11/16/2025 Snippet, BANSHEE BEACH (86K words)

Skulking!

…

We hit paydirt behind one door. Literally. It opened up into an old corridor, and I mean really old. There were wooden beams that looked like fossils, and the intermittent lightstones on the walls were clearly put in later. Much later.

It was enough to make Lucas poke one as we moved through the corridor, hurry or not. “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear these were pre-Old American,” he said. “I’ve seen basements like this up in Old California that were almost a thousand years old. But not this well-preserved.”

“Sure. They’re still using it down here,” I replied. “And it is pre-Old American. Everything around here was part of Old Mexico.”

“Mexico? Oh, right, they were a client-state.”

“Yeah, don’t say that in front of Sonorans…” then I didn’t hiss ‘Hold up!’ because Lucas had heard the faint sounds in front of us quicker than I had. Luckily, it wasn’t line-of-sight. Even better, they weren’t ‘Who’s there?’ sounds. More like a general ruibarbo.