"Why are treasures kept locked up in museums? For three reasons. If you have more than three, you have every right to take them." - Nicola Derosa
It was the kind of suburb that had spent the last couple of decades being bought up by real estate moguls and opened to lower income families until the graffiti embellishing the hues of its quiet lanes and back alleys grew to drown out the directionless hand of its predecessors' teenage dudebro angst with alarming wit and artistic integrity, proclaiming such tags as,
"They call me the Chien-Shiung Wu of being ambidextrous"
and
"THE OWLS ARE EXACTLY WHAT THEY SEEM. NOT SURE ABOUT EAGLES THOUGH"
and
"For an inimical time call..."
Sat on its fringes was a small colonial-era house with a tin roof that had seen... not better days - in fact, it had been broken into a month and a half ago - but certainly days nonetheless. There was a sign out the front proclaiming the name of the building, but they all recognised it well enough without straining to read by streetlight.
Danika grinned. "Bet you never thought you'd come back here again, huh?"
"I don't know. It feels inevitable in retrospect."
"Are you sure you want to go through with this?"
"This could be the most important discovery any of us make in our lives."
"Yes, but it did drive you completely, self-destructively insane last time you read it."
"But I got better! You know, that which doesn't kill you, et cetera."
"To be fair, it did that too."
"It... oh, give it a bone."
Danika rested her hand on Marie's shoulder. "Look. All I want to do is make sure that you're fine with being around this thing again."
Marie brushed her off. "I know what to expect this time. I won't freak my shit stupid over some century-old ghost story anymore."
"Promise?"
"Sure, I... I promise, if that's what you want to hear."
"Good to know!" With no warning, she swiped Marie up into a brief embrace. Marie stumbled backward out of it, and leaving her be, Danika now held out her elbow for the taking. "Thalia. Shall we?"
Thalia took it, and Florian climbed from her shoulder to Danika's.
"You two go have fun now. I'll keep watch."
"We'll be back in just a second. Don't do anything stupid while we're gone."
"What's that supposed to mean?!"
"I don't know, it's just something Dad says. I presumed it was, like, a thing."
Marie then proceeded to do something stupid while they were gone.
It began as that age-old bane of the paranoiac, one of those peculiarities which fell easily within the bounds of what the human mind can accept as a consequence of random chance but which would make perfect sense within the context of something far more deliberate some time later. For Adia Musyoki, the peculiarity was how quiet Haile Selassie Avenue was - even for a Thursday evening - and the amount of time it took for the cause to reveal itself to her was roughly twenty seconds.
It was difficult to hide an armoured black van barrelling down an empty street full-throttle, and harder still for its driver to care.
Before the van could roll to a stop, Adia was already bounding off - in the direction it had come, in fact: she reasoned her chances of escape looked far more lucrative if they had to turn their car around.
Some maniac had no intention of letting that happen, though, and threw open the back door. Adia had never seen her before, and she had no identifying symbols or slogans upon her clothes, but the demeanour that comes with deeplighting is never a subtle one.
Shit. She'd never been singled out by members of an international terrorist syndicate before. What was she expected to do in a situation like this? Well... die, probably.
There, off in that one park she was always forgetting the name of. There was a public toilet in there, and she could get in and out faster than any pursuer could.
At this point, she was probably too caught up in her escape to notice that the van itself wasn't moving.
But that didn't matter, not immediately. She hid behind the toilets, pressed her hand against the wall. Its rough... she wanted to say sandstone, exterior smoothed out and shone, faintly at first, but almost immediately afterward becoming brilliant and reflective. With no time to spare, she jumped through the mirror, into a stall, but didn't so quickly close it behind her.
The chirality was a little disorienting. Moreso than usual, at any rate, while a deeplighter was hunting her. The trouble with stepping through a mirror was either that she was in a reversed world right now, or that her whole body, brain included, had been made a mirror image and everything else had stayed the same. It kept her up at night sometimes, having no clear explanation as to which it was.
In the half-second she needed to reorient herself, there were already footsteps outside.
"Ms. Musyoki?"
"Hey, this thing's occupied. Can't you read?"
"I'm just here to talk."
"Am I really so unapproachable that this is your idea of 'just talking'?" She turned to leave, but another girl stood just outside, with some hefty-looking revolver in her hands.
