CHAPTER ONE
The largest private collection of rare artifacts from other worlds could be found in central New Jersey at Princeton University, and if anyone knew Maya Hoshimoto was a thief, they wouldn’t have let her anywhere near there.
Fortunately, no one did.
And anyway, she wasn’t a thief anymore, just a thirty-one-year-old graduate student entering her second year toward a PhD in comparative cultures—who happened to know a lot about foreign artifacts.
It was an excessively pretty end of summer, the kind where the birds were chirping and a few flowers hung drunk from their stems, but the air had just an edge of premonition to it. For Maya, who had grown up off-world under a dome, weather of any kind still felt like a gift.
Maya wandered into the subbasement room of the Dr. Frank R. Humbert Alien Artifact Collection and Rare Books Archives, where staff were unboxing recent acquisitions. Her friend Pickle, one of the assistant archivists, looked up and grinned at her. “How do you always know when we’ve got a delivery? I didn’t even know you were capable of waking up before ten.”
“Obituaries,” Maya said, then realized that maybe this wasn’t the kind of thing a graduate student paid attention to: that the grandson of a famous explorer, Dr. Nkosi, had died in his bathtub a month ago. She added: “I saw the van outside.”
Most material ended up sitting in storage for a couple of decades, but the Nkosi Foundation had dropped a hefty monetary donation to ensure that these items were given priority treatment.
Maya watched them remove artifacts from the boxes onto two long tables lined with black velvet. Her studies included an internship with the archives, which had a special relationship with the Department of Comparative Cultures. And while the pay was ridiculously low, she enjoyed hanging out here. She was friends with most of the staff, and every once in a while, they came across something truly special, something that might, just maybe, unlock a constellation of discovery.
“Quite a personal collection,” said one of the other grad students.
Maya raised an eyebrow. What she saw so far was disappointing: counterfeits and other common items. She reached for a round stone object etched with wavy lines.
“According to the inventory notes, those are worth more than your yearly paycheck,” said Pickle.
“Really? I know I don’t get paid much, but these are just personal hygiene products from the current era,” said Maya. She lifted it closer to her nose and inhaled a complicated scent, almost like chocolate with a burnt undertone. Fashionable right now on certain Belzoar worlds. “Even accounting for the cost of interstellar shipping.”
The others stared at her.
“What else we get?”
“This one’s a thousand-year-old Frenro sculpture.” The other grad student offered a peek.
“Mmmm.” Maya reached for the snarl of metal and stone. It reminded her of an old friend and a ship and all the ever-changing stars she’d left behind to be here.
“Careful!” said Pickle.
“This one’s fake too. And I’m always careful.” She lifted it higher, so its polished facets caught the light, and examined the smooth surface.
“Bullshit,” sputtered Brian, a conservator for the Artifacts Division. “It’s been authenticated. It’s one of the most valuable pieces of his collection.”
Maya probed one of the metal bits, ignoring his protests. “These types of Frenro sculptures are like a memory box of places a Frenro has lived, hence the mixed media.”
“Yeah, and?”
“This piece here is”—she scanned it again with her ocular lenses— “quartz.”
“So?”
“Quartz that appears to contain a significant amount of nitrogen,” Maya said. “Nitrogen in high concentration is poisonous to Frenro.”
“Oh my god. So true,” said Pickle with a laugh.
“And this fragment here”—Maya pointed out a black shard—“is a settler-manufactured data chip, the kind we used to make.” During the war, she meant, but didn’t say. She remembered her parents assembling the tiny parts that went into them every night at the kitchen table. Best to avoid mentioning it in mixed company.
Brian came to examine it.
Maya would have liked to linger over the rest of the items, but there was a blinking in her lenses indicating an incoming call from her lead academic adviser, and it unfortunately could not be ignored.
CHAPTER TWO
Her old silver Planet 9 bomber jacket barely kept out the chill of the stacks she’d retreated to for privacy. No need for anyone else to witness her humiliation.
The subbasement was a solid 18 degrees Celsius, dry, and dimly lit, to keep mold and deterioration at bay. The south side of the floor held metal shelves full of as yet untouched artifacts and the long tables where they’d been unpacking the Nkosi shipment. The north side boasted rare volumes and correspondence—Pickle’s domain. There were never many people around.
Maya slipped into the expandable-meter gap between the shelves and slouched against the cold metal frame. The gloom was bearable, except it reminded her too much of the banged-up, dusty orange world she called home.
She removed a chunky camera ring from her pinky and balanced it on the lip of a shelf, then touched her earlobe.
Dr. Liam Waterson’s head materialized above a row of mint condition crimson-bound minutes from some conference on interstellar relations.
His face was puffy and pale under a shock of red hair, except for a flush that blotched his cheeks and neck. Scowling, as usual. For as long as Maya had known him, he was irritated or anxious or both, and there was something comforting about his consistency.
“What is this?” he asked, without preamble.
So he had read the paper.
He’d called a week ago and asked her to send over what she’d been working on this summer for Xenology, a premier scientific journal. Liam wanted her to get a head start on accruing publication credits—important if she wanted a future in academia. Extra important if she planned on focusing entirely on museum studies rather than fieldwork.
Except she hadn’t been working on the paper. She had spent the last two months hiking and attempting to catalog every flavor of ice cream in New Jersey. Which left the only acceptable option of somehow condensing what should have been several months of research into seventy-two hours and appending a description of a concert she’d once attended while high on otherworldly psychedelics. Still, considering it was closer than Liam had ever been to another world, she thought it a fine enough contribution to the field. Fine enough-ish.
Maybe the detail about people vomiting acid on the carved stone floor and getting stuck when her soles began to melt was a little too much.
“It’s just a rough draft. To give you the general idea.”
“This isn’t a research paper. It’s a personal essay.” Maya may have grown up speaking Settlement Japanese, but her English was fine, and still Liam enunciated every consonant like he wasn’t certain she understood. “You can’t submit this. I gave you an extremely detailed outline, and you’ve driven over it backwards and forwards with a truck. How have you not made more progress? The deadline for submission is in three days.”
Copyright © 2024 by Yume Kitasei
