The crowd around the stone-cutting station had swelled to three rows deep when the commotion first broke out, and the noise was only growing louder.
"Arthur," the woman beside him said, her eyes sharp with curiosity, "don't tell me that young man who bought your scraps actually cut something decent out of them. Should we go take a look?"
Arthur Kingsley's face had already gone pale at the sound of the crowd's excitement, but he straightened his shoulders and nodded stiffly. "Let's go see."
On the other side of the cutting floor, Tristan Blackwood stepped back from his own heavy-duty stone-cutter with a sour expression. The completely unexposed geode he'd just sliced open had yielded nothing but barren rock, ten thousand dollars wasted on dead waste. It wasn't the money that stung. Ten t
