*
While Ari rounded up the grunt and Little Miss Assassin, Janco carried armloads of files over to a conference room. Over the course of multiple trips, he filled the long table. By the time the others arrived, Janco had finished writing the cheat sheet to help them decipher the code to read the reports.
Sergeant Grunt frowned at the piles, but Little Miss Assassin sat down and tucked her bare feet under her.
Ari explained what they sought from the reports. “...an oddity or something that doesn’t belong. Anything that sticks out.”
“Like your bare feet,” Janco said to the young pup. “Don’t your feet ever get cold?” He couldn’t resist asking. Not many rugs covered the stone floors of the castle.
“No.” She kept her gaze on Ari.
“Well, when we go undercover, you’re gonna have to wear boots.”
“Okay.”
Janco deflated. He’d hoped for an argument, but she wouldn’t rise to the bait. She wasn’t the chattiest person, either. At least the grunt asked a few questions as they spent the rest of the afternoon and evening reading reports. How could a person keep quiet that long? Was it part of her assassin training? If so, he’d never pass the test.
When the words blurred together and his eyelids drooped as if they weighed a thousand pounds, Janco called it quits for the night.
The next morning after running laps and training with Ari, he returned to the dreaded task of going through the files. Little Miss Assassin had beaten them there and she had quite a stack of rejects piled on the floor near her seat.
“Have you been here all night?” Ari asked as he sat.
“No.” She handed him a couple of files. “These meet your ‘odd’ criteria.”
Janco peered over Ari’s shoulder as he flipped through the pages. Most of the information she flagged could be explained.
“Sitians use magic all the time.” Janco shuddered. “It is odd, strange, unnatural, weird, crazy—”
“It’s a tool,” Ari said. “You just don’t like magic.”
“For good reason! Remember the time—”
“Why did you tag this one from Ognap?” Ari handed her a report.
The pup scanned it and pointed to a passage. “The agent counted sixteen wagons going into the mines, but only thirteen leaving. Doesn’t make sense. These mines produce coal and ore, so they’d need all those wagons to ship out the product.”
“Maybe they were having a slow day,” Janco said. “See? The next day they had sixteen in and then sixteen leave... Oh.” What happened to those other three?
Ari reclaimed the file. “Looks like there’s a pattern. Every three days, more wagons arrive than leave.”
“Could this be the smuggling route?” Janco asked. “Through the mines?”
“You tell me. You’re the one who spent a few weeks undercover at Vasko’s ruby mines.”
He scratched his scar. “There are a million miles of shafts under the Emerald Mountains. It’s possible that there’s a way to cross under the Ixian border and come out in the Soul Mountains. But...”
“But what?” Little Miss Assassin asked.
“The mine owners guard their maps with their lives. They don’t let strangers into the mines. For one person to know how all those shafts connect...” He shook his head. “Impossible.”
“They don’t have to know all of them. Just the right ones,” Ari said.
“And you said Sitians used their power all the time. Why couldn’t they use magic to find a passage into Ixia?”
The young pup had a point. Unfortunately. A cold dread coated his stomach. Two things Janco despised more than anything—magic and being underground. And it appeared he might just get both at once. Oh joy.