Chapter 8

Juliet sat curled up in the corner of a window overlooking the busy street below the Veritas buildings. The lunch with Anthony hadn't gone well had she had resorted to burying herself in her work to avoid questions. It had worked so far, but there was still one person she was finding it hard to hide from: herself. Her hands rested on a notepad filled with scribbled and half-deciphered symbols. Her head rested on the cool glass of the window. Her mind was far from either. Instead of focussing on the text she had been working on for months, Juliet's eyes were closed, picturing once again the dark, dusty catacombs of Syria.

Day One - Just after the fall

"I'm coming down, Cal, just wait there," Juliet called, having checked the knots she had tied around the surface rubble at least seven times. The packs were already down, so was the other rope: there was only herself left to go.

"I'm not exactly going anywhere," Cal's voice called back up. She could hear the grin in it.

She had taken her time and made sure not to scream when something, probably a piece of loose topsoil and not at all a bat, brushed past her about half way down. She had even made it to floor level without more than a few impatient queries from Cal. She took her time climbing up the heap of rubble, not wanting to cause a slip that might land them both in even more trouble. It wasn't terribly high, but Cal was on the top of it so if it moved, he moved, and, if he couldn't move as he was, with nothing pinning him down, moving him might make the problem worse. Much worse.

"Okay, I'm here," Juliet tried to keep the panic out of her voice as she reached Cal's side. "Please tell me you're in pain?"

"Remind me to sign you up for those bedside manner classes when we get home!" Cal retorted, his body motionless, his eyes staring blankly upwards.

"You know what I mean," Juliet snapped, trickling water onto a cotton swab and wiping the blood and grime from his forehead. She followed up with an antiseptic wipe and felt no need to hide the smirk when Cal grimaced at the stinging pain.

"I haven't broken my back, my neck or, as far as I can tell, anything else," he informed her through gritted teeth. "I may have cracked a rib or two and I have a heck of a lot of bruises on my back, maybe a few scrapes, but that's it. Nothing serious."

"Nothing except an open head injury, possible internal bleeding, blindness and complete paralysis!" Juliet replied, checking him over for broken bones nonetheless. Her hands ran over his limbs automatically, following the thread of scapula and clavicle, humerus, radius and ulna, then tibia and fibula, up to the femur and back down again on the other side. It wasn't until she was halfway up the far arm that the memory of those arms around her at the plane kicked in. She hesistated, banishing the memory from her mind, then moved on. When she got to his ribs, she eased up a bit, running her fingers lightly over the possible damage. Two maybe three ribs were probably cracked, eliciting a hiss of pain from her patient as she found them, others were only bruised.

"You need these seen to," she murmured. "Your back probably needs looking at too."

"Leave it: you can't do anything to help until I can move again, but I can't do anything to make it worse either."

"I can't just leave you here: it'll be dark soon. If we don't get under cover and insulated, we'll have hypothermia by morning."

"I'm not saying leave me here all night," Cal's voice rose slightly. "Just give me some time - ten minutes, twenty, whatever - and then we'll see if anything's changed. Seriously, Juliet, there's nothing more you can do here right now. You said it yourself: it'll be dark soon and we need to have our camping gear ready. Go sort that out first, then come back to me. It'll take you twice as long to set it up alone anyway!"

She had set up camp in a corner as far from the pile of rubble as she could find. Carved columns on either side of the camp and in front of it, opposite the corner itself, marked out a small square she hoped was safe from further cave-ins. It did take her longer without Cal's help, and by the time she made her way back up the rubble the light was growing dim. She sat down by his side, legs curled under her and her weight supported by her hand.

"Any change?"

"Little bit," Cal replied.

Juliet jumped when the hand next to her legs moved outward and hit her. Her breath caught, and she froze as it followed the line of her legs up to her hip. She swallowed and forced her mind to stop flying back to that moment at the airstrip. The feeling of strong, safe arms encircling her dissipated. When Cal's hand reached her waist, she shook her head, cleared her throat and caught the hand in her own.

"You okay?" Cal frowned blindly upward.

"Think you can sit up?" Juliet asked, deflecting the question. "I take it you still can't see?"

"Still blind," he confirmed. "Give me a hand and we'll try sitting up though."

