Jerod fitted the lid back onto the crate, with all the pieces of the puzzle safely placed back inside. After the preliminary checks, it was very quickly determined that the resources of the receiving room were woefully inadequate for such a piece. Even the size alone would have made maneuvering the thing extremely uncomfortable at the current location, but fortunately for Alexa, she had just been given the keys to the kingdom.

They carted it out the same way it had gone in and she summoned the large cargo lift next to the receiving room. In truth, she had forgotten that this particular lift had existed. The only instances where she had personally used it was to transport a massive leviathan’s ribcage or when Georgina had asked for a second pair of hands to move a marble statue. Aside from that, it was relegated to lifting machinery or entire exhibition walls, and normally on the days she wasn’t in. This was, by far, the largest painting she’d actually worked on, and such a piece would require tools she would normally not have access to. They would have to bring it to level 3.

She stood in the corner of the lift platform and watched as Jerod carefully maneuvered the crate into the basket, tilting the box so that it could pass through the doors. “Where I’m going, the signal might be bad. I’ll contact you from another terminal,” Alexa said.

“As soon as you can.” Mendoza hung up.

She exhaled sharply. “Shit.”

“Is this looking to be an eventful day, then?” Jerod asked, carefully setting the box down.

 He massaged his fingers.

“I really, really hope not.” She produced the keychain.

“Have you used Dr. Klein’s studio before?”

“Once,” she said. A half-lie. “I mean I know how to operate the big arm thing, but not for myself. There was a team on a bit of fresco that day.”

“What I mean is, will you need help?”

Alexa bit her lip. “No. I think I’ll be fine.”

Within moments, they were on the third underground level. The light flickered on as Jerod stepped out first, reacting to his movement, and he began to telekinetically life the crate again.

Alexa found her fingers wrapping hard around the keychain, almost hard enough to cut herself, and she switched hands. Steven’s words kept replying in her head, again and again, but there was never anything new to them that would make her understand. Restoring a painting in his stead was one thing, but…Guernica. Now she wondered if he had known exactly what it was. In that case…

Why me?

“Alexa. Please”

She blinked. Jerod was now standing next to the door of Steven’s studio, hovering crate in front of him. “Oh, sorry!” She rushed the door, almost dropping the fob, but managed to press it flush against the electronic lock and open the door into a spacious dark room.

The lights inside were manual, and it took Alexa a further ten seconds to locate the panel and turn on the correct ones. Once they illuminated the centrepiece of the room, however, she couldn’t help but take a few steps back towards the doorway to admire it.

Steven’s studio, also known as the Octopus to his colleagues, was functionally divided into two parts. The section by the door was the same as any other lab: a computer terminal, wide open tables for materials, cabinets full of reagents and substitute paints and even an entire section of wall dedicated to a projector screen, but it was the other half that once more had her enraptured. It was built over a pit that was present instead of a level floor, with a small set of stairs leading down to it. Above that pit, mounted with heavy-duty brackets into the ceiling and cradled by a set of reinforcement beams that went wall-to-wall, were several large motorised segments connected in a chain, a limb descending from the rotating base and terminating in a large metal circle that split off into 8 hardened processes, each tipped with a softened implement capable of adjusting itself to fit any canvas frame. A second, skinnier arm was also folded up parallel to the thickest segment of the first, this one harbouring a series of tools and sensors.

“I understand this is very exciting, but Alexa.”

“Oh!” She moved out of the doorway where she was blocking off Jerod again. “I’m so sorry.”

He put the crate down on a work table, his hands having visibly begun to shake. “When I get arthritis in all these fingers, I hope you’ll finally learn how to cast a sling.”

“No you won’t. Your insurance is too good, they’ll just fix your joints.”

“But nothing will ever fix the torment you all put me through. Are you sure you don’t need any further help?”

She puffed out her cheeks. “Maybe with attaching the piece.”

“Naturally.”

They took turns washing their hands in the basin in the corner of the room, then thoroughly drying them with paper towels and then slipping on nitrile gloves from a box Steven had left lying about. Alexa tied her hair back with an elastic band, and then moved over to the computer to turn it on.

A picture of Steven and a woman who was just as blonde came on as the background of the login page. She smiled and recalled the detail from her chatlog with Steven, haphazardly dictated to her as he had driven off in the rain. He could have easily typed it once he made it to the spaceport, but Steven was Steven, and the department heads knew him as the “king of multitasking” for a reason. The thought of him struggling to articulate his user details and password brought a grin to her face as she entered them, and brought up the room’s controls.

