So which was it? Aliah let out a deep breath and pushed the keyboard tray under the desk, her (still gloved) fingers sore from typing so furiously. She wouldn’t be able to figure out anything more without doing her own version of research…And before she messed with that again, she needed a break.
There wasn’t much in the fridge to help her recharge, though: just some spoiled Mexican leftovers and a few stale bagels. Aliah settled for a glass of water. She’d never been that fired up about cooking. Or housekeeping, she thought ruefully as she navigated around miscellaneous piles of junk on her way to the couch. But she was making do. And not that badly, given how unexpectedly she’d left her parents’ house six months ago…
Six months ago today, in fact, on February 15…As if on cue, Aliah’s eyes settled on the bracelet: it was hanging from her ratty table lamp. Putting down the remote, she reached slowly for the dangling piece of jewelry and took it into her plastic-covered palms. The bracelet had been a sixteenth-birthday gift from her father, and she’d worn it religiously until…until that “fateful night.”
What would it be like to relive her own history?
Aliah didn’t give herself time to debate the pros and cons: in one quick motion, she pressed the bracelet to her forehead.
A variety of scenes from her teenage and college years came flooding back all at once, but with a burst of will, she controlled the sequence. Grimly, she focused on that night six months ago to see how her memories aligned with the reality…
…Her mother sits at the kitchen table, still clothed in the traditional jilbab she hasn’t bothered to take off. Her father strides back and forth behind her mother, his belly swaying in time with his shaking head.
She sits slumped on the other side of the table, fiddling with the bracelet as she avoids their eyes.
“So this wasn’t the first time?” her mother eventually asks in Arabic, her voice soft but cold.
She doesn’t answer for several seconds, and then finally responds with a quiet “No.”
Her father grunts and seizes what remains of his hair. “We didn’t move here to…to—”
“To leave old constraints behind?” she interrupts, looking surprised at how forceful she suddenly sounds. “But I thought we did. I thought we left Iraq to start over…and…” She draws a deep breath and looks directly at both parents. “And things are different here. I’m sorry if it hurts you, but I’m not sorry I’ve done it…Or are you just surprised anyone would want me?”
Her mother winces at the accusing tone. “Aliah…We can’t have this under our roof, no matter where that roof is.”
“Then consider me no longer under your roof!” She pushes her chair back so hard that she stumbles as she stands. Turning jerkily, she runs upstairs without looking back, and the scene flees with her. When she reaches her bedroom door, she collapses against it, strips off the bracelet, and hurls it against the opposite wall…
…Aliah whipped her hand from the bracelet, shaking violently as she fell into the couch. That had definitely been a bad idea; it was way too soon. And the fact that the splinter had reappeared beneath the skin of her hand again wasn’t at all comforting.
But it was intriguing, she realized as she tried to redirect her aching thoughts. Was the shard of bone…empathizing? Did something about her history resonate with—
And suddenly several of the bead’s images she’d avoided disentangling until now started to make an awful sense. Swallowing dryly, Aliah plunged into her memories of them to be sure, cross-checking what various scholars and crackpots thought to be true as she went…
At some point after Pausanias’s arrival, Philip took him as a lover.
…An older man kisses a younger in an opulent bed while sliding a ring onto his junior’s finger. The younger man stares at the object for a long moment before embracing his elder with abject devotion…
For vengeance’s sake, Attalus got the king’s former lover drunk and had him sexually assaulted.
…The young man yells a drunken protest as several stable-hands hold him down for a gang rape. His right hand smashes into a chair leg as the first aggressor slams into him, jamming his ringed finger at an awkward angle…
…Alone, the young man wakes amidst the wreckage of his violation. Wincing, he gingerly touches his backside, his bloody brow…and his damaged finger. The section above the ring is visibly swollen and starting to turn a dark purple. Panicking, the young man tries to slide the ring off. But even after an immense, bruising effort, he fails: the flesh is too engorged with blood…
Once he’d recovered, Pausanias went to Philip seeking justice.
…The young man gestures animatedly in front of his elder, showing off all his wounds but making a point of highlighting his now extremely dark and distended finger. The old man hesitates before saying something that makes his junior gawk in disbelief…
Instead of rebuking Attalus, Philip tried to placate Pausanias by giving him a higher position in the somatophylakes.
…Alone and the picture of anguish, the young man stares at his blackened finger and reaches for his knife. With methodical, sawing strokes, he cuts it off below the ring…
…Showing several days’ worth of new stubble, the young man picks up the decaying finger from where it lies on the floor. He slides the ring off the dead digit, and with an impassive face, begins removing the remaining skin and working out the marrow from the largest joint. Once that’s done, he carves a word into the now hollow bone, threads a string through its newly cleared aperture, and ties the grim pendant around his neck…
Twice spurned now, Pausanias redirected his enmity towards the king who kept rejecting him.
