Grand Lyons didn't even give Chadrick a civil glance. He was gazing toward a man slowly driving across the grounds on a strangely ornate wheelchair. He had silver black hair, sharp features, and an eternally depressed expression.
"Lir!" Grand yelled to the man in the wheelchair, waving the artifact back and forth.
To Chadrick's surprise, Lir smiled for the first time since he had met him, and his wheelchair shot across the high grass. Grand ran up to meet him.
"Is this it?" Lir's voice quivered, reaching up. Oh tell me it is, Mr. Lyons!" Grand handed him the artifact, who received it with desperate fingers. "Are we finally getting off this cursed planet?"
Grand nodded. "We can save your people, Duke. We can get back home and stop the darkness."
Lir turned it over a couple of times, inspecting it. He spoke softly, "After ten long years …" He placed the artifact back into Grand's open palm.
Chadrick didn't know what to make of this strange interaction, other than to confirm what he'd thought about the old project leader and his morose wheel-chaired friend.
They were a couple of weirdos.
Grand cupped his hand around the artifact and spit.
"Ugh." Chadrick covered his mouth.
Grand rubbed the artifact, spit again, and then scratched it with blackened nails. Chadrick dug through his back pocket and offered up a brush. How did Grand not know this artifact was thousands of years old and hadn't come into human contact in all that time?
Grand ignored him. Instead he took the artifact back from Lir, "Discovered it just where you told me it would be, Ludwig. Didn't have to make it so hard to find though. You and your puzzles."
"It—it is quite strange," Chadrick said, trying to bring this conversation back to something that resembled normalcy. "The words—they're English. Definitely not Incan."
"And why should they be?" Grand's face rounded on the object.
Uh," Chadrick tilted his head in curiosity, "Maybe because the Incan's came before the English?"
"this was laid here when Peru was nothing more than an ice sheet."
A stick cracked in the distance. In one motion, the project leader shoved the artifact into his coat, reached behind his neck, and unsheathed a battle axe.
"Woah." Chadrick scrambled backward. "What? What?"
He traced a figure eight with the axe head. The jungle responded in silence.
"Wh—why do you have a battle axe at the dig … at all?" Chadrick cocked his head. "And where do you keep that thing?"
"They'll find us," Lir warned. "It's only a matter of time, Mr. Lyons."
Grand mysteriously hid the axe again. He then curled both fists around the artifact.
Snap.
The artifact broke in two.
"Are you crazy?" Chadrick grabbed his brown dreadlock hair as panic shot through his body. The oldest artifact in human history and the old man just snapped it in two like some piece of twig!
Grand chuckled and opened his palm. Now broken, Chadrick could see the artifact was hollow. There, in its metallic shell lay a key. It was large and had the words engraved on it: Steward's Viachron Key
"I, um, I …" Chadrick mumbled.
Grand closed his eyes and hit his fist against his own head, smiling. "We have the key. We can turn on the machine, Lir, We can finally go home."
Grand raised his eyes up and tears had traced down his cheek, leaving dirty track marks. He patted his hands together, nodded, and declared to the archaeological team, "I have tarried long enough. Must find my grandson. Good day to you all." Without another word, he marched to his yellow hovertruck, which was as swarthy and beat-up as he.
"Your grandson?" Chadrick whispered, "You're just gonna leave?"
"Yes," Grand answered, holding up the key. "Only Nikolas can turn the machine on and get us back home. Only he can complete the mission."
"Mission?" Chadrick screwed up his face.
From his wheelchair, Lir weakly smiled and turned his vacant gaze to Chadrick, "To save my people, dear sir. The Merfolk."