"Avian, we talked about this. Stop putting the peanut butter jar back into the cabinet after you've finished it!" Harper cried, tossing the empty jar into the trash can.

Fresh out of the shower, Avian's wet blond curls hung limply around his face as he cast his eyes to the floor like a Labrador puppy, which made Harper feel like a monster for chiding him. He knew exactly how to work her.

"I'm sorry, Harper," said Avian. "We came back late last night," he gave her a meaningful glance. "As you know."

Had he heard them?

A sly smile crept up on his face. "And, well, it was either that or the chocolate cake."

Harper yanked the fridge door open and sighed with relief: the cake was still there. "You better not," she warned.

He raised his hands in surrender and crossed his heart, too.

Harper made herself a large cup of the blackest coffee she could find as another Watcher entered the increasingly busy kitchen. A hulking buzz-cut mass, Tank surprised no one with his nickname. If he had another "real" name, Harper had yet to learn what it was. She'd met him when Gerard had sent Tank to help her out of the Paris snafu. Harper would be forever grateful to the big guy.

He smiled at Harper on his way to the corner where he sat next to another Watcher: A Scottish gentleman in his mid-forties by the name of Chadwick, with dirty blonde hair that fell in waves over his ears. He went by Wick because he thought "Chadwick's a bit of a mouthful, innit? And Chad sounds too American, ugh." He and Avian went way back, and that was reason enough to trust him.

Harper gave him a nod as she found a seat at the island next to Avian who was wolfing down a stack of pancakes. "Where in the world did you get pancakes?"

Avian jerked his head to the stove where a long-legged Watcher manned the skillet. Harper had only seen her in passing. What was her name? Jacqueline? Florine? Fondue?

There were three things Harper knew about her: she'd arrived at the townhouse shortly before Harper had left for Beth's, she had legs for miles, and Avian already had or was going to tap that very soon.

The woman barely acknowledged Harper as she plonked another pancake onto Avian's plate. He accepted it with a wink.

Oh, for crying out loud.

"You are a walking hazard to womankind," Harper muttered into her coffee.

"Wha?" Avian mumbled with his mouth full.

"Nothing."

If the morning kitchen crowd was anything to go by, it was an odd assortment of Watchers Gerard had pegged for this mission: Avian the pretty boy, Tank, Long Legs, Wick the intellectual, and Harper. Compared to the ex-special forces guys of Falcon 8, this crew looked like the adult representatives of high school stereotypes.

Where was Declan?

As if he read her mind, Declan appeared, looking like someone had dragged him over hot broken glass. If he weren't naturally tan, he might have been pale from exhaustion. As it were, the dark circles under his eyes went mostly unnoticed.

He sluggishly reached for the coffee pot and poured himself a generous amount. His light-blue pullover hung over his broad shoulders, and Harper had to look away before he caught her staring. He awkwardly leaned onto the counter, seeming unable to decide if he should stay put or join her and Avian.

"You look like shit," Avian said to him cheerfully, ending the seating dilemma.

Declan walked over and lowered himself opposite Harper. "Good morning to you, too," he said to Avian while trying to catch Harper's eye.

She mumbled a "good morning" while staring at her coffee.

Declan's eyes fell to his own cup as if it contained a puzzle that must be solved before he can drink the coffee.

Avian took this in, looking from one to the other. "Did I miss something?"

"Nope."

"Nothing at all."

Avian blinked. "Alright, then." He polished off his last pancake in a single big mouthful and jumped up. "Leonie! Can I have one more, sugar?"

At least I was in the right geography with the name, Harper mused.

"Harper?" Declan said.

Harper coughed, not in the slightest because her throat was scratchy. "Yes?"

Declan made a visible effort to relax his jaw. "Can we talk?"

"About what?" she squeaked. A little voice in her head went, really? That's how you're playing it—Dumb?

Declan's frown returned. "Us. About what happened?"

"There's nothing to talk about," she said quickly and downed the rest of her coffee as she rose from the stool.

The sound of a cane punctuating the floor stopped whatever he was about to say next.

Gerard entered the kitchen with his usual grumble for a greeting and bushy eyebrows pressed low.

His presence was a physical force that materialized alongside him. It was in the immediacy with which people stepped out of his way, in the reverent dip of their heads when they greeted him. Unlike the Secretary of the Society whom some revered but all feared, Gerard had earned his respect.

And gratitude, thought Harper as she raised her cup to him good morning.

