The ground was soft from the rain the day before, but not overly muddy. We dug for over an hour, Scylla starting from one end of our gridded-off workspace and me from the other, working methodically across the area, gradually moving closer together. By noon, we were about a meter apart and caked in mud. She was close enough that, when her trowel hit something in the dirt, I heard its metallic thud, softly.

She stared down at it for a moment. Then she glanced over at me, expression urgent, and looked pointedly down toward the dirt-encrusted object beneath her fingertips.

“Did you find something, Scylla?” asked Gilbert, one of the TAs supervising in our trench.

“Not sure,” she replied, her voice wobbling slightly. “I think it’s just a big rock.”

Gilbert pulled out his palmtop and took a couple of steps forward. Scylla’s wide eyes shot over to me. Before I could react, though, a shriek rang out from Trench 21.

The three of us leapt, startled. The radio at Gilbert’s hip crackled to life. “Professor Gomez,” a staticky voice intoned, “we need you in Trench 21 right away. And we need to call GSAF out here ASAP.”

Gilbert’s eyebrows furrowed. “The hell?” he breathed, and moved away from us, gingerly climbing up the slick, muddy slope out of the trench.

Distantly, I heard someone crying in the next trench over. What in the world was going on?

“Isaak, quick,” Scylla hissed, dragging my attention back to the matter at hand. “Help me get this out of the ground.”

The object she’d uncovered was a flat, trapezoidal thing, about fifteen centimeters across and five centimeters thick. It was completely coated in red mud, but as she brushed at it with her fingers, I could see that beneath the dirt it was at least partially metallic, and covered in symbols and markings that were eerily similar to those on the missing coin.

“What do you think it is?” I whispered.

“I have no clue. But you know what? I’m sick of GSAF taking everything from us before we get a chance find out. I want to get a better look at this thing.”

“How are we going to do that, exactly?” The rumbling sound of an approaching helicopter echoed off the hills around us. “That’s probably GSAF now. You heard the guy on the walkie.”

“We’ll have to hide it,” Scylla said matter-of-factly, thrusting the muddy object toward me.

I stared at her, dumbfounded. “How am I supposed to hide it?”

“Stick it under your shirt!” She had to shout, now, to be heard over the near-deafening sound of the looming chopper blades. I looked skyward. A black-and-white police helicopter was bearing down on us. They’d called the police?

“Hold on!” I yelled back. “The cops—”