THE ARTIFACT CURSE

Episode 11: The Warning

Arc 2: The Rules — Episodes 11–20

The message from R sat in Lyric's phone like a stone in still water.

He hadn't told anyone about it.

He wasn't sure why — except that he was, if he was honest with himself, sure exactly why: he wanted twenty-four hours to think before he handed it to Caspian, who would take it, make a decision about it, and tell Lyric the outcome at the pace that suited him.

So Lyric sat in his office on the fourth floor, made tea he didn't drink, and thought.

The R could stand for Reclaimer. That was the obvious interpretation.

But the message didn't read like a thief. It read like someone who wanted him to know something specific: that the Graves family had been concealing information about him personally. Not about the relics in general. About him.

The Graves family has been keeping something from you since before you were born.

His first ten years were a blank. He'd always known that — a soft amnesia, not traumatic, just absent, like a section of tape that had been recorded over. He'd been told it was a childhood illness. High fever, neurological. He'd believed it because there'd been no reason not to.

He touched his collarbone.

He thought: What if the blank isn't damage. What if it's a seal.

He was still thinking about it at seven in the evening when someone knocked on the open office door.

Not Caspian's knock — Caspian didn't knock, he arrived in doorways and waited to be noticed. Not Evelyn's — Evelyn walked in and started talking. This was a single, considered knock, and when Lyric looked up, it was Dylan, without the thermos, which was unusual enough to be alarming.

"You got a message," Dylan said.

Lyric went still.

"Not me specifically," Dylan said. "The team. Anonymous, external, routed through four different servers." He held up his laptop. "I traced it as far as I could. It's the same routing architecture as the Reclaimer's auction profile. But the content —" he turned the screen around — "it's different."

The message was short:

The second relic will leave the country in seventy-two hours. Bronze Mirror. Meridian port, container S-7, booked under the name Ashford Logistics. You have time to intercept — if you stop asking questions and start moving.

Lyric read it twice.

"It's giving us the location," he said.

"Yes."

"The Reclaimer is giving us the location of the second theft before it happens."

"Or someone using the Reclaimer's infrastructure is." Dylan sat down across from him. "Which means either the Reclaimer has a conscience, or there's a faction split, or—"

"Or someone is playing both sides," Lyric said.

Dylan nodded slowly. "I thought about that."

Caspian's response to the message was immediate and unreadable in equal measure.

He read it once. He set the laptop down. He looked at Dylan and said: "Confirm the shipping manifest." He looked at Lyric and said: "Come with me."

They went down to Sub-Level Three.

Caspian stood at the map table with his hands in his pockets and looked at the red marks for a moment before speaking.

"The message is real," he said. "I believe it's real. But it could be designed to establish trust before misdirection." He looked at Lyric. "We act on it anyway. We can't afford not to."

"You believe it's real," Lyric said, "because someone on the inside sent it."

A pause.

"Possibly."

"Someone who wants us to intercept the mirror."

"Possibly."

"Someone who doesn't want the second relic to leave the country — either because they want to protect the bound soul, or because they have a different plan for the objects and losing the mirror disrupts it."

Caspian looked at him.

"You're building a lot of theory from limited data," he said.

"I'm building a working model," Lyric said. "Which is what you hired me for." A beat. "Unless there's more you'd like to tell me that would improve the model."

The map was very quiet between them.

"Not tonight," Caspian said. He said it like it cost something. "Tomorrow we move on the port. Tonight — get some rest."

Lyric looked at the seven red marks.

"The person who sent the message," he said, without looking up. "They signed it R. Reclaimer."

Caspian said nothing.

"But the Reclaimer took the dice. Why would they warn us about the mirror?"

Silence.

"Unless," Lyric said, slowly, "the Reclaimer didn't take the dice."

He looked up.

Caspian's expression had gone very still — the deep stillness, the held-in-place one — and behind it, in his eyes, was the specific look of a man watching something arrive that he wasn't ready for.

"Go home," Caspian said. Quiet. Careful. "Tomorrow. Port."

Lyric went.

He didn't sleep.