When we wrapped up, the sun was nearly setting. Viktor must have been really pissed off, as he kept going far longer than I’d ever seen him in the past. Eventually one of the CU techs came up and told him that the charge levels weren’t keeping up and he had to stop. We only had so many of them and if they didn’t get enough down time to replenish their stores then we’d be doing nothing but making smoking confetti out of both the artifacts and the couriers.
He had, however, slowed down somewhat towards the end, so István had pulled me off courier duty and I’d spent the rest of the time helping him work on the backlog.
The artifacts wouldn’t come direct to us, by the way. First they had to cool off until they became this dull gray, like a spent piece of charcoal. Then someone would split it carefully with a special tool. It’s worth noting that we called both the unopened artifacts and the open ones “artifacts”, as though the outside was just part of the wrapper. I’d found out in the past this wasn’t exactly the case.
I’d once asked István why you couldn’t, you know, just bang the thing on the counter or something until cracked like an egg. He looked at me agog for a few moments before he realized I was serious. “If you open them the wrong way the rift’s energies will scatter and there will not be anything inside. Just the same texture, all the way through.”
“Makes sense,” I’d said at the time, before asking another question: “What do we do with them anyway?”
He looked troubled for a few moments before brightening up, like he was wrestling with the answer. “Sell them, of course. They’re worth a lot of money to the right people.” It’d seemed weird to me that he’d had to think about that, but even at my advanced level of verbal incontinence I could understand when someone didn’t want to talk about something.
Back in the present, I’d been going through all the artifacts that were open, looking for the special ones to hand off to István for his perusal. After about a dozen, he looked over at me.
“I still don’t know how you do it, Charley,” he said. I was staring at an artifact, so at first I didn’t hear him.
“Do what?” I said, when my brain caught up.
He held up the latest thing I’d handed him, an otherwise mundane looking bone fragment. “Find the most energetic artifacts.” He waggled the pale piece. “I can’t find anything special about this with my eyes but you only looked at it for a few seconds before handing it to me.”
“If it makes you feel better,” I said, “I don’t have a damn clue how I do it either.” The artifact I was currently holding was a carved wooden medallion. It had symbols I didn’t recognize around the edge and a figure of an animal I could not identify in the center. There was a small hole in the top, probably meant for a string. The figure in the middle looked like a deer, but stout like horses I’d seen in beer ads. Maybe just a real unit of a deer? I could totally understand why someone would see it and go ‘Yeah, I want that on a necklace.’
He seemed to appreciate the answer. “Well, whatever you’re not doing, keep on not doing it. It’s working.”
“I’ll, uh, do that?” I said, trying to understand the logic of his sentence and failing. “Or not do that? One of the two, anyway.”
We actually had an instrument that could do validate what I could intrinsically determine, only it took ages to run. We’d put everything through it anyway prior to the ‘sale’ of these artifacts to the ‘right people’. So far I hadn’t had a dud. It did apparently take something out of me to do whatever trick I was doing, something I hadn’t really realized until today. My head felt muddy, which seemed like too much effort for staring at something like a stoner until it told you its secrets.
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I handed off the medallion to someone else. It was a dud.
I glanced over at him, where he was still examining at the bone. “Where do these come from anyway? How does Viktor just get all up in the rift’s business and grab them like that?” István looked back at me, definitely considering his words. More secrets for sure.
He set the bone down on the table. “Hey look, you’re super helpful with this, so I’ll tell you what: Come with me after work for a drink, and I’ll tell you a few things. So long as you promise to keep it to yourself.”
“Deal!” I tossed him the one I was looking at - it looked like a giant fish scale. I’d barely had to look at it to know. He bobbled it a little before getting a good grip. “That one is, like, , man.”
His look was priceless.
We were done even later than usual. Late enough that István pushed back our plans to the following day. I was a little letdown, but I was tired. Probably more tired than let down, if I was honest. I was going to learn whatever it was he wanted to tell me either way.
After we loaded the last CU stack on the truck, I went back to the site to look for anything missing or left behind. Not sure why this was my job specifically, but I tended to be the one sent back to do it.
I methodically swept the area near the rift to where the tables had sat. Finding nothing, I turned around to go back to the last truck, when I spotted a bit of black on the ground that stood out from the rusty brown of the rocky soil that inhabited the area around the rift. Walking up to it, I hunched down and looked at it closely.
It was a feather. But not just any feather. It had a rich darkness to it that reminded me of the rift itself, as though it was eating the light. On the edges sparkled the red embers of a dying fire, but when I reached out towards it, there was no heat.
Something in me made me pick it up. I was intensely drawn to it. If the giant fish scale from before was a pond, this was an ocean.
Where had it come from anyway? We’d cataloged all the artifacts we’d retrieved earlier.
Wait. I was wrong.
The one I did my best sports ball impression on wasn’t accounted for. Sure, general knowledge was that when they 'cooked off' they were gone. That matched with what I’d been told about opening them as well. But what if…
My brain was immediately consumed with stupid idea. To just keep it. Who would know? I seemed to be the only one who could feel the pull. Not one to let a poor decision making process stand in my way, I grabbed it off the ground, wrapping it in my right hand and jamming that into my pocket, trying to hold it carefully enough not to hurt it while also not looking like I was, you know, holding something in my pocket.
I walked back over to the van, not letting a single trace of interest cross my face. I’d managed to steal cookies out of Gran’s jar before, and that was a borderline impossible feat.
She kept a close eye on the thing and it even when you opened it. Yeah, like a cow. My siblings had looked at me like I’d stolen the moon from the sky when I showed them the cookie. Which of course Gran spotted the second I pulled it out of my pocket. I couldn’t sit for the rest of the day without jumping a little bit when my butt touched the chair.
So long as Gran wasn’t around and the feather didn’t , I'd be golden, right? Feathers don’t usually , do they?
I put my off-hand up to pull myself into the back of the truck when a searing pain struck the one holding the feather. I yanked it out of my pocket, faffing it around in the air uselessly: the cool air didn’t help one bit. If anything all the motion made it hurt .
“You okay, Charley?” Alex was there, near the back, looking at me.
“Yeah, it’s fine,” I said, thinking fast, staring at my palm, “I had an allergic reaction to something I touched earlier today and it’s flared up or something.” It wasn’t completely a lie, the mark from earlier looked like a searing brand across my hand. It was bright red and throbbing. The feather was nowhere to be seen.
I took a few quick peeks at the ground around us under the guise of blowing on my palm, but I didn’t see a thing. The feather - which I suspected to be an artifact - had vanished into thin air, and all the work I’d done avoiding burns earlier seemed undone by one on my hand that was worse than anything Alex had.
“Let’s just go,” I said, taking his help in getting in. I couldn’t keep looking without it being suspicious. The hand didn’t hurt quite as much as it had originally, but it still stung and had a wave of pain walked across it now and then, as if accusing me of my theft.
