Tula looked up at him in surprise. "Why not?"
"The other bedroom should be for the baby." His hand moved to rest on the swell of her belly. "But even if this house had a third bedroom, I wouldn't want the workshop to be inside and for him to breathe in the dust."
That hadn't occurred to her, but he was right. Her son would be human for the first thirteen years of his life. Fragile. Their home needed to be pristine.
"You need somewhere to work."
"I'll build a shed outside where the sawdust and noise won't disturb you or the baby." He kissed her forehead. "Until it's done, I can continue working at my old place. Davuh and Roven won't mind. They're hardly ever there anyway."
"A shed," she repeated. "I like that. But with air conditioning and windows." She imagined herself walking out of the house to bring him tea or a snack, her big pregnant belly pointing the way.
Tears pricked at her eyes, but they were happy tears, the kind that seemed to come so easily now that she'd let go of the anger and allowed love in.
Esag was planning a future with her and her child, thinking about nurseries and workshops and all the practical details of building a life together.
A life. A real life, with a partner who loved her and a baby and a welcoming community to raise her child in.
After five thousand years of existence, she was finally going to live.
"I love you," she said again, because she could. Because she wanted to. Because she'd spent so many years believing that those words were never going to leave her mouth. Now that she'd set them free, she never wanted to stop saying them.
30
LOSHAM
The drilling had started two days ago, and the crew Losham had tasked with breaking into the sand enclosure was no closer to breaching it than when they'd begun.
Losham stood in the cramped service corridor adjacent to the mysterious glass chamber, watching the construction crew struggle with equipment that seemed woefully inadequate for the task. Dust hung in the air, coating everything in a fine gray film, and the constant whine of diamond-tipped drill bits grinding against concrete was giving him a headache.
"We've hit another problem," Grovdan said, approaching with a tablet clutched in his grease-stained hands. The Russian engineer had been brought in specifically for this project, one of the few people on the island with experience in structural demolition. His expression suggested the news was not good.
"What now?" Losham asked, not bothering to hide his irritation.
"The walls are not standard construction." Grovdan turned the tablet to show him a diagram covered in notations. "We assumedreinforced concrete, yes? Standard stuff. Drill through, shore up, proceed. But this..." He shook his head. "This is something else."
"Please explain."
"The concrete is embedded with a steel mesh, very dense, very tight weave. But that's not the real problem." Grovdan zoomed in on a section of the diagram. "Beneath the steel mesh is a layer of some kind of composite material. Carbon fiber, maybe, or something similar. Our drill bits are wearing down before they can penetrate more than a few centimeters."
Losham stared at the diagram, frustration building in his chest. "So, get harder drill bits."
"We've already gone through our entire supply of diamond-tipped bits. I've ordered more, but they won't arrive for another week." Grovdan lowered the tablet. "And even then, I'm not certain they'll work. This composite layer is designed to resist exactly this kind of intrusion. Whoever built this enclosure did not want anyone getting inside."
That much was obvious. Navuh had constructed this chamber with the same paranoid attention to detail he applied to everything else. Multiple layers of protection, redundant security measures, and biometric locks that responded only to his retinal scan. Whatever was buried under that sand was something Navuh considered either extremely valuable or extremely dangerous.
Perhaps both.
"What about going through the floor?" Losham asked. "Or the ceiling?"
"Same problem. The enclosure is essentially a box within a box. The walls, floor, and ceiling are all constructed the same way. Concrete, steel mesh, composite layer. All except the glass wall." Grovdan scratched at his stubbly chin. "And there's another issue. The structural analysis shows that this chamber is load-bearing. If we compromise the walls too aggressively, we risk collapsing the entire section of the building above us, meaning the lord's mansion."
Losham suppressed a curse. He couldn't bring down Navuh's mansion to satisfy his curiosity. The island's occupants were under the impression that Navuh was still there, managing things from the harem. Dave was instrumental in maintaining the illusion, but there was a limit to what he could do and how many people he could compel to silence. It was impossible to hide the noise generated by the crew drilling under the mansion, but it could be explained away. Yet it would be impossible to explain the entire building collapsing.
"There must be another way," he said.
"There is one option." Grovdan didn't sound enthusiastic. "We could try to cut through the glass itself. It's thick, tempered, and reinforced, but glass is still glass. With the right tools and enough time, we could create an opening."
"How long would it take?"
