Don't Split the Party

After a moment of blinding pain passed by, I blinked and took in my surroundings, looking for witnesses or threats. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw none, and slowly straightened up. The moment of crisis had gone by in an instant, because now if someone found us where we shouldn’t have been, they wouldn’t immediately think that we were in a possession of a billion-dollar piece of equipment that nations would have killed to get their hands on. We’d still be in trouble, but it would be more ‘breaking and entering’ trouble, not ‘stole a nuke’ trouble.

Our destination was a fancy restaurant with a private back room where a much younger Amaryllis had eaten with her mother and a number of guests. We had gone in the morning, before the restaurant would be open, on the hope that the only people there (if any) would be kitchen staff doing prep work, and then ideally we could slip past by leaving out the front door. This, we accomplished with relative ease. I again used the hilt of the An