Juliana Jones and the Emerald Fist

This story was written for the 750 Word Project 2024. Below this line are exactly 750 words:

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Dank, musty air wafted from the gap between ancient stones in the wall before her, making cobwebs sway like tattered curtains. Juliana squinted into the hole but couldn't see anything.

"Here goes nothing," she quipped, with a glance at her hand, calloused from the uses she put it to in old tombs and temples, but still maintaining a certain feminine appeal. Hoping this wasn't the last she'd see of it, she put her thumb and fingers together and pushed into the opening, through snapping strands of spider silk and crackly flakes of debris.

How did she get herself into these situations? It started off with a trip to Cambodia to do a guest lecture on the Tantric reliefs of the Anaal Kannal complex in the dense jungles beyond Damdek. Of course one of the attendees came up with a scrap of ancient leather branded with half a map and a few mysterious words in a forgotten Khmer dialect. And of course she recognized the inscription; she'd only been trying to make sense of it for the past decade, since acquiring a pottery fragment bearing the same words from a dredging crew in the Mekong Delta.

From there it had been a simple matter to put two and two together, using each piece to fill in the gaps in the other, and then trek into the bush with a hired guide to seek out the chamber the artifacts described, heretofore undiscovered among the ruins of Anaal Kannal.

But things never went according to plan, did they? The guide hadn't made it past the first hall of statues shuddering into motion with the turning of their ancient gears. Dr. Seang was made of sterner stuff but she'd gone missing halfway through the temple when a segment of floor fell away beneath them. Juliana had shimmied down right after, her whip lashed around a sturdy bit of carved stone that seemed safely inanimate for the moment, but found the tunnel below dark and empty. There had been nothing for it but to keep exploring and hope the other archaeologist turned up.

Now she was pushing her hand into the increasingly tight--and, as she went deeper, disturbingly damp--confines of this slot between the stones, feeling for what she sought. Her fingers, pinched together firmly, encountered a vaguely warm resistance, which seemed to relax and give way as she applied more pressure, allowing her to slip ever further into the mysterious opening, slowly, her arm swallowed up nearly to the shoulder, with a sound like the squelching of thick mud. There was a low rumble in the ground, and fine cascades of dust sifted from the stones.

"Hmm."

Juliana felt something. A smooth, round bulbousness. Closing her fingers around it, she began to pull. A deep groan echoed through the earth, and bits of stone carvings rattled loose and tumbled from the walls. She planted a booted foot on the bricks and heaved, and the ground shook convulsively, sending her falling back, still clutching desperately at her prize.

Her arm emerged slowly, streaked with oozing muck, until the resistance gave way around her fist and she landed on her khaki mini-skirted ass, mysterious artifact in hand--an emerald the size and shape of an emu's egg, glittering through the grime. Juliana rolled to her feet as a chunk of masonry crashed beside her, and a section of wall disintegrated.

"I'll take that, Dr. Jones," came Dr. Seang's voice as she stepped clear of the rubble with a snide smirk. The Cambodian archaeologist had a Luger pistol casually trained on Juliana.

"So this was your game all along, Nhean?" Juliana suppressed a moment of bitter regret. "After what we shared?"

"You didn't believe those tender promises, did you?" The woman cackled with cruel mirth. "You had what I wanted, in that hotel, and I took it. Same as now. The Japanese have been turning the country upside down looking for this artifact, and they pay very well."

"It belongs in a museum!"

"Don't you know the Emperor has one? Now hand over that stone."

Juliana slowly stood with her jaw clenched, the emerald tight in one fist. She faked a step only to leap and plunge her arm into the opening once more, ignoring Nhean's shouts and the ricochet of a bullet as the earth began to convulse and the temple shivered apart all around her. She let go of the emerald just as the walls collapsed into a chasm yawning at her feet.