"Your skills, while enough to warrant our attention," continued her interrogator, "are unfortunately rendered useless by the fact that I didn't come here alone."
"Shows how much you know, then." She closed that mirror and-
"I've also opened the doors on each stall adjacent to yours. Now, you could run on the 50% chance that you'd be jumping into whichever one I'm not looking into at any given moment, or you could come out with your hands up and not a drop of blood gets spilled today. Which would you rather?"
"Hmm. I'm gonna think about that."
"I am also not above planting an explosive in this bathroom and walking out."
Adia slowly pushed the door open and raised her hands.
If she was expecting the van's interior to meet the stylish menace of the exterior, she was sorely disappointed. The two deeplighters who had captured her ushered her in - the junior never once dropping the gun - where two others grabbed her and bound her to an office chair she supposed they must have had lying around.
And that was it. There was nothing and nobody else back here. The interrogator closed the door, and an unseen fifth driver fired up the engine.
"You've evaded the police, the government, virtually every cybercrime authority that exists-"
Despite circumstance, Adia grinned. "I thought it would have been up to me to do the bragging. Thank you."
"-so! Doesn't it just scare you to death that it only took four Attendants to capture you?"
"I imagined you probably just asked my ex about me or something."
Two of the other Attendants winced, including the one pointing the gun at her.
"Figures."
"You cannot imagine how we extorted-"
"He doesn't know you're kidnappers. You just told him you were... my friends from work or something. Honestly. You could kidnap him and he probably wouldn't even notice."
"I don't like your attitude, you know."
"You don't like mine? Your friend's got a gun to my head. How do you think I feel?"
"That friend happens to be the best enchantress you'll ever meet. If she pulled that trigger right now, your own powers would spontaneously overload and your whole body would turn inside out."
Adia stared down each of her captors in turn. This time, none betrayed any uncertainty or insincerity.
"Right!" Her smile was strained this time. "I'm fine with being abducted. Love a good abduction! So where is it we're off to?"
Taking the Matron's journal proved no more difficult a catch than last time. In fact, the exact same process worked the exact same way.
Danika and Thalia giggled softly between themselves at the simplicity of the situation.
"You know, I actually quite like this," the former admitted.
"What do you mean?"
"I don't know. Us. This. Weird little moments of doing things we definitely shouldn't."
"Is that...?" Thalia stumbled for a word she clearly didn't have. Whatever it was, it was enough to make Danika's face burn hot pink.
"No! No, don't get the wrong idea. I mean, you're fantastic and everything-"
"You call Florian 'stepson'."
"That's different."
"Is it?"
"I don't... I don't know! Do you want this to be some kind of...?"
"Maybe." Thalia shrugged. "I didn't think it was important."
"Me neither, dude. I've got other stuff going on."
She nodded.
"And - no offence, but - you are kind of made out of a twisted mess of flesh and bone. I'm not sure if that's what I'm into."
"Me neither. Old enemies I ate when I was Theoris. Not proud of it."
"Plus, it did get horribly infected that one time..."
"Oh! Honestly forgot I had two eyes."
They laughed again, but more strainedly now. Each had been afflicted with a sudden awful self-consciousness, for the almost literal reopening of old wounds. Danika glanced around, eager to change the subject.
"Hey. Remember last time we were here, we brought Marie along because her uncoolness had some kind of anti-attention ward to it?"
"I think I know what those words mean, yes."
"What's going to happen, now that she's been hanging around Fearno?"
It was the waiting that pained Marie. The dread that the journal would be perhaps even harder to bear now that she could see the tale it described for itself. Maybe Danika had a point, but it was too late to back out and too early to accept that.
The uncertainty wore on her with all the appearance of guilt. Epinephrine bursts ran out through her bloodstream, far more complex molecules than the isoamyl alcohol which provided the black truffle with its unique aroma, but equally capable of attracting pigs.
The officer was built like a bomb shelter, and shaped thus by twice as much paranoia. He jogged over with his bulk carrying enough momentum that Marie wouldn't have found herself all that surprised if he ran right into her and she died here and now, the collision to be the nascence of all manner of exotic elementary particles.
"Evening, ma'am. Any reason you're out around here on a night like this?"
