Chapter 8 - The Midnight Vault
Bell stared at the shattered pieces of sapphire beneath Clara’s boot. For three agonizing seconds, the room was so still that the hiss of the streetlamp outside could be heard clearly.
A muscle beneath Bell’s left eye twitched.
"Kill the blacksmith," Bell commanded coldly, turning his back toward the door. "Bring the girl to the manor."
"Down!" Nathaniel roared.
Before Bell’s enforcers could raise their repeaters, Agnes reached beneath the counter and pulled the wire of an emergency flash-powder charge used for mining photography. A blinding, deafening explosion of white light and sulfurous smoke erupted in the confined space, plunging Bell’s men into temporary blindness and screaming confusion.
Gunfire ripped through the mercantile, shattering jars of preserves, tearing through rolls of calico, and spraying glass like shrapnel.
Nathaniel didn't shoot blindly. He grabbed Clara with one arm and Willa with the other, kicking open the trapdoor behind Agnes’s counter that led down into the old drainage culverts beneath the street—tunnels originally dug by Chinese miners during the gold rush.
"Agnes, move!" Nathaniel shouted through the smoke.
"I’m an old woman, Cross! Go!" Agnes screamed back, leveling a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun across the counter and pulling both triggers simultaneously.
The roar of the shotgun blew the front windows completely into the street, sweeping two of Bell’s guards off their feet. In the chaos, Nathaniel pushed Clara and Willa down the ladder into the pitch-black water of the culvert, dropping down after them and pulling the iron grate shut just as a burst of rifle fire chewed through the floorboards above.
The darkness of the tunnel swallowed them.
The water was ankle-deep and freezing, smelling of lime and sulfur. Nathaniel struck a sulphur match, shielding it with his palm, illuminating the slippery stone archway.
"Keep moving," Nathaniel breathed, blood trickling from a shallow cut on his temple where flying glass had grazed him. "This culvert runs half a mile down to the rail depot’s water tower."
"Did she... did Agnes survive?" Clara choked out, tears finally breaking through her defiance as she carried Willa against her hip.
"Agnes knows those tunnels better than Bell’s dogs," Nathaniel said, though his tight voice offered little comfort. "She’ll vanish into the old quarter. But we have less than six hours before dawn."
"The dress," Clara said, her voice hardening with sudden realization. "Bell’s men didn't burn your cabin, Nathaniel. Bell doesn't have the missing deed either! If he had the deed, he wouldn't have offered to marry me. He’s searching for it right now!"
Nathaniel stopped in his tracks, turning to face her in the flickering matchlight. "The locket. The inscription."
"The wedding dress," Clara insisted, her eyes wild with clarity. "My mother always told me: 'When you are lost, follow the stitches of the border.' It wasn't lace, Nathaniel! The embroidery along the hem... it was sewn with metallic thread. It isn't a pattern—it’s coordinates!"
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Nathaniel pulled the brass locket from his pocket and flicked it open. Under the faint flame, he examined the scratched backplate beneath Eleanor’s portrait.
There were numbers. Survey markers.
