I honestly didn't realize that 'tea' was English for dinner, so when Lady Croft brings me into a sunny greenhouse area with a small table decorated with expensive looking food, wine and dishware, I'm taken aback.

Zip is already there with Alex, and both of them are chatting away about the best optimizer for their desktops, or something equivalently nerdy. She circles the table and pulls out the chair on the right-most corner, beckoning me to her. The gesture almost makes me blush; who told her she could be so gentlemanly for chrissakes? Not even the guys I've dated in the past pull out my chairs for me. I sit down hesitantly, and she takes the chair at the head of the table to my right, pouring herself a flue of Cabernet and filling mine as well. I drain it immediately.

"It's a pleasant diversion of the norm, to have company," she says, sipping the rim of the flue delicately. "Even if they are liars." She makes hard, direct eye contact at Alex when she adds this and he nearly chokes on his booze. I hold back my awkward laugh. Somewhere in my mind I can feel that vision still lurking, and it makes me want to drink more, so I fill my glass again and take my time with it.

Alex and Zip continue talking amongst themselves busily. As I watch them, a strong hand presses against my shoulder.

"You're on-edge, Miss Nishimura." It's not a question, but a statement. I felt as if I couldn't lie to her, or that I just shouldn't. Her raw presence is really something to behold.

"Why am I here, Lady Croft?" I ask quietly. She quirks her brow at me and turns the corner of her mouth up.

"Because you snuck in." I can tell by her tone that she knows that's not what I mean. After a moment she sighs and leans back in her chair.

"I suppose… it's because I want you here."

Her answer startles me. "Why?" I reply incredulously.

Her rich brown eyes turn to the glass ceiling. "Maybe it's because I'm bored. My instincts are telling me to have you stay, though I can't say why. But my instincts have never been wrong."

Her face remains unreadable as she speaks. "There something very familiar about you."

"You've probably seen my mugshot around somewhere." I take a fat chunk of pink meat from the silver dish in the center of the table; the sight of how tender it is makes me instantly hungry, despite my stomach still having knots from the tunnels. It's perfectly cooked and is juicy enough to melt in my mouth.

"Damn, this is really good," I say between bites. She smiles and raises her glass in Zip's direction; he gives us a seated bow.

"You cook, too?" Alex says. "Field handler, bodyguard, and cook?"

Lara laughs. "Bodyguard? He couldn't shoot in a straight line if his bloody life depended on it."

"Please," he contests, "And you couldn't cook a bowl of Instant Ramen to save yours."

"Touche." She fills her flue a second time and takes her share of meat, picking the reddest of the pieces. It bleeds as she sets it on her plate.

"I guess it would be fair to give her credit for catching the damn thing. I did the actual cooking though."

"Catching?" I look at her as she takes a bite, satisfied with its quality. "The estate covers many acres of land," Lady Croft explains, "I would rather hunt my food than buy it wrapped in plastic and dyed."

Wow. If I was actually doing the interview I think History would skip the crummy internship and just appoint me to CEO right then and there. I can honestly say with ease that I've never wanted to know more about a person than right now.

"Are you all finished, Miss?" An deep, older sounding voice spooked me from behind. I turn to see an elderly man with a tray of dirty dishes balanced on his shoulder. "May I take your plate?"

Oh my god. Is this her butler or something? Does she have a butler, too? I stare at him dumbly for like five whole seconds before he just takes my dish without another question. He circles around collecting, ending at Lady Croft. She smiles and hands him her silverware.

"Thank you, Winston."

"Of course, Lady Croft. Will your bags require emptying, or filling, may I ask?"

"Don't bother yourself," she replies quickly. "I have a charter booked for the Himalayas in the morning, I need to collect my gear before then."

"Very good, Ma'am." He bows his head at the rest of us and `disappears through the glass doors. He seemed pretty frail to be carrying all of those dishes by himself.

"The Himalayas?" I turn to her; she's already on her feet, pulling her plait to rest over her shoulder. I imagine her hair out of its grip, splayed over her neck and hard stomach and-

I shake my head. What's getting into me lately? I really need to get laid or something.

"I've got an appointment with Shangri-La," she winks casually, strolling off into the greenery. I nearly stumble over myself in my rush to follow her. "Shangri-La? Is that some kind of metaphor or something?"

"No," she responds coolly, stepping over spruces with bare feet. "Shangri-La is real. I've been there before, a handful of years ago on the eastern side of the mountains. I thought perhaps they were just hallucinations, but I've reason to believe the entrance will open again, soon. I want to be there when it happens."

"But…Shangri-La is a myth, isn't it?" I say confusedly.

"Myths almost always bare some form of truth. Someone very important once taught me that." Her face darkens for a moment, as if she's seized by an unpleasant memory. "Shangri-La is told to be a Utopia, a perfect world within itself where people don't age and time doesn't exist. Where war and famine and suffering have never been known. A place of unending tranquility." She strokes a stray hair from her face, and murmurs under her breath. "Maybe I'll find my peace there."

I dig in my brain for memory of the story, another story that my grandmother used to tell me before she passed a few years ago. "But…doesn't it only open, like, once every century or something? Once you go in, you can't get out type of deal?"

"That's right. The first time was a mistake; even I'm not sure how I managed it. But this time, the doorway will open."

"And you'll be trapped for a hundred years?"

"Perhaps," she muses. "It's meant to be a place you never want to leave. Maybe it's where I'm destined to go."

