with graying clay dirt. The tiles looked barely touched, but they'd clearly been disturbed and, when Mr. Steach reached for the closest to him, it shifted slightly and was very clearly not set in mortar. He picked up the knife again and pried the edge of it under the tile. It came away from the others easily, leaving behind its imprint against the false grout. Below the removed tile and underneath a three-foot square section around it was an aged piece of plywood. Steach rapped a knuckle on the surface of the wood and a deep, hollow sound returned. There was a visible edge to the plywood under a neighboring tile when he removed it and he when he shifted the tile-laden wood from the square it covered, he found two support beams that crossed over a chasm. A rope ladder dangled from between the beams and disappeared into the pit.
"Amazing," Steach admitted. He reached for the lantern where he'd set it in front of the safe and almost toppled it since he refused to take his eyes from the opening. A smell he was unaccustomed to emanated out and stung his nostrils. He remembered, then, what his own stench had become, and thought that he and the pit had a shared characteristic. "Girl." The way he'd addressed her was not dissimilar to the way he might have called a flight attendant for another drink.
The girl did not stir either because she hadn't heard him or hadn't cared. She was still entranced.
"Where does this lead?" Mr. Steach ignored the idea that the girl was incapable of communicating. He tried the question again but in Catalán. Then, more appropriately, in Spanish. Still, the girl did not respond.
Maneuvering himself above the opening and onto the rope while holding the lantern's wire handle proved difficult, but he descended slowly once he established his hold. He found that the bottom of the opening was only as far as twice his height below and the way beyond it traveled in only one direction—east. The tunnel that had been dug into the earth with rough-edged tools and supported with cheap and cracking timber, could accommodate only someone a foot shorter than Mr. Steach, but was wide enough for two to stand shoulder to shoulder. He held the lantern aloft and tried to cast the light ahead, but through cobwebs and uneven dips in the ceiling, he could only see for a few feet at a time. He took a few cautious steps into the tunnel and shivered from his sudden observation of the tunnel's chill.
With a renewed excitement for the next step in the plan that seemed to form and change with the wind, Mr. Steach turned and wriggled up the ladder and eagerly stowed the lantern at the edge of the opening as he pulled himself up onto one of the support beams. It creaked under his weight and he froze, afraid that he wasn't quite as nimble as he would have been normally—the cut on his chest and the disorientation of being essentially trapped and without a plan making him over-anxious and weak. He pulled himself into a sitting position atop the beam and then over the opening and onto the edge opposite the safe. As he turned on his rump to ready himself to stand, he once again felt the blade of the knife. It was at his throat and held by the formerly catatonic girl.
"Home," the girl said, struggling with just the one English word.
"Statue," Mr. Steach insisted. He kept his chin angled up but didn't dare to try and pull away from the blade—the girl might overcompensate and end his plans right then and there.
"Por favor," the girl pleaded. Her eyes were wide and full of emotion.
Steach felt none of the emotion himself as he stared into the sickly girl's face. But he saw the opportunity.
"Will the tunnel lead me to the statue? San Luis?"
The girl grimaced and let out a tiny squeak. She nodded. "Home."
He nodded, carefully, and raised his hands submissively. "I will take you home. But you must show me where the statue was taken." He'd given up on Spanish and determining what parts she might have been able to understand. It was clear that she heard every word and saw her own opportunity, though it obviously frightened her.
"No dejes que me atrape. No como los demás. No como los demás," she started into another mumbling.
Mr. Steach closed his eyes and waved at her to stop. "No dejaré que te atrape." He meant it to be as soothing as possible, but his gruff voice and annoyed tone made his promise sound more like a threat. He didn't care.
When the two of them had crossed the first turn in the tunnel and he'd stumbled over the first of many small piles of rubbish that had accumulated in the tunnel from a very obvious flooding, Steach had his first moment of pure doubt. How long was this tunnel and where did it end?
The girl had taken the lead and carried both the lantern and the knife. It was the only compromise she would accept. With the unknown ahead of him, Mr. Steach did his best to keep one eye on his reluctant accomplice and one eye on the lookout for a small bronze King walking the tunnel with them.

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