It had taken another hour to get Cal down from the rubble heap and into the tent. Every step seemed to put pressure on a different cracked rib. Eventually he was sitting under the glow of a lantern, the torn remains of his shirt removed and discarded.

"How bad is it?" Cal asked, wincing as Juliet cleaned another cut on his back.

"You'll live," she replied. "At least as long as any of these cuts don't get infected."

"And as long as we find more water to replace what it's taken to clean me up!" Cal retorted. "How much do we have left?"

"Enough for now," Juliet murmured, trying to focus on the task at hand. It hadn't been easy. ever since that moment when she fell down the steps at the airstrip, the smallest thing seemed able to take her back there. The deep, dark pools of his eyes. Eyes she could easily lose herself in. The gentleness of his voice. The unexpected strength in his arms. Why hadn't she expected that? Because he was an archeologist? Because he was clever? Wasn't that just holding to a stereotype? Sure, he had started college way before she had, and had earned the title of doctor, which he never used, way before she had, but hadn't he also been at the top of Professor Zond's list when they went to Antarctica? Okay, maybe Vincent might have been above him overall, but it hadn't been Vincent the professor had taken with him to teach his son how to climb. Suddenly the muscles in Cal's arms and back seemed almost too obvious to Juliet and she wondered how on Earth she hadn't noticed it before. Unfortunately, trying to ignore the play of light on the muscles of the man you've suddenly found yourself attracted to and now find yourself having to pay exact, albeit medical, attention to is not exactly easy, and for once Juliet was incredibly glad Cal couldn't see her face.

"Juliet?" Maggie's voice broke in on Juliet's daydream, startling her. "Juliet!" She could feel her cheeks burning.

"Huh? Maggie?" Juliet looked around. Maggie was standing, arms crossed, looking down at her.

"Daydreaming about lover-boy, huh?" Maggie asked raising an eyebrow. "And you only just saw him at lunch too. My, what it is to be young and in love!"

"Huh?" Juliet frowned, momentarily confused, then remembered her lunch date with Anthony. And the fact that she was supposed to be in love with Anthony. Anthony. Not Cal. "Yeah, right, of course," she muttered, pushing herself up out of the window alcove. "Was there something?"

"Solomon's called a meeting," Maggie told her, trying to hide a poorly suppressed smile and sound stern. "Wants us all in the main lab to go through the Alaskan finds. I get the feeling he's in a mood to start dishing out duties and, if we're late, we'll get the most tedious ones: so get a wriggle on."

The two women made their way through to the main lab. The men, and Nikko, whom Juliet still couldn't think of as anything other than a boy, except perhaps a health hazard, were all there. Professor Zond stood at the far end of the table, on which all the finds from Alaska were now spread out. Vincent, as always, hovered nearby murmuring quietly in the professor's ear as they perused a map that lay in front of them. Nikko leant nonchalantly against a bookcase, eating. Cal sat by the table, his crutches visible behind him. For a second Juliet let her gaze rest on him, taking in the dark eyes focused downwards, the dark hair curling gently about his ears, the pensive gaze as he turned over one of the artefacts in his hands. Juliet followed his gaze. The artefact was one she had never seen before: a rectangular box about the size of a deep pencil case or a long jewellery box. The hands turning the artefact over and over stopped suddenly. Juliet looked up to find Cal watching her with much the same expression as he had the artefact. Their gaze met for just a second before she looked away and cleared her throat. Out of the corner of her eye she caught the ghost of a smile flicker across Cal's face.

"Okay folks, now that we're all here," Professor Zond began. "There's a lot to analyse, so I'm going to split the tasks by type here. Maggie and I will take chemical analysis. We'll start with the eye of Horus and work our way through the collection of artefacts that way. Juliet and Cal: you're our language experts so you take the lead on translation. You can start with that box and, while you're at it, see if it opens at all. Vincent and Nikko: you're on recording and dry research. I want photographs, sketches and 3D HD imaging of everything we've found; and anything we turn up in the course of our research, you find out about, whether it's ancient tongues or the changing stratigraphy of the planet. Are we clear?"

A varied chorus of assents echoed around the room. People started moving off with artefacts to study, copy or test. Finally the only people remaining at the table were Juliet and Cal. Juliet's eyes remained stolidly fixed on the box in his hands.

"You okay?" Cal asked