Chapter 15: "Not now. Not ever."

Cooking, unless it involved a frying pan, was not a Zond skill, neither father nor son, but coffee definitely was. Juliet filled the broad, oversized mug and stood for a moment taking in the aroma as if every inhalation could replace an hour's worth of lost sleep. It suited her to let Anthony think her tired eyes and contagious yawns were the product of the box and its contents, but too many people in this neat little puzzle box of her life would spot that lie in an instant. She might get away with it with the Professor or Maggie if they were focussed on something else. Either one of them could switch focus faster than she cared to admit, though. Nikko and Vincent were always either focussed on everything or nothing these days, and neither option bode well for her. And Cal...

"You're early," Cal's voice had the effect a shower and three large, strong coffees had failed to have. Juliet jumped, some of the hot liquid sloshing over the side of the still full mug. Cal grabbed a cloth and hurried over. "Sorry. Didn't mean to startle you."

"It's okay," winced Juliet, putting the coffee down before it could do any more damage and turning to the sink. The cold water stung, but there was no chance of her drifting into another daydream now. "I overfilled it."

"You okay?" Cal frowned down at her, mopping up the spilt coffee.

"Other than the literally scalding wake-up call?" Juliet laughed. "I'm fine. Just tired."

"I've seen you tired," began Cal, but Juliet held up a hand.

"Don't, not right now," she warned. The pain in her hand still stung, but now her fingers were starting to go numb with the cold too. Juliet turned off the tap and grabbed a towel, then her coffee. "I'll see you in the lab. We've got a job to do."

Cal's eyebrows flicked upwards, the only outward sign that Juliet's last words had hit home. He threw the coffee soaked cloth in the sink and poured himself a mug. Maybe Juliet wouldn't have told Nikko as much as he had, but the kid had certainly made her drag up some ill-buried memories. The question now was whether Juliet would be able to bury them again, like she had the first time.

XXXX

6 ½ Months Ago – five days after the fall

"Anything?"

"Nothing."

"Juliet, come sit down and eat something. You need a break."

"Don't tell me what I need, Calvin."

Cal held up his hands in surrender. "Whatever. There's water and food there for you when you want it. I'm going to sleep."

Juliet rounded on him. "How can you sleep now? Dorna might come through that door any minute!"

"They won't, I…"

"Don't," warned Juliet, wagging a finger at him. "Don't you dare say you 'have faith', or you 'know' or any other reference to anything you may or may not have heard while cracking your skull open on some dodgy mediaeval masonry."

"My skull is fine," yawned Cal. "Aside from a small cut, a huge bruise and a headache that varies somewhere in between, I'm fine. Besides, I think it's clear this room was more than just a quiet little space for a scribe to get some work done in. We have a door that wouldn't open until the one behind it was closing. I'm ninety percent sure I was standing on a pressure plate at the time and wouldn't be surprised if this solid stone floor turns out to be another. One that keeps that door closed until the person on this side chooses otherwise. Then there's the mysterious cabinet that refuses to open. Hardly the sort of thing found in your everyday scriptorium."

"Why do you think I'm trying to open it, Calvin?" Juliet shot back.

"Eat, sleep," suggested Cal. "Then we'll both look at it in the morning with clear heads."

"Not tired, not hungry," replied Juliet, running her fingers over the line of one wooden panel.

Cal sighed and lay down. "Suit yourself."

XXXX

If Professor Solomon Zond noticed Juliet and Calvin arrive for the morning briefing almost simultaneously and later than everyone else bar Vincent, he said nothing. Nikko stayed silent also, but his expression was eloquent. Juliet considered throwing the remains of her coffee at him, but decided she needed it more. Either he or Cal would surely try and talk to her about Syria at the next given opportunity and she had not had enough hours of sleep to deal with either of them. It didn't help that the very topic they both wanted to discuss, from completely different viewpoints and for – at least she hoped – completely different reasons, was in part responsible for keeping her awake all night. She hated – really, truly hated – to admit it, but she had a growing feeling that Cal was right. Right about Anthony, at least. Right to be suspicious. Anything else was, well, coincidence. Of course she felt uncomfortable with him in her personal space. Wouldn't everyone? So what if her pulse jumped every time he was near her: that didn't mean anything. Maybe her relationship with Anthony was on the rocks. Maybe she would break up with him. It still didn't mean a severe knock on the head could predict the future. Even if things did go that way, and she did end up with Cal, it would be because she chose that path, not because it had been chosen for her. They had always worked well together, as friends and colleagues, and maybe they would be a good match. Maybe a logical match. Maybe that was all Cal's 'premonition' was: logic. The logic of his unconscious, subconscious, whatever, put together with the hundred tiny clues that must have been so blindingly obvious after he caught her at the foot of the jet stairs.

