The champagne was warm, the conversation was not, and Della Steel had spent the last forty minutes nodding at a woman who used the word visionary the way other people used punctuation.
"Your father's position on the trade bill is absolutely visionary," said Mrs. Pemberton, whose diamond necklace caught the chandelier light and scattered it across the marble floor like something shattered. "Absolutely. Visionary."
"He'll be grateful to hear it." Della lifted her glass and did not drink. "The Senate vote is next week. Every voice counts."
She had given this performance so many times it lived in her body without her permission — the warmth in her eyes, the angle of her chin, the precise wattage of smile that said I am listening and I care without committing to either. Senator Harrison Steel's daughter. Art history graduate, museum curator, political prop. She knew her role. She was very good at it.
What she was not good at was the artifact.
It sat at the far end of the fundraiser hall — the Metropolitan Museum of Ancient Cultures had built tonight's gala around the unveiling of a new acquisition, and the acquisition crouched on its velvet plinth behind a rope barrier and bothered her in a way she could not explain. Palm-sized. Dark metal that was not quite bronze and not quite iron. A placard read: Enuma-Keth Fragment — Origin Unknown — Circa 3200 BCE (est.).
Della had catalogued four hundred and seventeen artifacts in her three years at the Metropolitan. She knew the specific grammar of very old things — the way they sat in space, the particular quality of their silence.
This one was not silent.
It was not making sound. Nothing so obvious. It was more that the space around it felt attended to. Like something was paying attention from inside it, the way a room feels different when someone is standing very still in the corner.
She had walked past it twice already, both times telling herself she was being ridiculous.
The third time, she had stopped.
You know me, she'd thought, which was absurd, because she was a professional and it was a piece of metal, and she had immediately continued walking and accepted another glass of champagne she had no intention of drinking.
That had been forty minutes ago. She had not looked at it since.
She was looking at it now.
"And of course the infrastructure implications are simply staggering," Mrs. Pemberton was saying.
"Staggering," Della agreed.
The artifact's surface caught no light. That was the thing. Every other object in the hall — the chandeliers, the silverware, the diamonds at Mrs. Pemberton's throat — threw light back at the world. The Enuma-Keth absorbed it. Swallowed it whole. And from across the crowded room, in the warmth and noise of three hundred people, Della felt it the way you feel a draft from under a door — not cold exactly, but wrong. The suggestion of a different temperature somewhere beyond.
She became aware, gradually, that someone was watching her watch it.
He was standing near the east wall. Tall, dark suit, the kind of stillness that isn't restfulness — the kind that is something else entirely, coiled and quiet. His eyes were grey the way old glass is grey: something you look through to see distances.
He was not looking at the artifact. He was looking at her.
When their eyes met, he didn't look away.
Della looked away first.
"Excuse me," she said to Mrs. Pemberton, who did not notice because she had pivoted to the Secretary of Agriculture. Della set her champagne on the tray of a passing server and moved toward the restrooms, not because she needed them but because they were in the opposite direction from the grey-eyed man.
She was halfway across the floor when the lights went out.
Not a flicker. Not a stutter. Total, immediate dark — the chandeliers killed, the accent lighting killed, even the emergency strips along the baseboards killed, which meant this was not a power failure. Power failures didn't have that kind of reach.
In the half-second of silence before the screaming started, Della heard three things: the sharp crack of the rope barrier around the artifact being broken, the hiss of a door she hadn't known existed opening in the east wall, and behind her, very close, a voice that said:
"Don't run. I need you to trust me for approximately ninety seconds."
She turned. The grey-eyed man was directly behind her. He had covered thirty feet of crowded floor in the dark and in the chaos without making a sound.
"I don't know you," she said.
"No." He took her arm — not rough, not gentle, simply decisive, the way you'd hold something you intended to carry and keep. "But you're about to. Move."
The screaming had started in earnest now. Muzzle flash in the direction of the artifact — once, twice — and the sound of shattering glass. Della's body made the decision before her mind did, because her body understood what her mind was still processing: the men who had come through that east door were not after the guests.
They were after the artifact.
And the man holding her arm had known they were coming.
"My father—" she started.
"Is already in extraction protocol. I triggered it before I reached you." He moved through the darkness without hesitation, navigating by something she couldn't identify. "He has twelve Secret Service agents. You have me. Move."
Della moved.