Page 5

5

I linger in the Egyptian antiquities room. The display is structured so that permanent museum items and information about the ancient empire are along the wall, with the auction item in the center—a canopic shrine and chest made for Pharaoh Tutankhamun more than a thousand years before the Common Era.

“I’m not going to steal it,” I tell Rian. He’s a few paces behind me, but when I speak, he gets closer. Good. I like him close to me. I like the way it makes my heart jump.

“I don’t suppose it would fit in your purse.”

I swing my reticule around as I take a step closer to the center display. As I watch, the number beside the canopic chest shoots up. I subtly look around, but it’s impossible to know who’s added to the bid. It might not even be anyone in the room. The people today are here to see and be seen. They may make token bids on some items—a random jewel from a random crown from a country no longer a sovereign nation, perhaps, or a piece of art from someone long dead—but the really valuable items have already been previewed by the really rich people, all of whom had an early showing of the displays away from the commoners who had to pay for the luxury of attending a charitable fundraiser.

Remote bidding.

“You do realize that this is a charity event,” Rian says, but I’m not sure if it’s to make conversation or if my face has betrayed my disgust. “To help your homeworld.” Ah. The face, then.

I glance around the room. A few people I recognize—a Gliese-Earth politician, a singer, another feed star. There are more, some vaguely familiar, but I can’t pin a name to any of them. Still, there’s a chance I’m the only person in this gallery who was born on the same planet as Tutankhamun.

And there’s a chance I’m the last person from Earth who will ever see this shrine.

“Can you imagine?” I ask Rian.

We could be anyone; we’re just two people in a museum.

“Imagine what?”

“This man was born three thousand years before any human ever left Earth’s gravity, and now his organs are on an entirely different planet.”

Rian’s eyes skim over the gilded shrine, the alabaster chest. The chest is carved with four openings at the top, one each for Tutankhamun’s lungs, liver, intestines, and stomach. The number beside the chest blinks out, then goes up as a new high bid is placed. I could sell my own organs and still not be able to afford his.

“Ada, I—” he starts, but when I turn to him, his lips press closed. He watches me a moment, and I want to ask. I want to know. What do you see?

But it’s not fun if he just tells me.

Rian turns back to the canopic shrine.

“No, it wouldn’t fit in my purse,” I say. The gilded wooden box is almost as tall as he is, and combined with the alabaster chest, I doubt I could even pick it up. “If I was going to steal this, it would require some planning.”

I gaze about the room, noting the angles and positioning of the display, the way the cam drones hover nearby, the crowd. I bet the recessed edges at the doorframe hide a lockdown gate triggered if someone does so much as nudge the heavy chest.

I shake my head. “No, I don’t think I could steal this from here.”

Rian’s eyes go wide. “Ada Lamarr, giving up?”

I snort. “No, not at all. If I wanted this? I would take it.”

“But you just said—”

“Not from here. I’d talk you into buying it, and then I’d steal it from you.” It’s the best plan. If you can’t take an object from one location, you just have to get the object moved somewhere else and then take it.

“Maybe I have better security than the museum.”

I laugh. “Is this a theory you want to test?”

Rian moves closer to inspect the current high bid. A weird noise croaks out of his throat. “Well, it’s moot anyway. My blood’s not rich enough for this auction.”

I shrug. “Then I just have to talk someone rich into buying it and then steal it from them.” There are, after all, plenty of people mingling in the crowd who are the exact combination of rich and idiotic for a plan like that to work. Although, to be fair, rich and idiotic is a shockingly common combination in people. Inherited wealth is a hell of a stupefier.

Rian huffs a little laugh. Nearby, two people point out the carvings on the chest, the goddesses etched in stone and gilded wood, arms upraised. I’m reminded of the gala’s motto.

History as art.

There’s art here, yes. Undeniable.

I swallow hard, my throat dry. Just because art exists, should it be seen? I can almost hear a reply, a voice in my mind with a Rigel-Earth accent: Of course. Art exists to be experienced. And I don’t approve of gatekeeping. For all my goals today, I actually quite like museums.

But not all art is for all people. And this art? It was meant for the dead. I inhale, exhale.

“You’re angry,” Rian says softly, watching me.