"Neighbour's cat's gotten out. You haven't seen it out and about, have you? Lean little bastard. White with black and orange patches."
"I can't say I have. Is that motorcycle yours?"
Marie double-took Danika's bike. "That thing? Nah. Suffice to say my housemate told me she was going to be inviting a... friend... over tonight."
"Because word has it, it was here last time that museum over there got broken into, earlier this year."
"Ha!" Marie shook her head. "No way, man. Aiden's got shaky hands like nobody's business. Love him to death, of course, but half the time I can't imagine him unlocking his own apartment."
"Would you mind introducing me to this individual?"
Shit.
"Sure thing, man. First thing's first, though, I've still gotta find Megsie."
"Ma'am, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to comply."
"Every moment he's outside he's a danger to the environment, and to himself."
"I'm- look. We can get to that right after you introd-"
"The police are a state government thing, yeah? So's this. Department of Environment, Climate Change and Water. You've got a responsibility to help."
"Right!" He grabbed her wrist. "If you're not going to comply, I'm afraid I'm going to have to place you under arrest."
His other hand gone for a pair of cuffs, Marie snatched up his tie and pulled him close, close enough for her fangs to brush against a patch of baby fat along his right clavicle.
"I...!"
"I want to say 2004," she whispered. A shame, she decided, that he couldn't see her grin. "2004, or thereabouts, because you looked a decent way younger, but it was still definitely this tie."
That was enough to break his grip. She pulled her hand away and dragged him down by the neck. He pushed her off and punched her in the jaw. She spluttered. She could tell she was going to need to learn the secret to painlessly regenerating teeth tomorrow.
"What was her name? Lynn, or something. Christ, man. She looked 19 at the most, didn't she?" She spat blood on his trousers. It was hard to tell which development disturbed him more. "Ha. You're thinking, 'bloody hell, this gender-studies-alum looking bastard's pretty full of herself', hey? 'How could she know that?' Right?"
Now it was his turn to pick her up by the neck. Despite all the training she'd undertaken in recent weeks, she was still by no means a large woman. He could probably choke her with one hand. "How much did she tell you?"
"She? No, man. I'm just a voyeur."
"I don't believe you."
"White-blue tablecloth on a small bookshelf your granddad got you. Dog piss on the red carpet. You'd say you hit her for stepping out of line, but the truth was you'd just had a few. The most disturbing part is that those 'few' were Vic Bitters."
He pinned her to the ground, cuffed her behind her back. "Enough! Obstruction of justice, assaulting a police officer, blackmail-"
"Technically it's not blackmail if I'm not naming a price, right?"
"Suspected accessory to burglary! You're nicked."
Marie's heart fluttered. He said the thing! Maybe he was a fan of The Bill.
"Do I have a right to a phone call?"
"If you can get one out of your pocket without your hands, be my guest."
"What about a right to prayer?"
"Bloody hell. Why not?"
"S'pose that'll do me, then." She spat a broken tooth onto the footpath. "Hey, Eternal Hand. Beg yours for such short notice. I was wondering if you took blood sacrifices? Because wowza I've got a gullet like a slaughterhouse right now."
The blood around her mouth evaporated. Her disembodied molar followed suit, then returned to the pavement.
"Oh. Not a fan of the tooth? Shame."
Marie stretched her arms out. Tearing the chain between her handcuffs apart was trivial for the postmodern cyborg, and on pushing herself up, she confirmed the crackling, black aura around her hands.
"That's weird," the officer said, "I've never seen them break like that before. I wonder if I have a spare set somewhere."
"No, it's fine. I don't need another."
"Really? Fair enough."
And it was clear as anything, in his eyes, the moment he began thinking about something else - she was a memory buttered in his hands. Still right before him until tossed aside, and now impossible to grasp.
But so was he to Marie, or at least, so was something. His tie had seen a great many things throughout its life, that much she'd already confirmed, but there was something about it almost... unpleasant to consider. A memory which didn't taste right. Not bad, just not right. Unexpected. While he began idling off elsewhere, she kept to his side, fumbled, batting like a kitten, to grasp his tie.
"And the girl?"
