Page 81 of Night's Reckoning
He is leaving me.
Tenzin swallowed the knot in her throat. “He is coordinating between the vampire team and the human one, smoothing relations between the two of them to make sure communication flows appropriately and the recovery is seamless. He organized a party on the ship for better relations.”
“A clever idea. It seems he is an invaluable addition to the team,” Zhang said. “You were wise to insist on his presence.”
“Invaluable.” Tenzin picked up her tea. “Yes, he is invaluable.”
21
Ben watched Johari surface in the early-morning hours. The survey of the wreck had lasted three days while the human team took 3-D images of the wreck site and documented everything by video and photograph as well as sonar scan. Ben suspected that they had noticed various storage jars going missing from accessible parts of the wreck, but they didn’t say a word.
There was nothing more they could document from images, so official removal of artifacts had finally begun, and Cheng had brought Johari down to the wreck to move the sediment as delicately as she could.
“What is it this time?” Ben called down while Kadek’s men lowered a basket made for human rescue.
“Timbers from the hull,” Johari said. “Are there tanks large enough?”
“Yep. Fabia will want to do wood analysis if she can.” According to Fabia, letting any object dry out or shocking it with freshwater would cause damage, so it would be the job of the university to desalinate them properly. The holding tanks were only temporary.
What Cheng was doing with the artifacts he’d taken for himself, Ben didn’t know, and he wasn’t asking. He’d come to terms with his role for this job. He had given Zhang his word that he’d finish the job, so he would. Anything beyond that wasn’t his concern. His job was to recover the sword or whatever was left of it and return it to Penglai.
That was it. And that would be the end.
He paced along the edge of the deck, enjoying the whip of wind across his chest. He’d been diving in the morning, taken a nap to recharge, and woken to find his cabin sweltering from an afternoon heat wave. He stripped down to a pair of board shorts and walked up to the deck to observe the vampires and take advantage of the breeze.
He hadn’t seen Tenzin for two nights, and he hadn’t looked for her.
Cheng’s men used the crane to bring the long timbers up from the surface and onto the deck, shouting orders at each other while they worked. Ancient wooden pieces passed the modern metal hull of the research vessel. Boards that had been hewn in East Africa and had once sailed the ocean were loaded and handled like porcelain as the sailors moved them from the basket to the saltwater tanks.
Ben heard Johari dive again as Cheng surfaced. He was carrying two large storage jars in a bamboo basket. The area around him was glowing green from floodlights they had secured around the dive site.
“Hoist!” Cheng yelled, and the men came scurrying.
Ben walked over to see what they had already brought up. Fabia was overseeing the tanks, moving and bracing each jar with whatever she could find to keep it stable.
“How’s it going?”
“I can’t complain,” she said. “They’re moving fast, but they have an earth vampire who can literally move the sediment around each jar, so there’s little to no damage. Look at this.”
She pointed toward yellow tape that had been tied around the handle of one jar. “It has depth readings and measurements on it.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that once we collect all the data and the scans, we’ll be able to match each jar to its location on the ship.”
“Wow. So they’re not just taking stuff out.”
“They’re documenting it. It’s extraordinary. The most careful human excavation can’t match these results.”
Her confidence reassured Ben, who was trying to ignore Tenzin’s warning about the earth vampire.
“Johari might be trustworthy, but there will be no assumption from me. Watch her and wait. Don’t suppose that we are all working toward the same goal, Benjamin.”
Nothing about the woman said she wasn’t on their team. She was doing an extraordinary job with not a single complaint, unlike Kadek, who regularly grumbled about any task Ben asked of him.
Still, he couldn’t criticize any of their work. The artifacts recovered were in better shape than he’d hoped, and the farther they went under the sediment, the better they’d been preserved. Some of the glass and metal objects looked like a simple clean and polish was all they needed.
Fabia had explained that they needed far more than that, but to Ben’s eye, what they had found was extraordinary.
