Liberty (Flash Gold, #5) by Lindsay Buroker Page B

energy source could
be used for evil—though he had never minded it being in Kali’s
hands. He hoped she found the other half before Amelia did.
    “No desks or cupboards
that she could have stored anything in.” Kali looked under the bed
frame. “Mouse droppings all over under there.”
    “Probably not the ideal
storage environment.” Cedar thumped around more with the axe
handle.
    Kali noticed his thumping
and grabbed a fireplace poker to do the same thing. She tapped the
bricks of the hearth. Minutes passed with nothing but their
asynchronous beat filling the space.
    Now and then, Cedar
looked out the windows, but particularly the one facing the pond.
Those new airships might be keeping the soldiers distracted, but he
couldn’t assume that the search for them had been halted. Even if
the airship had been diverted, the Mounties could continue their
search on foot, and they had some decent trackers among their
ranks.
    “The spider
must
have been guarding something.” Kali lowered her poker with a clank,
then dropped to her knees in front of the firebox.
    Cedar walked over and
thumped on the floorboards beside the hearth. He had almost given
up on finding anything down there, but the axe thudded hollowly. He
tapped the planks a few feet away. A solid sound. He returned to
the floor by the hearth. Definitely a hollow sound.
    “Kali? I might have found
something.” He tapped around more, trying to identify the size of
the hollow spot. It extended across several floorboards, so it was
definitely larger than a niche for hiding valuables. Maybe he’d
found a staircase to a root cellar that had been dug off to the
side of the cabin?
    Kali had her head inside
the chimney, her body twisted so she could look up, and she did not
seem to have heard him. “Ah, what’s this?”
    “More mouse droppings?”
Cedar dropped to his knees and slid his hands along the dusty
floorboards, looking for a crack or a hidden lever.
    “No…”
    “Mildew? Mold?”
    Kali crawled further into
the hearth, her shoulders disappearing up into the chimney.
    “Soot?” Cedar abandoned
his search for a trapdoor for the moment and crouched beside her in
case she needed help. Who knew if the crazy inventor woman might
have booby-trapped the chimney?
    A soft clank came from
inside. Kali grunted, then wriggled back out, her face and hair
coated with soot.
    “I see my guess was
accurate,” Cedar said, brushing the fine black powder from her
braid.
    “What?” Kali barely
seemed aware of him. She had pulled something down from the chimney
and stared down at it.
    A book? A journal?
    She opened it with sooty
fingers, revealing a page mixed with drawings and small cursive
writing.
    “Are these her notes?”
Kali asked, wonder in her voice. “There’s a date on this page.
August 17, 1867. This predates me. My existence, I mean.”
    “Are you sure it belonged
to her and isn’t the diary of some mad trapper who was pining away
for a woman during some long winter nights?” Cedar would have
believed that the cabin had been abandoned for more than twenty
years.
    “Would a mad trapper have
gotten poetic about Maxwell’s Treatise on Electricity and
Magnetism?” Kali asked, pointing to a page.
    “Depends on
how
mad he was.”
    Kali snorted. “This is
amazing. Why would she have left her notes here?”
    “Maybe she thought she’d
get caught blowing up the mountainside and didn’t want to risk the
Mounties getting ahold of a book filled with such scintillating
topics.”
    Kali flipped through the
pages, then froze about a quarter of the way into the journal. Long
seconds passed as she stared down at scribbles and equations. They
made no sense to Cedar, but the lump sketched in the margin looked
vaguely like a lump of ore.
    “Is that—” he
started.
    “Flash gold,” Kali
breathed.
    “It’s not the recipe, is
it?”
    “I… I’m not sure. I need
to go through this carefully. When we met her, she said she’d
worked with my father, right? Been