"Found dead this morning along the Great Western Highway." The officer Marie had spent the near-present mutually harassing placed two photographs upon the table. It took her a second to realise that the body depicted was a crude facsimile of her own. "A girl her age that used to play sports with her in high school came forward to identify her. It's definitely the same person."
His colleague swung her chair from side to side. "Her parents'll be absolutely devastated."
"Who wouldn't?"
He looked over the photos again.
"Talked to her dad, actually. Lovely guy. Said he'd kicked her out not long before."
"And the son?"
"No, apparently he just ran away of his own volition. But the weird thing is the dad was saying the police had been around his place earlier that day, and were looking to talk to the family about her criminal record."
"What's so strange about that? That seems pretty standard."
"Well, she doesn't have one."
"Are you sure?" As if to discredit whatever confidence he might have spoken with, she swivelled to her computer and began typing.
"Marie-Clair Eleasha Crawford. Born the 13th of March, 1991."
"Are you sure? That doesn't bring up anything."
"Exactly! Nothing!"
"You could have gotten something wrong."
"Phone Births, Deaths, and Marriages if you want. All her records had that name and D.O.B."
"So what happened, then?"
"Well, I called around, and couldn't find any record of police being dispatched to her house."
"So... what? An impersonator's on the loose?"
"Looks like."
Oh.
Alright.
By the time she came to, the blessings of the Hand long since left, and so had Nick Angel's Stasi-sona. And despite this, she struggled to remember the last time her heart galloped like this.
"Marie?"
She really, really wished she hadn't seen that.
"Marie?!" Danika repeated, jostling her shoulders with flavour of impatience. Thalia loomed over them both, as if a streetlamp could project worry in place of light.
"Hi! Yes! Hello! Sorry about that."
"What happened to you? Here I was thinking we had the hard part of the job."
"So you have the journal."
"That doesn't matter! Are you alright?"
"I'm... sure, yeah. I'm fine."
Danika nodded. A feeling - that it would be unwise to press Marie at times like this - crawled up the hairs on the back of her neck. "Alright, then. Yes. We've got it. Hey, why don't you come over to ours tomorrow and we can read it?"
"Yeah. Whatever. Sounds like a plan."
Danika looked up and down the street before mounting her motorcycle. "Right then. Have a good night."
Thalia made to follow her, but in the last instants before climbing aboard awkwardly and struggling to accommodate her own height, sent a string of thoughts Marie's way.
"Hey. So I saw you fight that man a minute ago."
"Yeah?"
"Don't do that."
"He started it. Don't tell me Hope's gotten to you about this whole nonviolence thing."
"What's this about Hope?"
"No? Oh, don't worry about it, then."
"He is like an insect to us. You can swat him aside effortlessly and harmlessly. Besides," and here she mounted, "I wouldn't say your hunger for blood doesn't get results, but you should be careful. Because one day you're going to hurt someone. Badly. Irreparably." She put her arms around Danika's midsection, whose face at this point had taken on the role of the late Lauren Woodward's. "This is inevitable. It's life. But if you can't get your mind out of your bloodthirst, you aren't going to know how to react to that. And that might be more dangerous than the damage itself."
"Wow. That's mad wisdom coming from someone who was only born last year."
"What can I say? 2008 was a long year."
And the motorcycle peeled off into the night.
"What were you saying to her?" Danika forced over the roar of the engine.
Thalia didn't answer. Danika wondered if she didn't know how, or if she didn't want to.
Nairobi National Museum was, like most museums, an essential tautology, the sum of its parts implying just as intriguing a history as any it cared to reveal within. You enter and are stunned by a conspiracy in which the sublime universe of heavenly ogives and the chthonian world of gas guzzlers are juxtaposed.
Though her attention was by and large on the Attendants ushering her inside with a gun to the nape of her neck, the atmosphere of the museum disquieted her in a manner it never had when she was younger, and had visited with her friends, family, or school. And only in part because the walls were lined with dozens on dozens of security cameras, yet no alarm had been raised as to the firearm.
"Hang on. Where is everyone?" she whispered. She didn't know why she whispered, perhaps there was a hanging dread if she were to break this uneasy silence something yet-unseen would Get her.
"Keep asking questions and it's going to be you that vanishes next. Alright?" Her interrogator (that was what she decided to call her), now leading the formation, shot back the most disdainful look-down one could compress into 71% of a second.