Today, he carried his cane but wasn't leaning onto it. It was one of the better days, then. She was glad.

"Have they filled you in yet?" Gerard asked her, first making the mandatory coffee pit stop, then laboriously lowering himself onto a chair at the dining table; the bar stools did not work well with his knees. Or perhaps it was the other way around.

Straight to business, then. Alright.

"We were waiting for you," answered Wick instead.

Within seconds, every Watcher in the room was seated at the table.

In another life, some of these people would have been Harper's colleagues at the Society of Ra, people she'd have gone on expeditions with and celebrated birthdays together. Instead, they were all fragments of lives not led piecing together something new out of what was left of them.

Wick produced a manila envelope stamped with the eye of Horus inscribed in a circle, atop which sat a falcon: the symbol of the Watcher's Order.

"As you all know," he began in an official tone, "we sent the Falcon 8 crew to stop the Society from selling a potentially destructive quasar to a Somali terrorist cell." He took a deep breath. "We failed.

Ground intelligence, however, was able to determine that the quasar was a Charlie-Two category, not a Delta-One as we had initially suspected. Not to say that this wasn't a defeat—it was—but at the very least we know the damage they can do with it is limited."

"Do we know exactly what it is capable of?" asked Leonie, her Parisian accent elongating her s's into z's. Harper couldn't think of her as anything other than Long Legs—Leonie Long Legs.

"Afraid not," said Wick. "Falcon 8 are still investigating. If it's any help, the last C-2 I encountered was a thirteenth-century Chinese urn that, when opened, released a never-ending stream of coral snakes. Nasty bugger, that one."

Tank's large body shivered in disgust.

"Tell them the rest," Gerard said, unperturbed.

"Right." Wick opened the envelope and pulled out a stack of papers, which he laid out in the center. "During recon, Falcon 8 uncovered a solid lead that may finally be the one we've been waiting for."

Declan and Avian both nodded knowingly, but judging how closely Tank and Leonie were leaning forward, Harper was grateful not to be the only one out of the loop.

"Some old writings refer to it as 'The Dying Star." Wick tapped a finger on a photo of a weathered mosaic with chips missing from the center and around the edges. Enough of it was preserved to depict a multi-pronged star on a base of green with a screaming mask in the center of it.

"Looks like it's Hellenic, second century BC?" said Harper.

Wick nodded. "Good eye." He tapped a second sheet: this one a parchment scan with sharp, angular glyphs.

"Phoenician," said Tank. "Tenth century BC, if I had to guess." Harper shot him a surprised look, at which he shrugged. "What? I was a Researcher."

Her eyebrows went up even higher as her eyes skimmed his biceps the size of watermelons. A light blush crept up his neck. This three-hundred-pound monster had been a Researcher at the Society, and he's shy? She wasn't sure why she was so surprised. Perhaps because it had never crossed her mind he could be anything but a literal tank in human form.

Wick nodded. "That's right, Tank. If you notice at the bottom, the star symbol diverges from traditional Phoenician drawings. It has these—for the lack of a better word—squiggles next to a tower that crumbles."

"The star glowing," muttered Long Legs. "A city collapsing." As she leaned forward, her cleavage spilled onto the table, and Harper caught Avian smiling surreptitiously. She smacked him on the back of the head.

Wick shuffled the papers. "The legend persists through time, surfacing at weird intervals and different locations. Phoenician, Hellenic, going back to Mayan and Sumerian, even." He produced another document, a scanned page of a faded book. "One expeditionist who claimed their group found El Dorado wrote of what he called an 'Exploding Star' in the log, describing an event where a giant green-and-white light burst into existence in the middle of the jungle and took the golden city with it as it vanished into nothingness, all in the space of seconds."

Everyone's head swiveled to Gerard when he cleared his throat. "You're all familiar with Delos?"

It wasn't a question. The small island at the center of the Greek Cyclades was a veritable quasar mine. Progressive for its time, it had once been the trade center of the Aegean where many religions were welcome to trade side by side and worship their own deities. It resulted in a favorable climate for interesting objects to make their way onto this strip of land roughly the size of New York City's Central Park.

"As of late," said Gerard. "The Society has increased security around Delos."

"So?" said Long Legs. "They do it all the time when there's a larger excavation. Especially in a place like that."

"More than three-fold," countered Gerard. "No tourists, no vessels allowed anywhere near the closely-guarded perimeter they've set up around the island. The entire island."

