Chapter 34 - The Second Seam
I couldn't sleep. Nora had gone back upstairs to sit vigil beside Lily’s bed, leaving me alone with the silence of the vast manor and the silver artifact on my desk.
Under the bright halogen lamp of my workbench, I slipped on a jeweler’s loupe and examined the new Zippo.
The engraving was masterful. The raven’s eye wasn’t just a simple line; it was a microscopic dot. But as I angled the casing beneath the light, I noticed something odd about the hinge. The pin holding the top lid to the bottom reservoir wasn't a standard steel cylinder. It had a tiny, recessed hexagonal notch on the left side.
I grabbed a precision micro-screwdriver from my drawer. Carefully, holding my breath, I seated the magnetic tip into the notch and turned.
With a soft, metallic click, the hinge pin slid free.
The top lid detached. Inside the hollowed-out channel of the brass chimney sat a strip of translucent synthetic film, no wider than a matchstick and tightly coiled around a needle-thin spool.
I extracted the film with tweezers and laid it flat under the magnifying glass.
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It wasn't text. It was a high-resolution microscopic print of a blueprint—an underground utility map. Across the bottom of the schematic, scribbled in Julian’s unmistakable, sharp handwriting, was a set of GPS coordinates and a single sentence:
*The fire didn't start with Richard. It started at Blackwood Ridge. Midnight tomorrow.*