…The young man bends down before a royal looking door and slaps the ring on the floor with his bandaged hand. The necklace hanging from his chest hovers above the bloodstained piece of gold as he lingers for a moment before standing and walking away…
…Aliah hugged her legs to her chest, trying not to throw up. The bone bead hadn’t just belonged to Pausanias: it was part of him.
And now a piece of it—of him—was inside her.
* * *
Aliah spent the rest of the night in a daze, trying to numb herself by watching late-night TV and infomercials. It didn’t work: she kept coming back to the realization that all the bead’s memories before the…cutting…played from hand-height, while those that came after had a chest-level perspective. Was this artifact more animated because it had once been part of a person? Was that why it almost seemed to have a mind of its own? Why did…Why…
She couldn’t remember what time she’d fallen asleep when she woke up the next day. Four…maybe five in the morning. But definitely late enough to have overslept her alarm by two hours.
Flying out the door, Aliah barely remembered to grab the box of latex gloves she'd started to depend on. When she finally arrived (unremarked) at work, she focused on churning through the next batch of artifacts. If she concentrated—and kept her hands covered—then everything was fine. It helped that the soon-to-be-obsolete storeroom from which she needed to fetch today’s objects could only be reached by going through public space; navigating second-floor crowds with a packed cart was too nerve-wracking to allow time for thinking about much else.
Until 3:30, when Aliah’s hand started itching as she rounded the Chinese exhibit.
She tried to ignore the sensation—at least until she was back in an employee-only area—but the itch accelerated from irritating to painful within a few seconds. Somehow, she managed to swallow most of her cry of shock; only a few people gave her funny looks. The pain kept increasing, though, and now something dark was starting to pool under the blue latex.
Panicking, Aliah tugged her cart into an alcove, ripped off her glove…And stared in horror.
A perfect circle was gouged into the back of her hand. Next to it was the splinter, visible again and wiggling furiously.
With a sharp grunt, Aliah tried to snatch the bone sliver with her good hand. But i
t was still too quick, darting away from her grasping fingers and scoring another bloody line in the process. Aching and defeated, she slumped against a nearby exhibit and grabbed her wrist instead. “What do you want?” she hissed in frustration, shaking her occupied arm as if doing so would fling away the splinter like water from a wet dog.
A flashback started to push against the mental barrier she’d begun erecting last night. Aliah felt this internal shield bend…but she kept it from breaking with another grunt. She couldn’t stop the splinter from making another angry slash, however, angled so that her hand now sported an oozing X within a dripping O.
“What do you fucking want?” Aliah pleaded once more, feeling the resolve drain out of her as she let her arms fall limply to the floor…
…The young man fingers the bone bead around his neck, nods at another of the soldiers—who looks equally tense—and runs.
Past the other five soldiers, onto the stage, and up behind the old man as the scene lurches forward.
The crowd’s noise changes from adulation to alarm, and the old man begins to turn, his white cloak billowing around him in a slow arc. Just as the young man closes with him, something flashes on the old man’s chest. Something…golden. And round…
…The ring.
Aliah gasped as loud as she’d grunted moments earlier, her sight refocusing on the here and now of the bustling Field Museum. Philip had found the ring Pausanias slapped down in front of his king’s door…Found it and kept it. Around his neck, on a chain eerily similar to the one worn by his former lover. Pausanias had seen it as the old man turned…and still gone through with the assassination.
She took a deep breath and breathed another question, unsure if it needed to be voiced aloud, but unwilling to acknowledge a mental connection with the splinter if she could help it. “Am I…am I supposed to find the ring?”
The splinter wiggled once—in a gross parody of a nod—and then plunged back into her skin.
* * *
Over the next several days, Aliah used her spare time to scour the museum’s holdings. It seemed logical to start with the World Eaters assemblage, but nothing in its catalogue said anything about “Philip’s ring.” And running her hands over the exhibit’s jewelry pieces when she had a moment alone with them didn’t turn up anything except more unwanted, unfamiliar memories.
Browsing the museum’s larger holdings wasn’t any more productive. The database didn’t list any Philip-specific artifacts, and going through the large clusters of anonymous Greek rings was taking forever. To speed things up, Aliah had experimented with touching several at once, but the overlap of competing vignettes was too much.
After two weeks of this, she was close to breaking down. Her hand wasn’t healing well—wearing gloves kept irritating the scabs—and she hadn’t had a full night’s sleep since before she learned who Pausanias was. At least the splinter had stayed quiet: her continued efforts to find its counterpart seemed to be enough to placate it for now.
But Aliah knew she was about to hit a wall. It she didn’t find the ring in the museum soon…The next step was probably to go online and start searching other institution’s catalogues. Which meant expanding the scope from one haystack to thousands. And what if the ring was tucked away in a private collection somewhere? Or circulating on a black market she had equally as little chance of tapping into?
Fittingly, it all came down to coincidence.
Three weeks after her life turned upside down, Aliah was temporarily reassigned to photograph a set of Turkish artifacts. It was a rush job for a visiting scholar, which apparently had to be done by this afternoon “come hell or high-water.” (The fact that Terry had actually said this phrase kept it echoing in Aliah’s head.) On automatic again, she was coasting through the new objects, taking advantage of the mandated break from World Eater items and all her related concerns.