"Going back to our exploding stars," said Wick with a flourish of a sheet depicting a more modern, technical drawing. "We received this from a source inside the Society. Looks like our friends discovered a chamber deep within the bedrock below the Lion Terrace." A photo attached to the drawing showed the proud stone lions guarding what had once been a lake but had long dried up.

Wick pointed at a cluster of charts in the corner of the drawing. "Their instruments have been going completely haywire when trying to scan what's down there. All they surmised was that it's no bigger than a broom closet that, if you tried to drill into or crack open from the outside in any way, will collapse unto itself, irreparably damaging whatever lies in it. From a structural engineering perspective, it's quite ingenious for its era. We've never seen anything like it."

Harper's spine tingled. "How do we know what's in it?"

"We don't," said Wick. "But whatever it is, it has power unlike anything we've ever seen. Why else build a vault that is buried in a place where no one can excavate it without attracting so much attention that you'd be have to be in the middle of open war to do it—or willing to risk starting one because, let's face it, no one nation would allow someone else to take whatever the treasure may be right from under their noses. And even then, if they were to try: it would autodestruct."

Harper sank back in her chair, thoughtful. "The only way you'd be able to open it in time of peace is if the island had to isolate itself from the world around them."

"Sounds like an option of last resort to me," said Declan quietly. "Perhaps in the event of war or complete destruction coming their way, this was the nuclear button."

Everyone shifted uncomfortably.

"So," Avian said, "what Wick's saying is that someone's built a vault that cannot be opened, at least not until the Society deems the risk worth it and cracks it like a nut." He scratched his head. "If someone went through all this trouble to protect it the way they did, it must be extremely powerful. But how can we open it before the Society when we can't even get on the island?"

After a long pause, Harper said, "we can't. It's not meant to be opened." She looked up at faces ranging from befuddled to dejected. "We have to think inside the box."

The Watchers gave her a look that said she has finally lost her marbles. All except Gerard, who rested his chin on his cane and watched her brain work with a glint in his eye.

Harper held up the transporter quasar, ignoring the uncomfortable feeling of being exposed. "Where did we get this? Come on, guys." She bumped Avian's arm, her heart pounding. "Avian, you know this."

"The Society had found it in an Egyptian religious cache," he replied. "I don't know what that has to do with this."

Declan's eyes widened. He was piecing what Harper had already put together.

Leonie's gaze fell on the chain around Harper's neck in a way that made Harper want to slide it back under her shirt where it was safe.

Harper looked around the table. "We'd found it in the hull of a ship that was presumed to be bound for the Aegean. Don't you see?" she smiled. "We have the key to the room without a door," she said, clutching the quasar. "This is exactly what it was made for. This is what gets us in and out of the vault without causing it to collapse."

A stunned silence reigned in the wake of her words.

Declan broke it first when he said to Wick, "if this is real... If the transporter quasar, a D-1, is a mere key to whatever's inside that vault, then it is almost certainly something off the charts. Something we've never seen before." He rubbed his chin. "Something we may not be prepared for."

"Indeed." Wick dropped the last sheet in the center of the table. A three-day-old Research report on the Society of Ra's letterhead and stamped with the Quasar Division's seal.

The Society had labeled it Quasar Level: Omega, to be confirmed.

A smaller font underneath noted: Mass-scale destructive capabilities presumed highly likely. No lab tests have been conducted or possible as of this Report's date. Approach with extreme caution.

They exchanged looks around the table. Regular quasar levels went up to Delta. Whatever was in that underground chamber had scared the Society enough to cordon off an entire section of the Cyclades, the most popular tourist archipelago in Greece and the entire Mediterranean.

"Who is this source?" said Avian.

"Can we trust them?" said Declan at the same time.

"How do we know this isn't a setup?" said Tank.

Wick looked at each of them in turn. "The source is anonymous and has proven to be reliable. They were the ones to tip us off on the prior two missions of Falcon 8, and neither was an ambush. We have done some independent verification as well. The facts check out. This is real."

From her brief time in the Quasar Division, Harper recalled that destructive quasars were exceptionally effective in obliterating other quasars. With an omega-level destructive quasar, they could wipe out the artifact trove of the Society of Ra, and without their most valuable quasars, or even their highly valuable but otherwise powerless historic artifacts, the Society would be a house of cards in a hurricane: ripped to shreds and gone with the wind. For good.

A tombstone silence descended over the assembled Watchers.

This could be how they ended the Society of Ra once and for all.

They finally had a real shot.