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I lifted my wine glass and sipped. White.

Dull. Not even chilled. The caterers always rolled out the cheap stuff at openings like these, the bottles they couldn’t move anywhere else.

Any of the professors or historians or curators around here could’ve brought claret from their wine cellars that would’ve been better.

Would’ve been wasted there, though. The quality of the wine on offer suited the quality of the newly opened exhibition here.

Incan art. Again. The usual collection of reconstructed fabrics, pots with faces, and beaten gold plates with misshapen eyes.

Labels that had said the same thing for the last fifty years.

The pieces were so boring, so pointless. Spotlights shined directly over each vitrine, giving every painted pot a gravitas it didn’t deserve.

Nothing in that gallery was more than five hundred years old. When the Incas were at the peak of their achievements, drawing faces on gold leaf, Da Vinci was sketching designs for helicopters. Botticelli was painting Birth of Venus .

Yet there was the curator standing at the other end of the room, microphone in one clammy little hand, printed speech in the other.

The audience applauded as he read. There must’ve been more than a hundred people in attendance.

The great and the good. Art historians. Archeologists.

Supporters. Journalists who thought they knew this stuff better than the people who spent their lives studying it.

All of them getting off on telling each other how smart they were for appreciating these abysmal pieces. I wanted to gag.

No wonder the curator was so happy. All he had to do was stand there and thank the donors. Another round of applause. Another big grin through that thick gray beard.

I finished my glass despite the sour taste.

If anyone deserved praise for this pathetic display, it wasn’t the curator.

All he’d done was take a bunch of dusty old artifacts from the storerooms, send loan requests to museums, and arrange the items in their cases.

A middle schooler could pull off his job.

He didn’t even write the catalog. His assistants did that.

There wasn’t a new idea in it. Nothing to deepen knowledge, to improve the world, to make a difference.

Nothing of any importance.

One lifeless statue after another. A belief in false gods long dead.

When the Incas were still practicing human sacrifice and getting excited about chocolate, the empires I studied had already risen, grown, and fallen. Their gods had been born, worshipped, and forgotten.

“Isn’t it brilliant?” The question came from a woman in her sixties.

She had an expensive haircut, a mid-length gray wave from a side part that almost covered one eye.

The kind of cut that demanded hours in a salon at the hands of a stylist who kept up with the latest Upper East Side grande dame fashions.

She wore a spotless pantsuit, with two rows of pearls around her neck and silver earrings that flashed when she leaned too close to the beam of a spotlight.

Only the brooch of a golden boar on her jacket revealed her specialty in Roman and Greek art of the Imperial era.

She tilted her glass toward a gold-and-turquoise mask. “So beautiful. The craftsmanship is just remarkable.”

“And yet so old.” I handed my empty glass to a passing server and took another. “To think they were making things like this…five centuries ago.”

She smiled. I knew she got the joke, since she knew everyone in the department and specialized in empires over twenty centuries older than that.

Her area was little more than nostalgia. And yet garbage like this always won the attention, landed the citations, picked up the glowing reviews, and shoveled in the grants.

“And how is the ancient Near East these days?” She sounded like she was genuinely interested.

But people who attended these things always did.

They faked their interest in other people’s specialties.

I’d rather they were honest. I assumed that anyone who focused on popular, dull, over-researched areas such as the Incas and Aztecs, Greece and Rome, was only in it for the adulation, which was why I refused to feign interest.

No one here was as impressive as Maureen King had been.

And, despite his tendency toward money-grubbing, no one had been as effective as Trevor McAuley.

I’d mourn their losses for the rest of my natural life.

I was blessed, though, since I had many other soldiers out there in the field.

All across the country. South Carolina, Delaware, my home of Pennsylvania, and here in New York, to name just a few states where my soldiers resided.

“It’s coming along. One step at a time, you know. A work for the ages isn’t built in a day.”

“I’m sure you’ll get there.” She smiled with more than disbelief in her disingenuous expression. She also hinted at condescension. “And if you don’t, I’m sure one of the undergrads will pick up the baton at some point and get it past the finish line.”

I took another mouthful of wine as I wished her dead. Like most of the new students at the university.

The prophecies of the tablet were my real work. So much more important than all this stuff. So much more important than any other avenue of human inquiry.

In those ancient writings was the message I’d long hoped for, the prophecy to end all prophecies. I’d already translated the first part, which told of an apocalypse thousands of years in the future. In other words, right around now.

The writer called it the Day of Changing .

Beneath my very feet was the second part of the prophecy. The section that would tell me the precise date.

I could hardly wait to return to the tablets, to my translations.

The curator finished his speech and introduced the CEO of the financial firm whose generous contribution had made the exhibition possible. He wanted to say a few words.

I pulled my phone from my pocket. “Excuse me. I just need to make a quick call.”

The Imperial Rome enthusiast released me with a small bend of her neck.

I took my wine into the reception area and set the glass on the windowsill. In the exhibition room of New York’s Museum of Antiquities, the financial executive was explaining the need for great cultural shows such as these.

After stretching my fingers, I began to type.

Continue the sacrifices. The gods smile upon each and every one of you.

The Day of Changing is almost upon us.