Disclaimer: Atlantis: The Lost Empire is the property of The Walt Disney Company.

Acta Non Verba

Calamari. It was just calamari. Sure. With too many legs and eyes. Not to mention it was still moving.

Kind of like his Aunt Rosie's Christmas Eve dinners. Actually the woman across the table sort of looked like his Aunt Rosie. Same steely look in her eyes. Same double chin. And same hair, come to think of it.

Vinny poked at the…thing (it really seemed generous to call it 'dinner'), then looked up at Sweet, who was on his second helping. "You better keep up, or there won't be any left," Sweet said, swallowing another one of the creatures.

"Yeah, that'd be a real shame," Vinny said, eyeing the puma-sized animal lounging in the window, which he'd begun thinking of as the saber-toothed dinosaur-tiger, and wondering if it liked table scraps.

Someone cleared her throat behind him and he turned, glad for any distraction from the vigorously wriggling meal. Audrey was standing there, hands jammed in her pockets and hat pulled down low over her eyes. He hadn't even noticed her get up from her spot around the huge table, but now that he looked around, Milo and the princess were gone, too.

"Hey," Audrey said. She sounded uncharacteristically contemplative. Audrey was many things, and he liked her a lot, but thoughtful wasn't one of them. The girl was a doer. Smart as hell, too, it was just that sitting still and thinking wasn't her thing. The first time he'd met her, she'd been underneath a car in her Dad's shop, with what looked like three-quarters of its engine spread around her. After he'd shook her hand, he'd gestured to the car. "So, what's wrong with it?"

She'd shrugged. "Nada, I just had fifteen minutes before the next one comes in and I wanted to look inside."

So he wasn't used to her looking so thoughtful, and it was hard not to wonder what made a girl like Audrey look like that.

"Hey," Vinny replied. "Want some of…uh…this?"

He indicated the bowl hopefully, but she wrinkled her nose and shook her head. "Lo siento, but I'm full. You want to go for a walk?"

The things in his bowl seemed to want to take her up on the offer, as one of them heaved itself out and scuttled across the table on more legs than he ever wanted to see on something he was supposed to be eating. The horrified expression on Audrey's face endeared her to him, and he pushed his bowl towards Sweet as he stood up.

Sweet shook his head and said, "You're gonna regret it later."

"I've been eating Cookie's food for years. I'm pretty used to regret after meals."

Dumping the remaining wriggling creatures into his bowl, Sweet said, "Don't you two stay out too late, now." There was a meaningful look in his eyes, and Vinny nodded just once, a slight tilt of his head, subtle enough that the Atlanteans would miss it, but loud and clear to the team. Something flickered across Audrey's face—something that Vinny recognized but didn't really want to acknowledge, because he'd been hired to do a job, not for having a conscience.

The two of them slipped out of the open-air feast room into deep twilight. It was a weird kind of night, here in Atlantis. Not full dark, and lit by the orange glow from the lava fields surrounding the city. Looking up, you couldn't exactly tell that you were underground, that you weren't staring up at the sky. But that orange luminescence, with that strange, slow flicker that molten rock gave off, illuminated just enough of the enormous cavern that if you squinted, you could see dark, gray rock reaching up, vaulting over the city like a tomb.

Despite the gloaming, the air was just as still and warm as it had been in daylight. Well, it couldn't have been daylight, right? No sun down here. Just another spooky thing about this place.

They walked along the calm water, leaving the laughter and the conversation of the welcome feast behind, until it faded into the sounds of water dripping, animals calling in the night, and the eerie, eardrum-pressing quiet of this underground city.

"Nice people down here," Vinny finally said, when the silence between them got longer and longer.

Audrey sniffed. "Yeah. That's kinda the problem." She looked around, then stopped walking. They were alone, standing on a cracked landing that slumped into the water. A stunted, ancient looking tree was growing up from the crack in the stone, its bark gnarled and its leaves thick and waxy.

She looked over her shoulder again, then sighed and put her hands in the pockets of her dungarees. "I don't like this, Vinny."

For a minute, he stared at her, chewing the end of the match stuck in his mouth. There was a defiant look on her face. Practically combative. Like she thought he was going to argue with her. He could've played dumb, asked her what she meant by 'this.' He liked Audrey too much for that, though. Kinda flattering, actually, that she liked him enough to take this walk with him. Who knew, maybe it was because he'd always gotten along with her dad, but he had a good thing going with Audrey, too. They got each other in a way that he usually didn't get people, and that people usually didn't get him.

