Read Chapter 13: Finding the Scarab

The singing stopped.

It didn't fade, didn't falter. It just cut off mid-note, as if every statue in the museum had drawn the same breath at once. Eamon stood in the Great Court, his torch cutting through the dark, and the silence that followed was somehow worse than the sound.

That was when he heard the chittering.

It came from somewhere near the Egyptian gallery—small, rapid, like stones clicking together in a fast stream. He swung his torch toward the sound and caught a glint of movement at the base of a display case. Something scuttled across the marble, pausing just at the edge of his light.

The scarab.

Not the small, carved amulets he'd seen in cases. This was the size of his palm, its shell a deep, polished green that seemed to drink the torchlight. It clicked its legs against the floor and turned, waiting.

Eamon took a step forward. The scarab skittered ahead, then stopped again.

"You're leading me somewhere," he said. "Or you're just playing with me."

The scarab's antennae twitched. It moved again, faster this time, skirting the edge of the Egyptian gallery and heading for the stone stairs that led down.

Eamon followed.

The stairs were narrow, not part of the public route. Staff only. He'd walked them a hundred times on his rounds, past the pipework and the electrical panels and the rows of climate-controlled storage. But tonight the air felt different—thicker, older, carrying a smell of dust and salt and something faintly metallic.

The scarab moved ahead of him, its shell catching the torchlight like a beacon. It stopped at a door at the bottom of the stairs. One he'd never noticed before, set into the wall where the corridor turned a sharp corner.

The door was unmarked, painted the same institutional grey as everything else down here. But the scarab pressed itself against the gap at the bottom, and the lock clicked open on its own.

"You've got to be kidding me," Eamon muttered.

He pushed the door open.

Inside, the room was small and cramped, packed floor-to-ceiling with shelves. Boxes. Dozens of them, all ages and sizes: wooden crates with iron bands, acid-free archival boxes, a few ancient-looking chests that shouldn't have been stored in a place like this. Dust hung in the air, and his torch beam cut through it like smoke.

The scarab hopped from the door to the nearest shelf, then to another, navigating the room with the certainty of something that had been here before. It stopped on a low shelf in the corner, beside a plain cardboard box.

Eamon crouched and pulled the box free. It was heavy, the cardboard soft with age. He lifted the lid.

Inside, wrapped in faded tissue paper, were objects he didn't recognize. A small jade figurine. A leather pouch with silver stitching. A curved piece of ivory etched with symbols. A set of bronze rings. A fragment of what looked like ancient pottery, glazed a deep blue.

Each one from a different place. A different time. A different civilization. Someone had collected them—deliberately, carefully—and stored them here, away from the galleries, away from the records.

The scarab chittered again, louder. It hopped from the shelf and landed on the edge of the box, its legs clicking against the cardboard. Then it dropped inside, moving over the objects with deliberate steps, like a dog circling before it lies down.

It stopped on top of a bronze dagger.

The blade was short, leaf-shaped, its edge still sharp after what must have been millennia. The hilt was wrapped in leather so old it had gone black, but the bronze had been polished recently. Or maybe that was just the way it caught the light.

The scarab pressed itself flat against the blade.

And the dagger began to glow.

It started as a faint blue shimmer, barely visible at the edges of the bronze. Then it grew, pulsing outward from the scarab's touch until the whole blade was bathed in a cold, steady light. The symbols etched along the blade—Eamon hadn't noticed them before—ignited one by one, burning like tiny blue flames.

He didn't reach for it. Not yet.

"You're showing me something," he said, his voice low. "The screen. The diary. The codex. Now this. You're a guide."

The scarab didn't answer, of course. It just sat there, its legs still pressed against the bronze, the blue light washing over its shell.

Eamon remembered the cat statue in the Egyptian gallery. How its eyes had glowed just before the theft. How the scarab had appeared in the chaos, too. He thought about everything Maggie had said—about the keeper lineage, about the vessel. About picking a side.

He reached out and touched the dagger's hilt.

The light surged up his arm, and the room dissolved.

---

He was on a ship.

Not a modern ship—a long, low vessel with a carved dragon's head at the prow and shields lining the rails. The sea was grey and rough, the sky heavy with clouds, and the air smelled of salt and woodsmoke.

On the deck, a body lay wrapped in cloth, surrounded by offerings: a sword, a shield, a drinking horn, a woman's golden brooch. Men with beards and weathered faces stood in a circle, their heads bowed. One of them stepped forward, torch in hand, and touched it to the wood of the ship.

The flames caught quickly, climbing the rigging and spreading over the deck. The body began to burn, and the men raised their voices in a song Eamon couldn't understand but somehow felt in his chest. A farewell. A sending.

The ship drifted out to sea, burning, and the light of the flames reflected on the water like a second sun.

Eamon blinked, and the image shifted.

---

He was standing at the top of a stone pyramid, looking down at a crowd of thousands. The sun was high and brutal. At his feet, a young man knelt, his chest painted with symbols, his eyes calm and unafraid. A priest raised a blade of black obsidian and brought it down in a single, practiced motion.

The blood spilled over the stones, and the crowd roared.

Eamon's stomach turned, and the world twisted again.

---

He was on a field at dusk. The air was cold, heavy with the smell of iron and wet earth. Rain fell in sheets, plastering his hair to his forehead. Across the field, a samurai stood alone, his armor battered, his sword drawn. He was facing a line of enemies—dozens of them—and he knew he would not survive.

But he didn't run.

He raised his sword and bowed, and then he charged forward.

---

The visions didn't come one after another. They came at the same time, layering over each other like mist. Eamon saw the burning ship. The priest's blade. The samurai's charge. And under all of them, something else—a thread connecting each scene, each death, each final breath. A spark that lingered after the body failed, that carried the echo of who these people had been.

Spirits. Fragments of every soul that had ever owned these relics, still clinging to the objects they'd held in their final moments.

And then the Codex. He saw it in his mind's eye, not as an object but as a wound, a gap in the world that was drawing those sparks toward it, pulling them out of the relics like smoke through a crack. The spirits were being unmoored, pulled away from their anchors. And they were angry.

The blue light receded.

Eamon found himself back in the storage room, on his knees, gasping for breath. The dagger was still in his hand, but the glow had faded to a faint shimmer along its edges. The scarab sat on the hilt, watching him with its jewel-like eyes.

"That's what you were trying to tell me," he rasped. "Every relic in this museum—they've got pieces of people in them. And the Codex is pulling them out."

The scarab's wings opened and closed once, a slow, deliberate flutter that seemed almost like agreement.

Eamon looked at the dagger. At the other objects in the box. At the shelves stretching into the darkness around him, hundreds of boxes, thousands of relics, each one holding its own ghost.

And beneath his feet, the stone door groaned again.

Louder this time. CLoser.

The grinding sound had been constant, a low bass note running under the chaos of the night. But now it rose in pitch, becoming a howl, the sound of ancient mechanisms straining against restraints that were about to break.

Something was coming. And he had a dagger and a scarab and a box of borrowed deaths.

He pushed himself to his feet.