Alisa stood by the office water cooler, pressing her stinging finger against her lips, rocking back and forth on her heels. She then thrust her hand under the lukewarm tap of the small basin she used for washing brushes, letting the water run over the injury.
The blister was real. It wasn't a hallucination. It was a raised, fluid-filled bubble of damaged skin, bright red around the edges and white in the center. A second-degree burn.
Her brain, desperate to regain control of a reality that seemed to be slipping sideways, frantically cycled through possibilities. She needed a cause. She needed a fact.
Static electricity? Could a charge build up in the metal from the dry atmosphere of the vault? A capacitive discharge? Possible. But powerful enough to burn through heavy-duty nitrile? Unlikely.
Or… Chemicals.
Yes. That had to be it. Tim said the lab had struggled to clean it. They must have used some aggressive industrial solvent—maybe a concentrated acid or a caustic alkali base. If they hadn't rinsed it properly, a residue could have remained in the microscopic fissures of the stone. When she pressed down, the pressure released a droplet of the chemical. It reacted with the nitrile, or perhaps the heat of her skin, causing an exothermic reaction. A chemical burn.
It was plausible. It was scientific. It explained the "cold" sensation too—chemicals often felt cold before they burned.
"Incompetence," she hissed, turning off the tap and grabbing a paper towel. "Sheer incompetence."
She felt the panic begin to recede, replaced by a familiar, grounding irritation. She would march down to the restoration lab tomorrow morning and give Tim—and his supervisor—a piece of her mind about safety protocols. She could have been seriously injured. She could have been blinded.
She walked back to her desk, cradling her hand, feeling marginally more confident. The narrative of "chemical negligence" was a life raft, and she clung to it.
The locket sat on her work mat, dark and motionless. Without the lens of fear distorting her vision, it looked like junk again. A dirty, broken piece of jewelry. The menace was gone. The whispers were silent. The crushing melancholy had lifted, leaving only her own garden-variety exhaustion.
She skirted the desk, giving the artifact a wide berth.
I am losing my mind, she thought, the doubt creeping back in.
What if Tim was right? What if Davies was right? Maybe she was unraveling. Overwork, isolation, the crushing weight of expectation… the brain was a strange, fragile machine. A psychosomatic reaction. A hysterical burn (stigmata of the neurotic). Had she imagined the pain so intensely, believed in the curse so deeply for a split second, that her body had simply... manifested the injury?
She looked at her finger again. The blister gleamed mockingly under the fluorescent lights.
No. The burn is real. Physics is real. Magic is not.
"That doesn't happen," she said to the empty room. "Not in the real world."
She sat at her desk, but she pushed her rolling chair back a few feet, creating a safety zone. She needed to finish the catalog entry. She needed to log the item so she could go home and drink that bottle of wine waiting in her fridge. But she couldn't bring herself to touch it again. Not even with fresh gloves. Not with tongs.
She just stared at it.
The locket lay under the lamp, its cracked stone like a dull, unseeing eye. The silence in the room stretched out, thick and elastic. Was it her imagination, or was the shadow the locket cast getting longer? It seemed to pool on the desk, darker than the surrounding shadows, reaching toward her hand like a stain.
She shook her head, squeezing her eyes shut and opening them again. It's just the light. It's just the angle.
She needed to put it away. She needed to put it back in the gray box, walk it down the hall to the secure vault, and forget about it until morning. In the morning, in the daylight, she would test it for chemical residue. In the morning, everything would be fine.
She reached out for the box lid, her hand trembling slightly. To put it in the box, she would have to touch the velvet lining, inches from the stone.
You are a Doctor of History, Alisa Thoryn. You are not afraid of an old trinket.
She fixed her gaze on the stone, trying to hypnotize herself into courage. She watched the crack—that jagged, ugly scar running diagonally across the garnet.
And in that moment, as she watched, unable to look away, the impossible happened.
It started as a shift in color.
The hairline fracture, which had been a dull, dusty gray, suddenly deepened. It turned black, then a deep, rich purple.
Alisa leaned forward, her breath catching in her chest, her burned hand forgotten. She wasn't imagining it. The stone was changing.
And then, from the very center of the crack, as if from a lanced vein or a fresh wound in living flesh, a liquid began to well up.
It defied gravity. It defied geology.
A single, perfect drop.
It grew slowly, beading up on the surface of the dull, dirty stone. It shimmered under the desk lamp, catching the light with a wet, viscous glint. It wasn't clear like water. It wasn't brown like oil.
It was bright, arterial scarlet.
A drop of blood.
Alisa sat frozen, her mind screaming in denial, but her eyes refusing to look away. The drop reached its apex, heavy and trembling. It hung suspended for one impossible, heart-stopping second, and then, yielding to gravity, it slid down the murky face of the garnet, leaving a wet, shining red trail behind it.