So he didn't play dumb, but he did the closest thing he could without insulting her intelligence. "Hey, I just get paid to blow stuff up. Not to think too much."

"This isn't what they told us it was going to be like," Audrey said, her voice low, like she thought someone was listening. Vinny didn't blame her. He almost wanted to shush her, to tell her not to say any of this out loud. To remind her that she might think she knew how hard a man Lyle Rourke was, but that Vinny'd spent a lot more time around him, and he knew a lot better than she did. But he didn't, and she kept talking. "Helga and Rourke—and Whitmore—they said it'd be like those tombs in Saqqara. Or that temple in Veracruz, the one we had to hack through all those vines just to get through the door?"

"I don't think they knew," Vinny said.

"Yeah well, they know now, don't they?" she demanded. "And I don't know about you, but no one told me to forget about the plan."

"Me neither," he admitted. Not much of an admission. From the minute he'd seen this place and realized it was full of living, breathing people, he'd known Rourke was going to stick to a plan that had been formulated under the assumption that they'd find nothing but dead, crumbling ruins, broken pottery, and a giant, shiny crystal, sitting down here getting dusty and doing nothing for nobody. Did he like it? Of course he didn't. He may have given off the impression of an, uh, lackadaisical attitude towards the destruction of both property and life—it was what had gotten him accused of killing Enrico Bentivegna, after all. Well, his attitude and the fiery blast that had taken out old Enrico.

But he hadn't actually done it. He didn't like threatening people. Didn't much like dealing with people at all, really, but if he was going to spend his time with them, it sure wasn't going to be messing something up for them.

"So what are we gonna do?" Audrey asked.

Vinny chewed at the match in his mouth. Stared at her. Moved the match to the other side of his mouth. Her hands were on her hips, and she was watching him expectantly, like she was waiting for him to come up with something. With a slow sigh through his nose, he took the match out of his mouth, holding it between his thumb and forefinger and looking at it.

"I'm thinking this is where I'm supposed to say there's no way I can go through with it?" he finally said. She pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows. "Audrey. What do you think's gonna happen here? We're gonna what, tell Rourke we quit?"

"I don't know," she said, sounding frustrated. "All I know is this isn't right. I didn't agree to this, did you?"

"No," he said. "Well, I mean, yeah, I agreed to the looting part. Just not the stealing-from-living-people part."

She looked triumphant. "So you don't like it. You don't wanna do this either."

Putting a hand to the back of his neck, Vinny replied, "Like I said. I don't get paid to think."

Audrey looked incensed at this. Poking him hard in the chest, she said, "Yeah well, you saying that's as estúpido as Rourke thinking it. Use your brain, Mr. Master's Degree."

Vinny tried not to look surprised that she'd remembered this fact about him. Though he didn't know why it would; he'd seen her take one look at an engine once and sketch its components from memory, sometimes hours later. She'd watched him put together a timer on a detonator on her first mission for Whitmore, and the next day he'd found a second one sitting amongst his things with a note that read, How's this?

It hadn't been great, actually, but it would have worked, and it was that moment, probably, that he'd started thinking of her as a full member of the crew, instead of just a really smart kid.

The second time he'd seen Audrey, she'd been chewing gum and blowing big, pink bubbles as she'd tightened the last couple nuts on one of the rigs they were taking out into the Sahara. "You're Manuel's daughter," he'd said, detouring from his own final check of his supplies down in the packed hold of Whitmore's steamer. "He finally retired, huh? It's Audrey, right?"

She'd paused to regard him, let another bubble pop with a snap, then said, "Yeah. My dad brought you to the shop last year. You're in demolitions. Vinny Santorini?"

"Good memory." Figuring he should be polite, he stuck out a hand. "Nice to see you again."

She'd cracked a smile at him as she'd shaken his hand, and Vinny had gotten the impression that she wasn't used to meeting people—even if it wasn't for the first time—and having them unquestioningly accept a teenager as a chief mechanic. Maybe that was why she'd been down in the hold by herself, fiddling with stuff that all looked pristine, anyway.