"Out on the street, too. Right in the middle of the city."
She turned on her heel. Her compatriots to her flanks froze up, but her gunman bringing up the rear only pressed the barrel into Adia's neck.
"You will be quiet, or I will fucking kill you! Is that understood?! Look! Look. Maybe you've grown accustomed to this world of yours behind the screen, where nobody can tell you what to do. But this is the real world! So what you're going to do is you're going to do what I say, you're going to keep your mouth shut, and then you're going to walk away from all this intact. I will not tell you to stop talking a third time."
"Well!" Adia swallowed. "When you put it like that, I... feel like I can properly appreciate your perspective. Lead on."
"Much better. Let's carry on."
But if the lack of answer was supposed to keep Adia in the dark, it had failed miserably. It didn't make sense to talk to her like that, they'd singled her out. Why would killing her be on the table if they needed her so urgently? It seemed a substantial threat - if the gun wasn't enchanted into some sort of certain death mode, shutting her up with a bullet to, say, the knee, would work out perfectly. That left two possibilities.
The former was that the gun was fake, or unloaded. That would be nice. Then she could just walk away and call it a day.
Of course, she knew this mindset wasn't going to get her as far as out of the building.
The latter was that the girl behind her was actually poised to take her life at the first sign of dissent. She tried not to let this get to her, which was about the most difficult thing she ever had tried. Well, second-most. But if the Attendants understood the severity in the first place, she wasn't so sure that they'd have put her in this situation.
Alright, so suppose they were going to kill her for asking a question, and suppose that they did need her, which was why she was here in the first place. That meant that the answer was at least as valuable as whatever their plan was. No! Not that, it had to be connected to whatever was going on here, had to be a key part of it. It seemed inconvenient to make everyone vanish and - she presumed - abduct someone for their utility in a museum heist on the same day otherwise, but if you needed to go unnoticed during a break-in, what better method than simply having nobody around to notice you in the first place?
Well, that wasn't exactly a secret from her. The real question remained more a matter of how than why. But this was all a lot to say that the lack of any answer told her exactly what she needed to know. Best as she could discern, this must have been the consequence of the magic of one of the four girls with her, and if she knew which and incapacitated them, suddenly they'd find themselves in a museum packed with other people.
The next question, then, was whose power was doing this? Well, what wish would drive someone to gain this ability? The only answer that sprung to mind was someone wanting a little too hard to be left alone.
They cut through an exhibit on prehistoric history. The lighting was starker here, it gave Adia a better read of the contours of each of her captors' faces. Her running theory was that the girl to her left had seemed rather uneasy, perhaps anxious, this entire time, and the light upon her face only affirmed this conject...
This conject... erm...
Hold on, hold on. That's...
No way! That's my skull!
The following text has been recorded by the Understudy, and so on, and so on. (Note to the Editor: can we get a shorthand for this?)
UNDERSTUDY: What's your skull?
NARRATOR: Just there, in the display. Skull of young Homo erectus. Koobi Fora. 1.5 million ye- oh. Oh dearie me.
UNDERSTUDY: What?
NARRATOR: I tell you what, never guess a woman's age. Still, though. I think I look as good as I did back then.
UNDERSTUDY: Do you think that has anything to do with the fact that you can't age or die?
NARRATOR: That's rather harsh - let me have this. Transcript ends.
UNDERSTUDY: You know you saying that doesn't actually make the transcript end?
NARRATOR: Transcript ends!
Transcript ends. Yeesh.
The Attendants threw Adia down before a bookshelf in a tall glass case filled with all manner of archaic tomes.
"I don't suppose you're inviting me to have a nice, quiet read."
The interrogator shook her head. "The Empress herself has become interested in the Holzknecht lineage. You have been identified as the administrator of the private email server of humankind's leading magical girl experts. Certainly you have the skill to get inside without breaking anything, and presumably, the knowledge to identify her journal."
Adia ran to the cabinet, pressed her face to it. "For real? That's all you're interested in? This is a goldmine!"
The glass grew opaque, until she was face to face with her own reflection. Softly she passed through the surface and into the case.
