The sun had climbed and the room was full of hard light now.
I sat on the floor with my legs bent, looking at the stone. Venna's laughter filled the room.
"It genuinely cannot get worse than this." She sat down near me, her legs bent the same way, both of us staring at the same object. Then she laughed again—short, disbelieving, the sound of someone who had decided the only remaining option was to find it funny.
We'd gone through every room in the building twice more. No keys. Nothing hard enough to matter. And the one stone in the entire place was sitting in the room furthest from the fridge.
That would have been fine on its own.
The problem was the size of it. About the size of a twenty-litre jerrycan, and it had the weight to match. The thing sat there like it had been placed specifically to mock us—flat on three sides, corners rounded by age, the surface rough and warm from the room's heat.
