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Vanessa jumped. "River! Jesus, what's wrong with you?"
But I was already heading toward the grid. "Come on," I called over my shoulder. "I'll show you."
7
"It's impossible," Raheem said.
"It's improbable," Vanessa corrected.
"It's beautiful," Luca said.
Dr. Blanton's expression was tight and tense. "Did you touch it?" she asked me.
I barely heard her, could barely focus on anything except the book. The crumbling, weathered cover, the leather brittle and thin. The fragile, dirt-smeared pages. The book that looked every bit its age. It had not looked that way last night. I couldn't seem to catch my breath.
"River?" Dr. Blanton's voice was sharp, and I blinked, meeting her gaze. "Did you touch the book?"
I could feel Luca's eyes boring into me.
It was on the tip of my tongue to say yes, but I found myself shaking my head. "No," I heard myself say. "I didn't open the box."
She stared at me a moment longer, then dropped her gaze, appearing mollified. "Okay," she said. "Raheem, River, you get the rest of this box out of the ground. Document everything, but do not touch the book. We'll have to call in experts from the university."
My heart sank. The university? The book would be whisked away, and I'd be stuck here, digging in the dirt. No. No way.
Luca cleared his throat.
It was such an obviously fake throat-clearing that Raheem and Vanessa stopped whispering and stared at him. "I do not know," he said, slowly getting to his feet and brushing his palms on his thighs, "if it is necessarily wise to involve others at this point."
I glanced around. The Velartan graduate students were digging in the southwest corner of the site; I’d assumed that Luca had told them about the anomaly, but now I wasn't sure. Was it just the five of us that knew?
Dr. Blanton was looking hard at Luca. "What do you mean by that?" she said. She, too, rose to standing, and though she was no taller than I was, the intensity of her gaze seemed to give her at least six inches in height.
Luca met her stare and matched it. "I mean," he said, "a find of this type is…significant. And the significance will not be lost on my colleagues at the university. If you wish to maintain the autonomy you've enjoyed on this dig, the…privacy…it may be in your best interest to—"
"Stick it in a box in the lab and pretend it doesn't exist?" Vanessa interjected brightly.
Dr. Blanton and Luca turned to stare at her, both seeming to be rendered momentarily speechless by the frankness of Vanessa's suggestion. Dr. Blanton's expression was reminiscent of someone who had just taken a very large bite out of a very sour lemon.
"Well," she said at last, "since this find is rather, ahem, unusual, I suppose a bit of discretion might not be entirely unwise."
"Generous," Raheem mumbled under his breath. Louder, he said, "In that case, it might be a good idea to move the book—"
"Shh!" Vanessa hissed, clapping a dusty hand over his mouth and glancing around.
Raheem pushed her away, sputtering. "Gross," he said crossly. "No one can even hear—you know what, whatever. I was just going to say we should probably get it somewhere safe."
"Yes," Dr. Blanton said. She'd lost some of the sour-lemon expression and was looking thoughtfully at the box. "Yes, I agree. Let's get it wrapped up, and we'll figure out where."
Alarm bells were ringing in my head. Was Dr. Blanton actually considering breaking protocol? The book should be treated like any other artifact: taken back to the lab, photographed, dated, and recorded. I opened my mouth to object, but once again, my mouth didn't seem to want to cooperate with my brain.
"I could—Vanessa and I can take it," I blurted.
Vanessa looked at me oddly. "In our dorm room?" she said. "You think that's somewhere safe? Plus, like—" She gave the stone box a distrustful look. "I don't really want that where I'm sleeping."
I looked down. I didn't know what was going on here, but something was wrong. That was not the book I'd found last night. Had someone else been here in the night and replaced it? No, that didn't make any sense. Besides, it did look like the same book. The same jet black leather, the same gilt—but this book had aged hundreds of years in only a few hours.
"No," I corrected myself. With an effort, I shook my head. "No, of course not. I don't know what I was thinking."
