Julius gets along with everyone, I swear. He the type of dude to just strike up conversation with a random person in Walmart and sit there talking for thirty minutes. I don’t know if that’s a Texan thing or a hood thing. But when I’m trying to get stuff done, it’s annoying.

“Jue, focus. Bri, are we sure?”

“There’s definitely a room of some kind here.” She drags the device along the wall and walks until she’s small in the distance. “And it stops around here,” her voice echoes, rippling down the tunnel. “So it’s a big room. What else could it be?”

I guess there’s only one way to tell. “Back up.” I pool my magic through me and my arms gleam, my hands heating up. I snatch the energy creeping through me and shove.

“Feey’l,” I say. A ripple of light slams into the wall and it cracks, dust particles raining overhead.

“Okay… again.” I square my shoulders and thrust. “Feey’l.”

The crack stretches, zigzagging to the floor. Bri’s eyes comb the ceiling. “Uh, Rue… be careful. I don’t know how much more it can take.”

I lift my hands, hoping this doesn’t bring the place down on top of us.

“Hold up.” Julius whips out a blade from beneath his pant leg and taps the center of the crack. He hammers the back of it with his fist, and bits of wall crumble. “That’s it. Nice and easy. I used to help my uncle with house renovations on the weekends for some side cash.”

Niggas be a gold mine of skills, I swear.

He taps again, chipping away at the crack, and the tiniest hole appears, a ray of light barely visible there. We listen.

“No one’s there,” I say, grabbing a chunk of wall. It’s cold and brittle in my fingers, crumbling like cake as I toss it away. “Let’s get this hole bigger.”

It takes several minutes, but we pull apart the pieces of the crumbling wall enough to really see inside. It’s definitely a room. Bri was right about that.

“They sealed this one with a veil,” Bri says, noticing the same thing I am. “No one would ever know there was a room here because there’s no door. Smart.”

There are tables and storage containers everywhere. Wires hang from above, but from the hole, that’s about all I can make out.

“Here, let me. My HologrifX might…” Bri shoves a metal sphere about the size of a golf ball through the hole in the wall and brings her wrist to her nose. Orange light from her watch slices the darkness, flickering the room into view. A hologram 3D image of the room hovers above her wrist and she rotates our view by spinning a finger.