"Juliet? Juliet!" Professor Zond's voice broke through the haze of Juliet's mind.

"Huh? Sorry," Juliet blinked the world back into focus. "Sorry, Professor, what was that?"

"I said we leave in two hours. Get what you need for a few nights, maybe a week, and meet us at the airfield."

"Right, sure, of course," nodded Juliet. She watched everyone file out. One notable figure hung back.

"You sure you're okay?" Cal murmured from his side of the table. "I take it back. You are tired."

"Just a lot on my mind," replied Juliet, shaking her head. Her eyes finally focussed on the strange map in the middle of their workspace. "Where are we going?"

"Wissembourg, North-eastern France, on the border with Germany. Maggie worked her magic on the samples and her data fits with our findings. It's France in August, so pack warm, but bring a raincoat."

Juliet nodded, still watching the map as if it held all the answers to all the mysteries of the world. Maybe it did, in a way. Or maybe it just held the answers to this little cache of conundrums.

"You know you can still talk to me about stuff," Cal added, watching the unmoving form opposite him. "Whatever else I may or may not be to you, Juliet, I will always be your friend."

Juliet's eyes flicked up to his. The world held its breath. "I think you were right."

XXXX

6 ½ Months Ago – six days after the fall

Juliet awoke with a start. She winced and groaned, raising a hand to the back of her neck. She was sitting slumped against the cabinet, her head aching from where it had rested against the leg of the desk. A shiver ran through her. Whatever heat the underground room had gathered during the day, it now appeared to have lost. Flicking on her flashlight, she saw Cal, wrapped up in a sleeping bag, fast asleep on the floor on the opposite side of the room. Her sleeping bag lay by him, ready for whenever she chose to use it.

It took her a moment to persuade her stiff limbs to cooperate, but Juliet managed to raise herself to a crouch without making too much noise. There was, after all, no reason why at least one of them shouldn't get a good night's sleep, if they were able. The light from her flashlight fell on the base of the cabinet. The seemingly solid wood panels reached right down to the stone floor of the room, the grain of the aged wood reflecting warm treacle-toned light streaked with gold. A jump in the pattern of the grain caught Juliet's eye. It was small, but it was there. She reached out and brushed her fingers over the mismatch. There was a cut in the wood there. She followed it, tracing its edge with the tips of her fingers. The cut turned and moved horizontally for a while, then down. It was a box. A rectangular box in the wood, right at its base, large enough for a foot to find and press. Juliet stood up, careful to keep her foot beside the box. Should she wake Cal first? It might be nothing: just a patch in the base of a centuries old cabinet that must surely have been damaged at some point in its life. On the other hand, it was the only clue she had found so far.

Slowly, steadily, Juliet pushed the rectangular panel inward. There was resistance at first but then a click and the bone-shaking, grinding sound of stone moving against stone for the first time in almost a millennium. Cal sat up.

"What's going on?" Cal demanded over the juddering cacophony of ancient mechanisms re-awakening.

"I found it," replied Juliet, turning her flashlight on the now only marginally different cabinet.

"I may still be asleep," murmured Cal, running a hand over his eyes, "but that sounded like an awful lot of noise for not a lot of difference in the thing."

"Maybe," shrugged Juliet. She reached out a hand to the side of the cabinet and the door swung open to her arm. She reached over and flicked open the other door. The top half of the cabinet now showed a variety of locked boxes and pigeon holes. Most were empty. Some held dusty and decaying bags of coins. Juliet fished a lockpick out of her pocket and started work on the locked boxes. "Are you going back to sleep or are you going to help me with this."

"If I do, will you please eat something?" Cal bargained, disentangling himself from his sleeping bag and finding his own lockpick.

"When we're done," Juliet promised the lock she was working on. "If I'm hungry."

XXXX

"You're gonna have to be more specific," breathed Cal, edging round the corner of the table, hands in pockets. "We haven't exactly been agreeing on much lately."