Now, he stuck his hands in his pockets and said, "That master's is in Engineering and Demolitions, not Psychology of Sociopaths." Something dark, with a disturbingly wide wingspan, launched itself from a nearby pillar and rushed by close enough that the disturbed air from its passage ruffled his hair. "You knew all the stuff we were bringing down here. You checked out most of the firepower to make sure it's working right."

Maybe he should have stopped to question why they were bringing so many guns and heavy artillery on an archaeological expedition. After the Leviathan, though, he'd been more than happy to be well armed. Okay, then. Maybe it was time to stop pretending archaeology had anything to do with what they did. There was a lot of finding and taking artifacts and not much note-taking or paper-publishing on their expeditions. And he was pretty sure nothing they'd found had ever ended up in a museum. Okay, well, maybe some of it. Thaddeus had been pretty good about that. Kept the rest of them on the straight and narrow as much as he could.

Thaddeus must have known it was a losing battle, but even he'd probably have been pretty disappointed to see them now.

Not, honestly, that Vinny cared much about sending it to a museum. Stuff was stuff, and he didn't see what made old stuff any more special than something new. Nice that some people did, though, and were willing to pay for the privilege of owning it. But up to this point, the only people they'd encountered on their expeditions that might have objected to their belongings being stolen were mummified, cremated, heaped in a pile of bones, or otherwise expired, and not really in any state to say anything.

Audrey scuffed a shoe on the ground, breaking eye contact with him. "Yeah, but, if I'd known…"

"You sure?" Vinny said, filling in the blanks himself. 'Cause the thing was, he knew if he'd known there were people down here, he'd probably still have signed on to come. It was easy to sign a piece of paper, disconnected from every fact of a situation except the promise of a huge payday. It only got hard once reality kicked in.

The two of them stood in silence for a long moment. Several more of the giant winged things soared by overhead, until one plunged downwards, a vertical drop from still sky straight into glassy water. Vinny watched the dark shape in the water reappear with something struggling in its jaws. Poor little Atlantean fish or frog or whatever. Ah, who was he kidding, it probably had twenty eyes and spikes for legs, and he'd probably be happy to see it eaten if he'd gotten a good look at it.

Slowly, carefully, he said, "We'll get killed if we back out now. You know how bad Rourke wants that crystal. I think if you wanna be a conscientious objector, you're gonna get our working rigs rolled right over you." He paused. "And I know you're like, an adult, and whatever, but no way I'm going back to Dearborn and telling your dad I let that happen."

Saying this had been a mistake, but he'd known that before he'd decided to say it anyway. Her eyes flashed and she opened her mouth to respond—probably at high volume—but he grabbed her shoulders and held her furious gaze. "Look, Audrey. Best case scenario, we say something, and we get left down here. Worst case scenario, Rourke uses us for target practice. I'm with you. It's wrong, and I don't like it. But it's just us against them."

Stubbornly, she kept staring at him, anger simmering in her eyes. He knew it wasn't him she was mad at, but he still didn't love being on the receiving end of her temper. "Milo's not going to go for this, either," she snapped.

"Yeah, maybe, but that doesn't make the odds any better, if you ask me."

Abruptly, she sagged, all the fight going out of her tensed shoulders.

The third time he'd seen Audrey hadn't really been the third time—they'd been in the convoy across the Sahara for a couple days, exchanging a smile or a hello from the seats of whatever trucks they'd been driving. It had been the third night, maybe, when they'd been close enough to Cairo to hear the call to prayer on the wind blowing across the sand towards them, and they'd all been sitting around the campfire eating Cookie's questionable dinner. Mole seemed to be enjoying the flavor of the sand more than the food, though after his first swallow Vinny couldn't really blame him. Whitmore must have really liked Cookie because the man was pretty much the worst cook Vinny had ever encountered. Or maybe Cookie was just blackmailing him.

Audrey had been staring at her tray, prodding at the greasy, gelatinous mess that the rest of them had gotten used to years ago. Okay, maybe not gotten used to. That seemed a little strong. Resigned themselves to was more accurate.

Vinny had reached over and taken the tray from her, then surreptitiously dumped it in their campfire. "You got your whole life ahead of you, don't eat that," he'd said. "Here." He dug through his bag and pulled out some biscotti—his mother's, from the last batch she'd made. He brushed some gunpowder off it and handed half his stash to Audrey.

But she'd bristled, and said, "I can eat what everyone else eats."

