A lightning bolt shot out from Jack's arm and slammed into the guard standing nearest to the door.  He fell to the floor and didn't move.  Jack looked stunned at what he had done. The three other guards in the room all turned in our direction, and pointed weapons at us—the same weapons that I knew were capable of knocking a wall down.
    "Do something!" I said urgently.  Jack's arm crackled with electricity again, but this time instead of one bolt of lightning, three shot out in separate directions each striking a guard right in the chest.  They fell hard to the floor.  Jack sat back breathing heavily and looking pale.
    "Did I, did I kill them?" he asked, his voice barely above a whisper.
    "I don't know.  I'll check." I got up from where we were crouched just outside the door and walked over to the nearest guard.  Small tendrils of smoke were rising off of his clothes where Jack's lightning bolt had hit him.  I leaned in close to his face and could just barely hear him breathing.    
    "This one's alive at least," I said.
    "I didn't know what else to do. I didn't really think about what would happen. You wanted to get in there and then they were going to shoot us. Jesus, Tom, I could have killed them. I don't know if they have families." I walked over to him and put my hand on his shoulder.
    "You had no choice. They were trying to kill us."
    Jack just sat there, either unable or unwilling to help.  Ignoring the guards as best I could, I looked at the pedestal in the center of the room.  This close to it there was no doubt what was inside.  The HTS sat in a little holder like the ones you use to let Easter eggs dry after you've dyed them.  Thick glass surrounded the HTS, as though someone had taken an industrial strength fish bowl and turned it upside down.
    "I thought the Prince said you had to be able to touch the HTS in order to make it work," Jack said from somewhere behind me.
    Without looking back, I said, "What do you mean?" I felt, rather than saw, Jack come up and stand next to me.  He still looked pale and a little shaky.
    He said, "Well, I mean there has to be some way to touch the stone or else it wouldn't work—supposedly."
    "So, why is the glass there?"
    "How should I know?"
    I walked closer to the HTS to try and get a better look.  Could it be as simple as just lifting the glass up?  Of course not.  Once I was close enough, I could see there were hundreds of tiny wires attached to the inside of the glass bowl on one end and to the HTS on the other.
    I said, "I bet this is so more than one person can use the stone at a time."
    "Probably," said Jack, "but what is going to happen when we move the glass?"
    "We're about to find out," I said. 

     Before I could touch it, Jack said, "Wait, let's just take the whole thing."  I watched as his arm elongated and flattened creating what looked like a metallic pizza spatula.  He slid the flat end of his arm under the glass and slowly lifted it off the pedestal.
     "Is it heavy?"
     "Not really, but it's kind of hard to tell.  It's almost like my arm has a mind of its own."
     "Let's go before those guards wake up," I said.  We moved quickly out of the room back toward the place where we had last seen the Princess, Brian, Mr. Fisher, and J.P.
     As soon as we turned the first corner, we plunged back into darkness.
     "Tom, do you remember which way the Princess told us to go?" Jack asked.
     "I think so. At least up until the point when the wall exploded.  Hopefully, if we get that far, we'll be able to figure out the rest on our own," I said with more confidence than I felt.
     "Sure, I mean, it's pitch black, we're trapped on an alien planet, I'm carrying the equivalent of the Hope diamond in my hand, we've left a trail of near-dead guards behind us, and you're feeling pretty good about the situation, huh?"
     "Really not helpful, Jack," I said.  "Now be quiet for a minute, so I can concentrate.  There should be a right turn coming up." I moved as quickly as I could while still feeling along the wall for the next turn.
     "Here it is.  One more turn to the left and then we have to go up two levels, somehow." We found the left turn pretty easily, but had no idea how far we had to go before the hallway ended, if it ended. Feeling our waay with our hands and hoping we didn't run into a wall, we, well, ran into a wall. 

     "Ow!" I cried out. "Jack be careful, the hallway --." The sound of the glass smashing into the wall followed by the sound of the glass smashing onto the floor echoed like a gunshot in the darkness. Suddenly the hallway was ablaze with light. Blinking hard to force my eyes to adjust, I reached down to clear the glass away from the HTS. A piece the size of my hand lay on top of the stone. The glass barely moved when I tried to lift it. 

     "Jack, help me. How heavy was that thing? I can't even lift a piece of it." 

     "What do you mean?" Jack leaned down and tried to lift a smaller piece of glass with his unmodified arm. With some effort, he was able to lift it a foot off the ground and then dropped it with a thud. He came over to where I was standing and reached down with his other arm and easily picked up the glass covering the HTS.  

     I grabbed the HTS and looked around for a switch that would activate whatever mechanism turns this part of the floor into an elevator to take us two floors up. I saw the small lever almost immediately in the center of the back wall—right next to a second lever. I looked at Jack. 

     "We don't have time. Pick one quick," he said. I pushed the lever on the left up and the floor began to rise. 

     "Good guess," said Jack.  

     "Thanks. Now we're really on our own, though. I couldn't hear what the Princess said next." 

     "Except that it was really important." 

"Right." The ceiling slide aside as it had earlier when we still had the Princess as our guide. We could see that lights were on on this level. As our eyes reach floor level, bullets hit the back wall, missing the tops of our heads by about a foot. We fell flat on the floor, but we kept rising. It was only a matter of a few seconds before we were going to be fish in a barrel, or an elevator.