The lid of the small box fell open – and the coin was still there.
I couldn’t believe my luck! It had been – Lord, had it been twelve years? Certainly someone would have stumbled on it in all that time, the housekeeper perhaps, or Mera. I would’ve expected Mera to pick through my things in my absence, scavenging for something worth pawning.
Perhaps she’d taken some of my other treasures, but I resisted the brief urge to glance about for missing items; there was no time. By now the Constable might have discovered my trickery, might even now be close enough to sense me, to track me to this old town. I’d barely escaped him the last time; I’d not get a second chance.
I held the small disc between thumb and forefinger, and my body heat triggered the security widget built inside. In a moment, it scanned me, knew me, and it dropped its protective guise. I now held a round, filmy wafer: a flatlet, expensive as a stratocruiser, and loaded with tech.
My leg still throbbed, so I sank into a chair and stared hard at the translucent disc. It felt impossibly thin, which it was, of course. A flatlet has almost no thickness in our world; it extends into another dimension so that it can contain massive amounts of circuitry and a power-source. Looking at a flatlet is like studying the polished surface of an invisible, ten-meter-long crystal cylinder. It felt slippery, a soap bubble, nearly nothing – but it held my last hope.
A long, low thrumming from the street outside told me that my time was up. I had to try to use the thing now, whether it killed me or not. The fact that it dropped its cloak meant it knew me, but could I still speak its language?
“Snafu”, I whispered, nearly coughing. “Snafu velcro blitnik”. Or something like that. The consonants didn’t matter as much as the vowel-sounds and intonation anyway. The surface of the milky thing flashed briefly with traces of green and violet light: so far, so good. It knew what I wanted it to do.
The chair toppled as I stood quickly, kicking things aside to clear a space in the middle of the floor. I dropped the flatlet and watched it flutter to the ground like a feather. When it landed, it began to grow, and darken, until it was a large blue-black spot, maybe a meter across. Could I really do this?
A banging at the door downstairs ended my hesitation. I jumped, feet first, and slid through the inky spot into deep, silent darkness.