He'd laughed, and this reaction seemed to startle her. "Why?" he'd asked. "Trust me, we all pack something edible for when we can't stomach dinner. Which is pretty much every night, so, you know, if you're watching your waistline, you're in luck. I always drop five, ten pounds."

For a second, she just stared at him, like she wasn't sure how to react to this. Then, a smile pulled at her lips, and she took the biscotti.

"Oh, and uh, careful you don't break a tooth on that stuff. It's a few months old. No one makes biscotti like Ma but it's probably a little past its prime."

Just before their next mission after Egypt—Veracruz, where they never would have gotten by without Audrey to speak the language—he'd asked Ma to bake a double batch of biscotti. Hey, it wasn't like Cookie's culinary skills were going to get any better.

Vinny kept his hands on her shoulders, still holding her gaze. She looked defeated, but mad about it. Seemed about right. In all his memories of Audrey Ramirez, whenever they hit a setback, she got annoyed about it. She usually found a way to fix it, too. Problem was, there was no way to fix this. Not one that didn't involve standing up to Rourke and his machine gun carrying army. Well, what was left of it—and what was left of it was still plenty capable of shooting them full of holes.

He stuck the match between his teeth again and sighed. "Sorry. Not what you wanted to hear, right?"

She echoed his sigh with an angry one of her own, finally dropping her eyes. Her nose was wrinkled in frustration and her lips twisted into a furious pout. Something splashed in the water, but neither of them looked towards it. Anything they had to worry about wasn't going to come from there.

With another sigh, she took her hands out of her pockets and crossed her arms across her chest, meeting his eyes again. Something caught behind his sternum. Might have been his heart—a weird, hitching fear that she was going to be disappointed in him, or lose whatever respect for him she had. He guessed he shouldn't care what an eighteen-year-old girl thought of him, but, well, Audrey was like no other eighteen-year-old girl that he'd ever met.

Something called through the gloaming from the direction they'd come, somewhere within the crumbling, but living, city that they were about to steal from. "Nope," she finally answered, a mirthless smile flickering across her face. Then, she sighed again and dropped her arms back to her sides. "I don't know," she said. "Maybe I did. Now it gives me an excuse to go through with it."

He'd kind of forgotten his hands were still on her shoulders, and he finally let go. Knowing he'd just talked her into something that he didn't even want to do wasn't a great feeling. "I guess we all gotta do what we gotta do, huh?" he said.

She looked unhappier than he'd ever seen her, a deep frown making her forehead crinkle into lines. "I guess."

The end of the match was getting too chewed up—what was that, nerves? Maybe he was developing a teeth-grinding habit. He took it out of his mouth and struck it against his bag. It burst into flame with a pop, and he watched it burn down the wood, creeping closer to his fingers.

He flicked his gaze upwards to Audrey, who was staring at the match while orange fire reflected in her eyes.

Then, he felt the sear that came just before the bite of fire—even with gloves on, he recognized it—and flicked the match away. It landed in the water, extinguished instantly, leaving only a trace of sulfur behind it in the still air.

There wasn't anything more to say. The silence expanded to fill the space between them, heavy and pressing, and Vinny knew they should go back before they were missed. But he was thinking now, and that was exactly what he hadn't wanted to do. Rourke had showed all of them the page he'd torn out of the Shepherd's Journal, told them the crystal shown on the page was a giant diamond and it'd make them all rich. Right. Vinny hadn't been born yesterday, and even though he couldn't read gibberish, he could tell from the pictures that whatever it was, the crystal wasn't just some big diamond.

He wondered what it was to these people down here, and what it would mean for them to take it. And then he made himself stop wondering. No point. Like he'd told Audrey, that wasn't what they paid him to do.

"C'mon," Audrey sighed. "Guess we better go back. Don't you have something to blow up?"

"Hope so, or I'm out of a job," Vinny said. The joke fell flat.

She met his eyes and he looked for the disappointment. Or worse, distrust. It would serve him right.

But it wasn't there. So that, at least, was something he wouldn't remember about Audrey Ramirez when he thought back to this moment. She hadn't stopped respecting him. She hadn't stopped trusting him. In all his memories of her, there weren't any where she didn't trust him. It seemed pretty important to make sure it stayed that way. "Let's go," he agreed.

There was a rush of wings as something flew by in the twilight and the two of them started back the way they'd come. And he was still thinking. He was going to have to get that under control. After all, he had stuff to blow up.