One day, right after midnight, when everybody had retired for the day. Lorca took a floating platform and quietly flew to the cube building. The cube building was a massive structure in the middle of the main park. It was covered with thin sheets of gold foil and lit somehow which made it shine in a way that it looked like something worth worshiping. The whole thing was an amazing sight to see. A monument to power. And, Partica controlled access to it completely.
The building was a perfect cube many stories high with no windows or openings of any sort, surrounded by a round moat, and covered by a sphere of what looked like glass to prevent floating platforms from getting close. On one side of the cube, half way up one of the walls, there was the only visible feature of the building. A small round feature that looked like a stained glass window in the form of a beautiful eye.
Once there, Lorca pulled a disc that Marcato had given him out of his satchel. The disc was made of the same material that most things in this planet were made of. Nice and smooth. This disc had been developed by Marcato's ancestors as a way to cross solid objects without having to carve tunnels. The disc was instrumental in the early days to quickly explore the underground vastness of the planet as they tried to find large natural salt caves that could be used for directing the water from the surface of the planet.
The rope had small cylinders attached to both ends. When the cylinders were pressed, a light beam would show, and a second later the cylinder would fly to wherever the light was pointing. The rope between the cylinders would stretch regardless of how far the cylinders were.
Lorca aimed the light beam of one cylinder to the floor and got that cylinder attached. He aimed the light beam of the other to the stained glass eye across the mote and the cylinder did its thing. Once the rope was in place he went up.
Lorca got the disc out again and attached it to the eye and Lorca went through it into the golden building were the cube was. What he did not expect was that inside the building there were a number of motion sensors that triggered an alarm that reverberated throughout the whole city.
At that moment, the city lit up. Lorca ran into the chamber where the cube was. He later told us that the cube was suspended inside a floating sphere of water that was kept in place with a gravity field that came from somewhere. He thought it was the cube itself because when he stuck his hand in the water sphere and took the cube out, the water sphere came crashing to the floor.
He knew time was of the essence and that the guards will be there any minute so he ran out the building, down the rope, out of the sphere, and onto his floating platform. He glanced around and saw a swarm of platforms full of guards approaching from all directions.
He flew on the flying platform he had as fast as he could towards the fort. He knew Atesta's life depended on him being able to leave this world with the cube. Lorca knew that he was ready to do anything that needed to be done to save her. He wondered if Atesta felt his love across worlds and dimensions at that very moment.
As he arrived at the fort and as he was getting into the portal, the guards stormed the fort and barely missed him. For some unknown reason at the time, the portal refused to let the guards in to follow him.
Partica was livid that he had lost his most precious possession and the source of his power and control over Calarrosa. Partica also knew that Lorca would eventually come back. He knew that it was in Lorca's nature to help people especially those suffering like the underground people under his control.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
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