Elena leans back in her chair, thinking.
“We can do wonders with this, June…not only save ourselves but bring back the lost,” she says, and when she smiles there is sadness in the curl of her lip. I am reminded of a certain glass coffin.
I offer a consoling smile, my eyes sliding to the side.
“You are my sister,” says Peter, his tone grave. “And I want you to be safe, but also…happy. I made mistakes, before. I have learned from them.”
As usual, Peter is not smiling. Hands flat on the table, he is concentrating on delivering the rest of his message. I can almost see the clockwork turning in his mind. He glowers, hesitating to speak.
Elena leans over and puts her small hand over his.
“Thank you, Brother,” she says.
“I am not finished,” he says, reaching into his jacket pocket. Elena watches his hand, perplexed as he withdraws a crescent-shaped piece of metal.
Elena’s eyes fill with tears as she recognizes the symbol.
“Virtue,” she whispers. “You found her.”
Peter nods, placing Hypatia’s anima on the table between ceramic teacups and saucers and strange clay animals. Elena hesitantly picks it up, holding it in both hands. She turns it over and over, rubbing red clay dust off with her thumbs.
She smiles, and tears spill over her cheeks.
I didn’t know avtomat could do that.
Elena pulls the relic against her chest and slides an arm around Peter’s neck. His eyes close as she does it. Sudden tears rush to my eyes as I watch the look on Peter’s face as he hugs his sister for the first time in two hundred years.
“Hypatia is only the first,” I say, reaching again into my purse.
One by one, I set more relics on the table. Batuo. Talus. And then others, the ones collected at random from a dust-covered cavern floor. Each bears a unique symbol, the Word its owner carried in life. Each is a mystery as great as the one I used to wear around my neck.
There are strange things in the world, June. Things older than we know.
I lay a final piece on the table, a chunk of dusty rock—utterly unremarkable save for a spray of metal dots that stubble its surface. The artifact I recovered from a hidden alcove in Huangdi’s throne captured my curiosity back at the hotel. It took only a moment to flake away the loose sediment with a rock pick and brush. Inside the lump of solid stone, I found something familiar—a dark crescent of metal.
The relic has been fossilized.
I can’t even begin to imagine who it belongs to, or why it was made—much less when—but I plan on finding out. All I do know is the age of a thing is right there in the feel of it. No matter what I’ve seen, there are more secrets locked in the fingerprints of cracked porcelain and the bloom of rust on metal. And when I hold this relic in my hands and let my eyelids meet, mind-reeling eons of time seem to stretch out before me like a star-filled sky.