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Jamal was harder and colder when compared to his older brother. While she’d come to believe both brothers had been conscripted by Rafiq’s terrorist troops, Jamal was the one who might have chosen to join without being forced.
His shrewd brain likely wondered at her tears, not with sympathy, but because he recognized she’d broken and wanted to identify what had been the tipping point.
Thankfully, he asked no questions. She told him no lies.
The label on the box she was about to open indicated it contained cobalt-blue glass ingots.
This had been a particularly exciting find, as it was extremely rare to find whole glass ingots in the ground. In antiquity, glass ingots were used as a transport method for the glass trade. The glass, once traded, was then used for other purposes, much the same as metal ingots. Some ingots were themselves money, as with gold, but often, it was just a way to move the raw material, a basic trade good. So when a glass ingot reached its destination, it was melted and made into a new glass object.
The oldest intact glass ingots ever found by archaeologists dated to the late 14th century BCE. They were among the cargo of the Late Bronze Age Uluburun shipwreck, an underwater archaeological site in the Mediterranean Sea near the Turkish shoreline. The only reason the ingots had been recovered intact from that site was because the ship sank before the trade goods could be delivered.
Finding intact glass ingots in the Jordanian desert was potentially the first find of its kind.
Whenever she held artifacts—be they tools, objects of art, or raw trade materials—she thought of the person in antiquity whose hands had created it. The artistic vision or the skills they brought to the piece. She considered the person who bought it and thought of their hands touching the piece, using the tool, or the plan to turn the raw material into something else. Each item went through a chain of hands like hers until they were lost to time.
These ingots had a short chain, or they’d be something else entirely. A mosaic, perhaps. A window. A glass vessel.
She closed her eyes and practically swayed on her feet, her exhaustion was so great, as she wondered at the last human hands to have touched this ingot. How had it been lost before it could be used?
She held the cold glass, which was roughly the size and shape of an eight-inch round cake pan. This was the largest of the four intact ingots they’d found.
How many guns will Rafiq be able to buy with this artifact?
She held it up to the light, looking for cracks or variations in the color.
How many bombs?
The cortex was grainy and the glass opaque.
How many trucks to haul children away from their schools so he can enslave girls and conscript boys?
She would never know if she did it on purpose or not. The act went against everything she believed, but still, it happened. The ingot slipped from her fingers and shattered on the stone floor.
She gasped as it happened, her shock genuine. Bassam and Jamal both cursed. Their faces reflected her own horror.
They all looked to the open door to the hall, and she knew the men were braced for someone to step in and see the destruction.
She had no doubt Rafiq would deliver on his promise to cut off her hand. Perhaps all three of them would suffer that fate. Bassam and Jamal would certainly be beaten.
From the moment the ingot had been extracted from the site, it had belonged to Rafiq, and one did not destroy his property without consequences.
Diana’s tears dried up. Fear, it appeared, had quashed her ability to cry.
Glances passed between the two brothers. Jamal flicked his head toward the door, and Bassam, the closest to it, silently pushed it closed.
Without a word, they all began collecting the broken pieces. The largest remaining piece was a third the original size. They couldn’t pass it off as all that had been recovered from the field because the break was fresh. No patina. It looked like a blue obsidian artifact, with its bulb of percussion and smooth waves. That grainy cortex on one side.
“We can’t salvage any of it,” she whispered. “I’ll change the count on the inventory.”
Both boys nodded.
They gathered all the small, sharp pieces and placed them in an artifact box until they could figure out how to dispose of them. The boxes were numbered on the inventory sheet, and they didn’t have extra. Nor did they have a broom. They would need to figure out how to get the shards out of the room without anyone noticing. It wasn’t as if they could just toss them in a garbage can.
She stared at the pile of shards, her breathing shallow as she took in the volume. The garment—a dark abaya—she’d been given to wear had no pockets, and Jamal and Bassam couldn’t fit a sharp, shattered eight-inch cake into theirs.
Then she remembered the cell phone pocket in her headscarf.
The glass edges were sharp, just like obsidian blades. Little knives.
