After supper, Arai excuses herself; she has one last late night commitment before she can rest for the night. Back into the labyrinth she retraces her steps until almost halfway to the entrance. Here she turns down a different passage. Soon Arai is at the doorway she wants.

She remembers the first time she saw this door. It was the day before her eleventh birthday, and Arai was lost in the caves, again. That is, until she heard the voices. She followed the noise to this very opening. She had meant to ask for directions, so she didn’t know what made her sneak in instead. There was no way to describe the scene Arai found; sure she had known that many of her new family were bandits, but it hadn’t clicked until the moment she saw the treasures.

No one in the group of men arguing at the far side noticed Arai in the shadows cast by their single candle lit between them. And then she saw it- an emerald necklace just like the one her mother refused to buy her from that merchant two years ago. Arai slipped deeper into the room and pocketed it, slipping right back out without anyone noticing. She retraced her steps a short distance to the last fork and then started running back to the bandits’ meeting.

“Papa Joe?! I got lost again! Papa Joe?! Where are you?” Arai wailed over and over again as she ran to the room she had just left. Hearing the commotion, the men filed into the tunnel where Arai ran into the arms of the eldest. “Oh, Papa Joe, it felt as if I’d been wandering around for hours before I heard your voices!” And, of course, he would have brought her back to her cavern off of “Ma’s” home, if things had gone as Arai had planned. But at that moment Arai’s secret fell out of her pocket.

Their initial response was one of fury towards the necklace thief, but that anger turned to astonishment at their prodigy. With the new special training, she was able to outmaneuver and out-shoot almost any grown man by age thirteen.

Arai walks through the life-changing doorway into the loot room. It is going to be a very long night.

***

Arai lounges at the head of her squad. Her system of loot division is much more fair and organized than other gangs’. Normally she would gain all profits and then pay her group what she saw fair in the plunder they wanted, but right now she is having to assuage one of the arguments that the system is supposed to be preventing.

“Fine, if you’re just going to squabble over it, then neither of you will get it!” Arai’s need for sleep is starting to break through her layers of niceties; the bickering isn’t helping much either.

***

When Arai finally heads to the cave she shares with Sarah, it is much past any sane person’s bedtime. She barely makes it to her cot before collapsing in an exhausted heap. Even so, it is a while before she starts dozing off, the chirping of crickets as her lullaby.

That’s one aspect both Sarah and Arai love about their executive suite; it has an exterior entrance to their very own enclosed glade. The entrance is framed by lush vegetation, and if you look high enough, you can see the distant mountains from that exclusive access. Not too far from the entry is a cascading waterfall and lake with its stream tumbling further down the mountain. Oh, how beautiful it always looks in any light with all the various trees, plants and animals; one might think it the setting of a fairy tale. Even after all these years, the view could still take Arai’s breath away at times.

Arai finally drifts off to sleep to relaxing thoughts of her beautiful woods.