"Right about Tony, Anthony," Juliet replied, correcting the slip with a shrugged shoulder and shake of her head as she edged round the corner of the table at her end. "Right to be suspicious. There's something not right."

"You think he's Dorna?" Cal murmured, watching Juliet drain the last of her coffee and set the mug down beside the map.

"I don't know, he…" Juliet broke off with a wince and turned her attention to the empty mug. "These last few days, since you've all been back, with the artefact and all… I don't know, it's like he wants to know all about my work, even though he says he doesn't understand it and he wants me to quit. He says it's too dangerous, then he starts sneaking into the building. He wants to know how the labs are set up and how closely we work together. At first I thought it was just, you know: he's jealous of you, same way you're jealous of him."

"I'm not jealous," broke in Cal. " I just think he's going to hurt you and I know he's not right for you."

"I'm beginning to think you're right about that too," admitted Juliet, looking up from the empty mug. "About him not being right for me. Because he's throwing up way too many red flags for me right now. But he won't hurt me. Not now. Not ever. He can't."

"You sure about that?" Cal asked, watching her eyes. For once, they didn't look away.

"I'm sure."

XXXX

"What's the fuss?" Vincent enquired of a rapidly receding Solomon Zond. He had returned to the Veritas building in time to pass Solomon on the way to the kitchen.

"I forgot to pick up the water for the jet," Solomon called, reappearing from the kitchen doorway with a plastic five gallon bottle of water in each hand. He handed one to Vincent as he passed him. "Car's out back."

"Where are we going?" Vincent requested, following Solomon out through the building's corridors to the slowly filling vehicle that awaited them.

"France," replied Solomon, handing his water bottle to Nikko, who was leaning up against the driver's door. Solomon raised his eyebrows at his son. "No!"

"But…" Nikko's complaints were lost as his father turned back to the building, Vincent, sans water bottle, following.

"Little town on the German border, top of the Alsace region," elaborated the Professor. "It's called Wissembourg. You know it?"

"Not off the top of my head," admitted Vincent. The two men turned and headed up the stairs. "I'm familiar with some of the history of the region though. It has changed hands numerous times, I believe."

"Lots of times," agreed Solomon with a nod. "Maggie's analysis puts the box there or thereabouts somewhere in the sixth to seventh centuries, although we think the tablet is older. We know there is an abbey church in Wissembourg that was built in the… Well, all the way through the mediaeval period, really. For the most part, what you see is what was built in the latter part of the thirteenth century at the order of the Abbot Edelin, but some parts didn't appear until a couple of hundred years later and the oldest section dates from a couple of hundred years before. There's been an abbey there, though, from the seventh century, same time period as our box. Now records are a little sketchy on when exactly the abbey was founded because it seems there was a point in their history when it was deemed necessary to do a little rewrite of the official record, however, all variations of the truth put it in that century somewhere and I am willing to bet that whatever caused someone to put down roots in one of the most contested chunks of land in the area has something to do with that box. Almost as soon as it was founded, the abbey apparently grew and grew in wealth and stature until sometime in the tenth century when one of the local bigwigs decided to take a sizeable chunk of the abbeys holdings for his own church. We can't be sure if the box was already gone by then, but we know it wasn't there by the time the majority of the current church was built."

Vincent, barely out of breath, paused with his friend on the upper landing. "How so?"

Solomon, considerably more out of breath than Vincent, held up a hand for a moment's pause. "The Codex Edelini," he gasped. "The same bishop who caused the building of the current structure also ordered a book to be written inventorying all the remaining property of the abbey. He also had all the properties the abbey had lost included in the book. Neither list mentions any kind of relic or box matching our box's description."

"Then what do you hope to find there?" Vincent frowned, falling in step with Solomon again as they made their way along the corridor.

"I don't know," Solomon shrugged, stopping outside Vincent's door. "A clue, some hint of how the box got there perhaps. Maybe even whether the box originated there and the tablet came to the region from further afield."

"Dorna will be watching us," warned the security expert.

"Ah, when aren't they," Solomon shrugged again and turning to his own door across the hall. "Besides: if they're not skulking in the shadows I start worrying I'm not doing my job properly! We shouldn't be more than a few days, a week tops. Don't take too long packing."

"I always have a bag ready," grinned Vincent.