My heart leaps in response, further proof that I should not appreciate the art in front of me, the art not made for warm blood, attached organs.

“Furious.” My tone is light, my rage as soft as breath.

He doesn’t ask why, but I know the question sits on his tongue. Rather than give him a direct answer, I go to the wall, away from the canopic shrine and chest. “Did you know,” I say, pointing to the display, “that people in Victorian England had unwrapping parties?”

“Unwrapping?” Rian starts, and then he sees the little informative graphic on the wall, showing an illustration of white men in stiff collars and women in swaths of taffeta standing around a table upon which lies a mummy.

“Some of them would eat pieces of the corpse,” I continue. “They thought it was medicinal.”

Rian’s expression goes slack, but it’s not enough. Because even in the image on display, the people dressed in gowns and tuxedos are portrayed as civilized. After all, the cutlery is placed precisely, napkins arranged just so.

“And then later,” I add, “they ground the bodies up and mixed the powder with oil.” I snort without humor. “Expensive paint, that. Mummy brown.”

A little holo displays those words again— History as Art —overtop a series of paintings that used the pigment. A Delacroix melts into a Burne-Jones. They’re taking that motto quite literally.

“At least—” Rian starts.

“Which is better, do you think? Medicinal cannibalism or corpse paint?”

Across the room, voices murmur in appreciation as the bid for Pharaoh Tutankhamun’s canopic shrine and chest climbs higher.

“Or,” I say softly, like it’s an afterthought, “maybe the better question is, which is worse? The constant display of your sacred tomb in a museum, or a bidding war for your dehydrated organs?” I turn to Rian. “You see how this isn’t better, right?” And for the first time tonight, there’s doubt in my voice. Worry.

Rian shakes his head, and relief floods through me at the disgust evident in his features. “When does a person become an object?” he mutters, meeting my eyes with a clear, steady gaze.

“Historically, when someone else assigns a monetary value to them,” I answer.

He nods, jaw tight, and whatever he sees on my face seems to satisfy him. He starts walking, sticking to the perimeter of the room. He doesn’t feel like he can leave me, but he doesn’t want to stay here.

He may be from Rigel-Earth, and his family may make their wealth through luxury food, but at least he knows enough to peel back the gold veneer of this party and see it for what it is. I wonder if this means he’s crossed off Tut ankhamun’s crusty liver as a potential item for me to steal, or if my lingering attention sent the alabaster chest to the top of his list.

I watch him, the only art in the room that’s mine to view.

And that’s when I notice him fidgeting with his corsage. A white rose held down with a circular pin . . .

How did I not see it before?

A rose. A circle.

The Rose. The O-ring.

His pin is the exact same size and type of O-ring that I told him about when I was climbing out of a ravine lined with lava, the exact same O-ring that broke on the Rose , a ghost ship I discovered with a whole family dead inside.

Is this supposed to be some mockery of that moment? No, Rian wouldn’t do that. Fuck, what’s my evidence for that, though? He didn’t like mummy brown, I think desperately, trying to hold on to the threads tying us together. But he’s wearing that for me; he has to be. And the message is clear: he’s going to find the O-ring in my plan, the flaw that will lead to my demise. That’s what it is, I think, almost relieved. This is taunting me, nothing more, but . . .

He wears it as a badge of honor, just like the Victorians laying out a banquet.

I close my eyes and peel away the emotions I don’t want to show, a different sort of unwrapping, a bitterer consumption.

When he finally looks back at me, I’m certain my face shows nothing. But just in case, I pull him closer to the shrine. “See there?” I say, pointing to the stone relief of a woman, her arms outstretched, her body facing the shrine, her back to us. There’s one on each side of the box, each a different goddess.

“People think the Ancient Egyptians were showy, and maybe they were,” I say. “But the goddesses face the box, not us.” They know what they should look at, what they should not.

“It’s for protection,” Rian says. He nods toward the information scrolling above the display. “The four goddesses are both on the shrine and the chest, each providing a different layer of protection.”

Layers of protection, each more elaborate than the next. It reminds me of bubbles at Yellowstone.

It reminds me of the cougar.

Of the volcano.

I glance at the O-ring on Rian’s rose.

It reminds me that nowhere is safe.

Not even when you’re dead.