Hearing her say that makes my heart fall into my stomach, and I don't think it's for the sake of the interview. I really don't know why my insides get all twisted at the idea of her leaving and never coming back; I'd just met her, and she maybe traumatized me in her creepy haunted basement an hour ago, but the thought of never seeing her or hearing her voice again makes me feel sick.

"Wait, what about the manor? What about all this?" I gesture my arms out wide at everything around us. "You want to just leave all of this behind? There are people who would kill for your life!"

"Those people wouldn't know a single thing about my life, if they were willing to take it. Let the remnants of my family fight over the Croft fortune; I never wished to carry its burden."`

"Well-" I start. "Well, what if I go with you?"

What? She looks at me with an expression I haven't seen on her yet. What did I just say?

"Are you daft? Do you have any archeological experience?"

"Well…no."

"Mountain climbing experience? Gear? Sherpa connections?"

"…No."

"Surely you see the problem here, Miss Nishimura."

"It's Sam," I say, angry for no real reason. "It's Sam, and I think it's really shitty that you're willing to just leave everything behind so you can go fulfill some…'destiny', or whatever."

She puts her hands on her hips and scoffs. "What business is it of yours?" She sounds amused more than insulted, and that makes me madder.

"I just-" I stutter, my face getting hot suddenly. "I just…I don't want you to disappear, okay?"

The bemused smirk on her lips falls slowly into a neutral line, and her eyes widen for just a second. "Look.." she responds languidly after some pretty awkward silence, "If you want, I'll give you a few quotes. I'm sure that would be enough to-"

"It's not about the interview, dammit." You make me feel important, I want to say. You make me feel like I matter. I feel as if we were supposed to meet sooner, like something went wrong and now we're strangers but we aren't supposed to be. I feel like if I'd known you before, it would have changed me so much that I wouldn't be the wreck I am now. She says she's going, and I feel like I'm the one getting left behind.

"What about Zip?" I say, trying to distract her from my obviously confused inner clamouring. "What happens to him?"

"I've made it clear to him that in the rather likely event of my death or disappearance on the job, he would be granted a severance check that would be enough to raise his children and his children's children."

God, she talks so mechanically about her own life! In the likely event? It's like she's totally okay with the idea of dying.

She inhales evenly and continues her trek, leading me through the indoor jungle and onto a broad marble-white balcony drenched in sunlight. Leaning against the columned rail, she crosses her ankles and faces me, red lips quirked. "Tell me about yourself then, Sam." My name sounds too good in that accent.

"What do you want to know," I reply gruffly, not set on letting her off so easy.

"You can start by telling me who the gentleman you brought in really is."

"Oh." I scratch behind my ear and look away from her. "He's just a friend who I knew would help me."

"Help you break into my home."

"…Yeah."

She's got that amused air about her again, though her facial expression changes very little. "Very well then. Now, why do you need this…interview so much that you were willing to do so?"

I cross my arms over my chest and look to the ground between my feet. After a handful of moments I collect myself enough to answer.

"I'm sick of being a burden. I want to be something. I want to feel like I matter. I dug myself a hole so deep in school, with the police and with my family and with people in general. I just…I didn't have anyone who ever thought I was anything more than a problem child. A mistake. No one ever listened to me or respected me, or looked out for me. I'm a burden on my parents, and I know it. They don't even really talk to me anymore. Last time I got in trouble with the cops, they didn't even bother coming to the station; they just paid them off remotely and got me off the hook."

I take a deep breath and look up to her, half-expecting a bored or regretful expression. But still, just very little obvious reaction. It makes me want to tell her more; she isn't judging me. At least not from what I can tell.

"The only one who still cared was my grandmother. I remember…she used to spend hours telling me stories, about our ancestors. Stories that got me through my childhood. I mean, they couldn't have been real, but..hearing that we had the same blood as, as 'Queen Himiko'," I laugh at the idea. Himiko. What a joke. "It made me feel more significant, I guess."

"What?" I turn back to Lady Croft, and for once she's like an open book. She looks totally beside herself.

"Huh?" Did I say something weird?

"Did you say Queen Himiko? As in, the Sun Queen?" She speaks urgently, stepping closer fast. Her swiftness makes me back up in surprise. "The Sun Queen of Yamatai?"

"Yeah..?" She cups her long fingers over her mouth and creases her eyebrows together tighter. "What? What's wrong?" Her eyes pinch closed before she shoots back through the greenhouse, grabbing the crook of my arm and nearly knocking me over. Before I know it, we're in a dusty library in the far corner of the manor. I ask a lot of questions, but get nothing back; she's too busy shuffling through piles of papers and books, searching for something. In a couple of minutes it seems that she finds what she's looking for.

She thrusts an old, burned paper in my face. On it, there's a white outline of a woman surging with power, suspended between a cloud of storms and ferocious ocean waves at her feet. "These one, here? Is this your Himiko?"

"I-I think so, yeah." A queen with the ability to create storms. It looks like it could be a picture of her. Lady Croft is staring at me intensely when she withdraws the image, as if she's trying to convince herself that I'm lying. Again she dives into the pile of paper, this time coming away with a dirty old notebook with a leather binding and the name 'Mathias' scribbled in pen on the cover. She opens it, scans it, and pulls out a photograph of a shipping crew; it's worn and slightly yellowed on the edges, so it was maybe eight or ten years old. Her eyes stay fixated on it for a long time before she rubs her forehead tiredly between her thumb and forefinger.

"I suppose Shangri-La is going to have to wait."