"Look at this stuff!" She pulled untitled tomes from their shelves, thumbed through them, and tucked them into her jacket. "You've got Sung's atlas - still in great condition, too. Ruiz's bestiary, and would you believe it! The enchantment still holds!"
She cracked it open to show the others. Illusions of the witches within poured forth and roamed about like a supernaturally sophisticated pop-up book. She appeared to be the only person enthused by the display.
"Derosa's Dialectics on Museum Burglary. Oh, well that might have been nice to have a bit earlier. Other than that, uh..." She leaned close to the shelf and ran a finger down their spines in columns, close enough, of course, that they wouldn't see her slip a fourth into her coat pocket. "No. Nothing. Still, though. It's been worth the visit just for those three, hasn't it? I mean, they were supposed to be missing for about 120 years."
"Alright, Ms. Musyoki, don't try and bore us with your trivia. You're going to come back out, and you're going to hand over the journal."
She took, once, twice, thrice over her shoulder. "The journal? I told you I didn't have it."
"You're a terrible liar."
"What, do I seem nervous? Because I'd put that on the kid you've got pointing a gun at me!"
"I can see your hand move around inside your jacket, you know."
"Ah."
Ah.
"Ah. Well..."
Well.
"Look, I think if you're trying to watch my hands, you might get the wrong idea."
The interrogator raised her eyebrow and signalled for her gunner to take aim.
"Because the thing is... when you're looking at my hands, that takes your attention away from where I'm standing."
Inside the case should have been hardwood panelling. Instead, it looked almost like a mirr-
"Later!"
Above her was a miasma of glass shattering and alarms blaring, but not for long - reflecting, now the chaos was beneath her, the floor and ceiling betwixt the boundaries of an echelon, and for just a second, she was rising.
Gravity worked to its own schedule, though, and she struck the floor below at what must have been among the least pleasant angles.
She scrambled up and shot off. The walls were thinner now, like the cemetery earth beneath the doomed to die - now she could feel the exhibits ready to jump to life and reach out, for she was one of them now, four volumes implicated into their collective essence. But now was hardly the time to panic, so long as the present was still her domain. She had to think. And if her track record as a cybercriminal was any indication, this was her strong suit.
She needed to give her assailants names - just in her head, although that was subject to change if she could think of anything suitably derogatory. The interrogator already felt right, and 'the gunner' was starting to stick too. The others could just be Big and Small. Sure, they were going to kill her, but it still felt wrong to nickname them based on appearance any more mean-spiritedly than that.
The anxious-looking one was Big. An easy target if she could get at her without being shot, but probably also a child of fear. Best to knock her out in one blow. Once she was in the lobby, she could-
"Is the way back really faster for you four than it is for me?"
The gunner was aiming right at her heart. Big had a hook-shaped polearm, and Small, a short spear. The interrogator stood behind the trio, seemingly unarmed, but who was Adia to make any optimistic assumptions at this point?
She dashed behind a pillar, whose width (or lack thereof) wasn't all that keen on making her feel good about her physique in a life-or-death situation. The gunner approached, slowly and carefully, but as inexorably as anything. Big and Small cornered her, kept her behind the pillar, which, given all they had just seen, was about the stupidest thing they could do.
Support had left the gunner's side, so Adia reflected through the pillar and right on top of her, grabbed her wrist, and forced the sight upon someone else. Small, then Big, then Small, then the interrogator for good measure, then Big. The plan was to shoot her, let the bullet overload her power, push the gunner away, and lose herself in the crowd bound to appear once this zone of emptiness or whatever it was disappeared. And as long as she was armed, nobody seemed all that keen to disrespect her plan.
For the first, and what she prayed would be the only, time in her life, Adia Musyoki shot someone.
She shoved the gunner off her and watched Big keel over. A stack of perfectly cooked roast dinners leapt into existence and buried her. No crowd appeared.
Alright. So that was not her power. That was not her power, and she had let go of the only person in the room with a gun.
She tried to remember what her Mum said in times like this. For some reason, 'don't get kidnapped off the street, forced to rob a national museum, and locked in a gunfight while completely unarmed' wasn't something she could picture in her voice.
