From the other side of the building, Jeran steals into the museum without a sound.
As the sentry goes to investigate, I pull myself up the side of the entrance steps and rush toward the entrance. As I move, I hear the sentry again make his annoyed huff as he finds my abandoned wristbands and sash.
“Bunch of wild children,” I hear him mutter out loud.
Before he can turn back around and return to his post, I disappear inside the darkness of the museum.
Skylights up above us shed squares of blue light against the marble floors, where objects stolen from every corner of the Federation’s conquered lands stand in beautiful, curated rows. Graceful statues, jewels that sparkle in the night, enormous vases and carved plaques. Pillars and pieces of monuments. Tapestries hang on the pale stone walls. It’s so quiet I can hear my heartbeat thumping in my ears.
I’ve never been in here at night before. The daylight cast the entire space in a dreamy fog. In this midnight air, though, the museum feels haunted. There are spirits in here, whispering stories ripped away from their roots.
Jeran materializes from the shadows beside me. The light halos him in silver. He looks questioningly at me, waiting for my cue on where to go.
I nod, then close my eyes, trying to remember the paths I used to take. Then I turn down a hall, and he follows.
We make our way past old doors salvaged from early Karensa and conquered Reo, plates and dishes and silverware taken from the rubble of destroyed homes in Benton, rugs depicting Azaran folk tales that must have once decorated the walls of their libraries. As we go, I can feel a flicker of my boyish self in here, taking these same steps, walking these same corridors. I’d seen these same displays back then. I’d lift my sister so she could get a better look at paintings and artwork on the walls. Laeni would let out purposefully loud laughs just to hear the way it echoed down the corridors. I can almost hear her now, some memory of her voice still preserved in this space.
I nod at a table set that we pass by. “See that?” I whisper so quietly that my voice seems to dissolve into the air. “I remember the soldiersbringing that into the museum for the caretakers to polish. They’d brought it back on a train from Carreal.”
“Did you have happy memories here?” Jeran asks.
We reach the bottom of the stairs leading up to the second floor. “So many,” I whisper.
Jeran gives me an understanding smile. “It’s okay to keep those memories, you know,” he whispers. “Even here.”
“I know,” I murmur back as I look up. Then I make my way up the same steps I used to take as a child.
We emerge onto a second floor dedicated entirely to relics from the Early Ones.
Jeran sucks in his breath. Rows and rows of artifacts are on display—archways from ancient halls, shards of twisted metal, gadgets that must have once worked, old engines and intricate gears, metal and glass polished to such a fine sheen that they look like nothing that exists today. One display is a series of charts drawn inside an old notebook, meticulously spelling out the life spans of various persons. They seem impossibly long: 140 years, 151 years, 160 years. Another is a line of glass jars containing curiosities preserved inside murky liquid, pieces of something organic that must have been alive a long time ago.
Goose bumps rise on my arms. No matter how many times I see these objects, I’m always haunted by them.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Jeran whispers as he stops in front of a glass display case showing what looks like a rectangle covered with rows of slim, shiny metal. “Does the Federation know what it’s for?”
I glance at the placard with it. Another long-lost memory returns: I was a little boy standing beside my father, pointing at this exact object, and asking him what it does. He stooped down to my height, his handswarm on my shoulders, and said,We think it was an engine of sorts, something that could power a metal machine and tell it what to do.
I stared in fascination at the slim, neat rows of metal.How can this tell something what to do?
My father shrugged.Well, how does an engine tell a train to move?He glanced at me.How do we tell the Ghosts to attack or to stay? The Early Ones were always searching for that.
For what?
Control.
Why’d they want that so badly?
He stood back up, patted my shoulder, and fell silent.If you could control the entire world, all of life, with a touch of your hand, you would.In his expression, I could see a glimmer of my mother and the sadness that always accompanied it.
I looked away from him and across the room, my eyes finding Laeni as she stood on tiptoe to peer at a mechanical doll on display in a glass case. Whenever my father got quiet like this, I found myself shying away, wanting to give him his space.
Looking back, I realize that maybe I was trying to control my own narrative.
The memory fades. I am looking straight across the same room and seeing the same mechanical doll on display against the opposite wall. Except now there’s no Laeni standing in front of it.
“Control,” I whisper.
Jeran looks at me.