But then her hand throbbed as she picked a golden goblet off its shelf.
Somehow, Aliah managed not to drop the delicate looking vessel. Her reward was another jab of pain, as the splinter pierced through skin and glove to tap against the cup’s surface. A droplet of her blood oozed down the splinter’s shaft, touched the goblet, and sparked a new set of images…
…Grubby grave robbers shout in triumph as their spades hit something solid. They waste little time in unearthing the body they’ve discovered, yelling again as they slide jewelry from its skeletal hands and decaying neck…
…The grave robbers throw up their hands to beg for mercy. But the road bandits have none of it; they butcher their quarry with the same dispassion they evidence afterward when they loot their corpses…
…The bandits hand over a bag of rings and pendants to a smiling merchant, who repays them in coin…
…A young noble buys one of the rings with an anticipatory smile…
…And offers it to a young, excited woman…
…The ring passes to another person…
…And another…
…Until a pragmatic-looking smith takes possession of the ring, melts it down with several other gold objects, and works hard and long to form the resulting liquid into a shining goblet…
…Aliah pulled herself out of the montage and set the goblet back on the cart. Then she exhaled forcefully.
The splinter had stayed on the goblet.
Feeling suddenly lighter, Aliah took a big step backward, trying to put enough distance between herself and the bone fragment that it couldn’t jump the distance or do something equally insane. But the splinter just kept tapping against the base of the goblet with decreasing force…As if it were losing its essence now that it was no longer contained in her body?
Part of her wanted to let it…die, if that was the right word. Something about the splinter’s relentless, diminishing efforts made her hurry to the elevator, however. Some part of her that wanted closure, even though she was already free of the impossible parasite.
Fortunately, no one was in the lab when Aliah emerged into the main Anthropology room. Which meant no one witnessed her pocket the rest of the bone bead—still unfixed; she’d overheard Terry grumbling about how resistant it was proving to repairs—and scurry back to the elevator.
The splinter was still moving when Aliah returned to the cart, but only barely: if she hadn’t been looking for the motion, she never would have noticed it. Feeling a strange sense of urgency now, she withdrew the bead, rubbed her thumb lightly over the Greek inscription that might or might not read “Justice,” and set the artifact gently on top of its missing fragment.
Faster than her eyes could follow, the two pieces merged into one…And started thudding against the goblet with renewed—and shockingly loud—force. The noise panicked her for a few moments before she had a sudden insight into why it was being made: if the bead had once been part of a finger, and the goblet was partially composed of a ring…
Breathing quickly, Aliah cast around for something with a point. The first such object to catch her eye was an ornate dagger lying on a nearby shelf.
Trying to ignore the fact that she’d be fired on the spot if anyone caught her at this, she scooped up the knife and started gouging out a hole near the goblet’s upper edge, picking the cup up by its base to get enough leverage. The bead seemed to approve; looking creepily like an expectant dog, it raised itself up on one of its shorter sides to watch her work.
And it was definitely work: the knife wasn’t an ideal tool. But the cup’s gold was soft, and after no more than a minute of furtive scraping, Aliah succeeded in making a hole. A minute later, she’d hollowed this aperture to a size that looked large enough for its purpose.
Holding her breath now, she carefully upended the goblet to make her crude handiwork more accessible and set it on the cart.
The bead shook once—with excitement?—and glided into the opening. It lay there for a moment, motionless and serene…before turning to dust, along with several portions of the goblet that might have amounted to a ring’s worth of metal.
* * *
That night, Aliah finally noticed what a pigsty her apartment had become. It never would have done Martha Stewart proud, but piles of notes and articles had sprung up everywhere, the detritus of her almost month-long search for answers.
Now she had one…along with some questions of her own to answer whenever someone noticed the pocked, corroded looking goblet and the missing bone bead.
What she didn’t have, though, was the ability to sift through an object’s history any longer. The skill seemed to have left her when the splinter ejected itself from her hand; nothing had happened when she touched the dagger…Or anything since.
Overall, Aliah mused as she flopped down on the couch—deciding that cleaning up could wait—it was probably for the best. Even if she’d learned to fully control the power, it was too disruptive, too unbalancing…But she had to admit that part of her would miss the historical insight.
Reaching absently for the remote, she noticed with detached amusement that it had been lying on a printout about Alexander’s supposed role in his father’s death. Aliah still wasn’t sure about the particulars of the future conqueror’s involvement; none of the scenes she’d delved into had shown the forging of a dark compact. Then again, Pausanias had nodded to that other guard, and there had been two horses…It seemed likely that more than just tainted love had been in play, but she no longer had the means to unravel any such conspiracy.
With a quiet sigh, Aliah shook her head, her eyes lingering on a sentence about Alexander’s patricidal motivations. What a strange connection this had been. Alexander subjugated Persia shortly after the scene she’d relived so many times; Persia was her ancestral homeland…
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