Short of any other option, she pulled the bestiary - the thickest tome - from her jacket and threw it at the gunner. For her part, equally short of any other option, she turned and fired aimlessly. The bullet struck and lodged itself in the front cover, and out poured the living illustrations of hundreds of witches. The room was flooded with them instantly, visibility almost nonexistent. Adia trusted her spatial awareness well enough to make it a floor up, and should the others try to work their way out, she threw a few mirrors onto the walls here and there. They stumbled about, the size of the room and their position in it now unclear. Small somehow managed to fall through a mirror and into an adjacent hall. Adia almost laughed watching the ordeal from behind the upper-storey handrail.
To reassess, Big was not the person maintaining the absence of other people. Of course not, she was the most anxious of the lot of them. What good would this power be if its user was still a nervous wreck while using it?
The interrogator bent over to collect the bestiary and end this madness. But the moment she had, Adia brought down another at near-terminal velocity for an object so air-resistant, to the base of her neck.
And like that, the interrogator collapsed. The room filled with police - probably come to investigate the broken glass on the book display - and slipped out a moment too soon for any of them to notice her. Her abductors did not fare so well, and she was three long-lost books better off for it.
Adia: Hey
Adia: You know how you said you'd always love to be able to see Annie's journal?
Ruth: Oh of course darl ... All the best ... Ruth
Adia: Well for starters you don't have to keep signing off on all your texts :P
Ruth: Im old ... Its what I do LOL ... All the best ... Ruth
Adia: Suit yourself...
Adia: Long story short I've recently
Adia: Shall we say come into possession of it?
Ruth: NO WAY ... All the best ... Ruth
Adia: I'm not sure who must have smuggled it out of Mombasa
Adia: Or the other books for that matter
Adia: Probably best to bring up with the experts!
Adia: I presume you know how I can get in touch with them?
Lucile Chang had hardly slept last night. Miguel had been messaging her incessantly the past few months (and certainly with good reason) and she had spent just as long trying to solve a mystery the very universe might depend on with him. It had not gone well, and she felt no closer to determining who Sylvia's anonymous next-of-kin might be. Worse still, in hoping time pressure might help, she had invited one of her students to join her in delivering a bottle of magic-resistant dirt and a small envelope Miguel had sent her to the mystery individual.
Well, it certainly wasn't true to suppose they hadn't progressed, but only in unravelling ancient mathemagical secrets which had threatened their trust in the departed.
It was on the morning of this day that her old acquaintance from Australia whom she met during her tenure in California, a woman who came to meet the minds of a generation in the futile hopes of saving her daughter, sent a message - linking to a private chatroom - to herself and Miguel both. It simply read:
"Hey chaps ... Good to see you again ... A friend of mine in Kenya has BIG NEWS ..."
Hope drummed a restless rhythm onto the kitchen countertop with one hand and twirled the phone cord with the other.
"No, Aunt- I'm... look, I'm sorry, but I'm crap at computers. Never needed them, I've just asked the Kyubster anything I'd need to look up."
Mækiu had awoken before Marie, and craned her head around the living room with a level of awareness only half-engaging with the area's eponymous activity. "Hope... would you mind keeping it down?"
"Oh! Hi, Mae. Didn't even know you were still here. Nah, nah. Just talking to Marie's girlfriend. Oh! Really? Well, you're not gonna believe who it- right, yeah... yeah... right. Sorry. Nah, nah, nah. I'll ask her actually. Oi, Mae!"
"What...?" She rubbed her eyes, forgetting as she did most days that only one of them actually did anything.
"You any good at computers?"
"I invented them nine million years before you, if that helps."
"Spot-on. Can you teach me how to use an instant messenger?"
Margaret kicked her feet up on the table. The cashier glared at her, but she pretended not to notice. Internet cafés tended to gather the aroma of a very particular demographic, anyway, she thought. If anything, she would be leaving it cleaner than she found it.
"So who's hiring?"
Alice didn't look away from the screen. "Would you believe nobody?"
That made her sit up. "Nobody?"
"Guess they don't have stuff worth stealing in Arizona."
"Yeah... that makes sense."
"That Aussie girl from back in January is trying to get in touch again, and would you believe, there's a chatroom for it?"
"Alright. Let's a take a look."
For a second, only a single click filled the air. A silence accommodated each of them process what they were reading.
"Sweet Jesus, Miguel's in here?! No, don't type that."
