Under the Gun by Cari Z

Author:Cari Z [Z, Cari]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

SIXTEEN

Adam left to go into town that afternoon, citing a need for supplies. Joey wondered for a moment if that was code for checking in with someone until he saw the look on his grandmother’s face. “Honestly,” she said from where she was arranging freshly cut roses in a vase, “it’s like he doesn’t trust me to handle the slightest things on my own. Impossible man.”

“You know, he told me you’re a lot alike,” Joey said, mostly for the fun of poking the bear, but he was surprised when she nodded.

“I suppose we are. In too many ways, perhaps.” She glanced at Joey from under the brim of the hat she was still wearing. “Tell me more about your work. How did learning to be an archivist translate into spotting a hidden weapons cache?”

Joey smiled. “It didn’t. I learned that from you.”

“I never trained you to do any such thing.”

“You trained me to be observant.” All those tiny threads he’d found about the house, all the miniature pressure switches and the tricks and traps … figuring out his grandmother’s brainteasers had been the closest he’d ever come to telling her he felt any sort of affection for her at all, and vice versa. “Plus, I’ve seen a lot of secret safes at this point. I’m pretty good at spotting them.”

“I suppose so.” She looked slightly pleased. “What is it you like about being an archivist?”

Joey was surprised she was bothering to ask but flattered at the same time. “I like the act of preservation,” he said. “I like thinking that there are things out there that are important enough to be preserved for posterity even if the artifact or art piece itself is lost. The world is an unstable place, you know? There are a lot of great works of art that might be lost someday, but with 3D-scanning technology, you can preserve a digital copy at the very least, and the quality is getting better and better.”

“Do you photograph pieces as well?”

“Photograph, describe, measure, scan … I try to do it all.” They spent another half an hour talking about some of his jobs, and at one point, his grandmother even laughed a few times when he described the challenges of scanning a collection of over six hundred stone lingams, some as tall as he was.

“That always was one of the biggest challenges to fieldwork for me,” she mused as she cut thorns from the stem of a yellow rose. “The equipment was very rarely built to go where I wanted it to go, and even less often constructed with someone my size in mind. That’s one of the reasons I had to get so good at jury-rigging things together.”

“Do you miss it?” Joey hadn’t meant to ask that, but it slipped out anyway.

His grandmother stilled for a moment. “Less and less as the years go on,” she said at last. “It’s hard to see the forest for the trees while you’re in the service, but once I got

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