At the bottom of the hole lay a rusty expanse of sheet metal, about a meter square. One edge showed a set of hinges and the opposite edge had a handle. “I think it’s a lid,” Alex said eagerly.

“I think so too.” I leaned against him. His body was warm and solid.

“Can we open it?” he asked.

“We probably shouldn’t,” I told him. “Jerith would want to document everything first. The position of this thing in the hole, the depth, all that. And we don’t want to damage whatever’s inside. Didn’t most of those Egyptian mummies crumble to dust when people opened the sarcophagus?”

Alex’s face fell. “You mean I make a major discovery and I can’t even see what it is?”

“It’s up to you,” I answered. “You wanted to impress Jerith, right? For that, you have to be meticulous.” I squeezed his waist tightly. Very tightly. But I tried to make my voice sound playful. “If you open it, I won’t tell anyone.”

He whooped with elation and leapt, sliding down the loose dirt to the bottom of the hole. I knew Jerith would be appalled at what Alex was up to, but it certainly wouldn’t be a serious blow to science. You couldn’t walk thirty seconds in a straight line without tripping over debris from Caproche’s war — the entire surface of the planet was heaped with the stuff. Given so much material to draw upon, Jerith’s investigation would scarcely suffer if one artifact wasn’t dug up with full pomp and circumstance. Besides, after my recent experience, my dream, whatever it was, I loved Alex’s high spirits and didn’t want to dampen them.

The box’s handle was set too tightly against the lid, at least by human standards — it must have been built for an alien race with thinner hands, or tentacles — but Alex eventually wiggled his fingers under the bar. Down at the bottom of the hole, standing on loose dirt, he wasn’t in a good position for lifting, so I got the shovel and slid down to help, jamming the shovel blade under the lip of the lid and levering upward. Together, we managed to break the grip of the rust holding the lid shut, and with protests from the hinges, the lid groaned open.