Nadia nodded intermittently at her open laptop while she unpacked. "I can't imagine how you managed to get your hands on that."
"I was there, and I still can't imagine it. I've been photocopying it to send to Ruth Cahill-Madigan-"
"The historian?"
"The very same. But over on your end I've heard the deeplighters are looking for Holzknecht's supposed great-great-grandchild!"
"I'm well aware." Nadia unzipped a side pocket to her suitcase and tossed a pair of novellas across the bed. "But you can rest assured that I know exactly who to put onto this case."
"Already?"
"I'll be meeting with them tomorrow. I would today but I'm too tired from the flight to sound coherent asking directions in German."
"I'm impressed. Give me their details, I'll drop 'em a link to a small group I've been getting together."
"Of course."
SAME OLD SONG, FOREVER
Nicola Derosa (1851 - 1871) is widely considered to be one of the greatest magical thieves of all time. Certainly, by any metric, she remains to this day the greatest thinker - perhaps the only thinker - on the practice of museum heists. Now five - and with my Understudy hinting more to come - museum heists deep into this story, who better to recount than her?
Derosa was born in Rome to a wealthy family- well, to a wealthy mother and some poor sod she'd met while her husband was off overseeing some cleanup after the Italian War of Independence. To be more precise, she was born in the Musei Capitolini, wherein museum staff were forced to escort herself and her mother off the premises.
Throughout her adolescence, she would find her brain as polluted by teenage ennui as anyone's, and come to the conclusion at age 14 that if life were terrible, and so were death, then the only other possibility open to her would be whatever state one calls their prenatal nonexistence. She swore, from that day, to find the exact spot within the museum where she was born, and reimagine the circumstances.
Naturally, she was banned for this.
So she swore, from that day, this time for sure, that if she could not go to the museum, the museum would come to her. She would recreate its atmosphere by taking the very objects it was built to house. And she discovered right away that she was shockingly good at this. And once her contract was sealed, she became suddenly aware not only of how many artefacts belonging to magical girls were housed in similar institutions, but what struggle there was in a worldwide push to reclaim them without making public the existence of her own species.
She decided that there was a moral imperative upon her, to teach women like herself how to steal. And when she had taught not only her peers, but the young paupers and urchins of Rome who shared in this narrow, magical existence, who she had passed on the street every day as a human but only now stopped to treat them as her own kin, she remained unsatisfied. What she needed was to write a manifesto on theft which would persist long after she passed away. And the theories she presents within stand far more interesting than any robbery of hers.
Derosa postulated that objects were kept in museums for three reasons. The first was that of education. As the world's most noble endeavour, this proved the greatest moral complication in robbing a museum. As long as something is kept within the walls of a museum, it has the potential to enrich the entire public, not to mention how important its professional preservation was to allowing experts, many generations apart, to re-examine, question, and cross-check each other's discoveries. Derosa argued that if something is to be learned from a relic, one needs an absolutely imperative reason for claiming it.
The second is objectification. A museum, as in any institution, has an agenda to enforce. Any agenda worth its salt needs facts to back itself up. A relic, removed from its cultural context, sometimes even by centuries, can lose emotional value, and be used in appeals to other rhetorical senses. Anyone can suggest that the ancient Egyptians were master engineers, but it is perhaps more significant to suggest that they built this or that, and have an object which, in a vacuum, supports this. On the other hand, voiding an object of all connection to emotion, culture, and anything outside itself can very easily lead to turning its society of origin into an other, its population into a number, its epistemology into a paragraph and its traditions into a dot-pointed list. Whether or not something is worth stealing by this metric is depending on what agenda the museum carries, and who is doing the objectifying.
The third, the sinister twin of the second, is imperialism. Just as the rhetorical value of an object can be used to deprive a history of any emotional value, so too can it be used to make a similarly factual-sounding point to increase the public's faith in their country's supremacy. With the rise of nationalism in Europe throughout the tail-end of the nineteenth century, Derosa asserted that artefacts with such value may not only be stolen, but in certain circumstances, destroyed forever.
Derosa passed away at age nineteen, murdered by a gang of pirates. Both her body and belongings were left in Mombasa, where they had been presumed to be lost forever.
But how times change.