First, she checked the light switched controls mounted on the secondary arm of the Octopus, including the ones for the infrared and UV lamp, and then moved onto the main arm itself, re-learning the speed at which each segment’s motors moved. From what she recalled, the default worked on a slow pace, which was perfect for the type of pieces this studio usually received. Guernica would be no different; last thing she wanted to do was to smash it directly into a wall.

“There’s two backing boards,” Jerod said, leaning over the open crate and peering at one of the holes in the canvas. “Looks like the damage might have destroyed one. The back one is the same colour, but newer.”

“Probably shrapnel. I’ll get Mendoza to confirm.”

Jerod placed the front protector back on the painting, and slowly flipped it over so that the support lattice on the back was visible, held against the wooden frame. He gradually undid some of the large screws, untensing the ribs, and slowly lifted the supporting structure and its sling out, leaving only the blue backboards. “At your leisure.”

Alexa tapped the keys little by little, getting the mechanical arm to hover in position over the back of the painting. Then she ordered it down, down, until the eight limbs were touching the backboard. Their ends expanded automatically, locking onto the canvas frame, and the machine began moving back into position, revering her earlier instructions. Guernica rose, tissues and broken canvas and all, turning so it faced her, suspended above the ground by the Octopus.

“If you need me, I’ll be in my room.” Jerod stripped off his gloves. “Best of luck, Alexa. This one looks like it’ll be a handful.”

She just gave him a curt nod, turning back to the painting as he left. It stood an arm's length off the edge, heavily obscured by the very stuff holding its paint together. And yet…something felt wrong. She was back in the computer chair, bringing up the history of the piece from a top-level search. Painted in 1937 by Pablo Picasso, displayed in Madrid, survived the Daluran invasion of 2112, smuggled out ahead of a Federation landing, hidden from the initial Stateship encounter, transported to a frontier world…the list went on and on as the date climbed towards the present. Truly, it had been moved more times than the Galactic Union’s capital, passed through so many hands in the last six-and-a-half centuries, so much that Alexa was newly surprised with each following entry that it was still in the condition it was. Then came concern, when the record stated in no uncertain terms that Guernica was still on display at a prestigious art institute on Virelle. No mention of Earth, or a Federation Overseer past the mid-2400s.

And yet the painting remained, staring back at her. Could it be? It certainly didn’t seem fake, from the superficial examination she had done upstairs. But it was old, and she hadn’t made an extended effort to delve into the Picasso style. There was only one person with a clear answer. She quickly synced her phone into the computer and sent out another call to Dr. Mendoza.

She picked up almost immediately. “I was afraid something had happened.”

“We had to set it up on a robot arm. Too big to work on normally,” Alexa said. “You know I thought it was supposed to be on Virelle.”

“You looked it up.” Mendoza hardly sounded disappointed. In fact, she didn’t sound like anything.

“But you knew I had to, right? This thing has been through so much I needed a refresher on the background. Is it…real?”

There was a pause. “I can guarantee you that this is the genuine article.”

“So what’s that thing on Virelle?”

“I’m happy to tell you the story as you work. It’s a rather sad tale, and I can’t offer you evidence for a variety of reasons I won’t go into…but I swear on my life and those of my colleagues that this is the real Guernica.”

It was a strange sensation for Alexa, when she found herself convinced. Whether it was a product of her own need to believe it, or something she’d sensed from the work itself, she couldn’t be sure. She reached over and flicked the switches on the table for the climate control system, making the ventilation in the high ceiling above come to life. She dialed it to 19 degrees celsius, and sat back in her chair. “It has to acclimatise a little. You might as well start.”

“I want to preface that the only person who can fully corroborate might be dead. Overseer Sullavahn was reported dead two years ago. I don’t know if you’ve ever read about him, but he had a vested interest in preserving cultural artifacts. A colleague of you and me, I daresay. Which is more than I can say about the other Overseers.”

As the room cooled, Alexa got to documentation. She summoned the second arm and accessed the camera on it, pushing the painting back and getting a detailed shot of it in its current condition from every angle, front and back. Then she drew the camera towards the work table and snapped images of the loose fragments in the crate, with their individual pieces encased in more facial tissue.

“It’s kind of a legend, especially on Virelle. Picasso painted it in criticism of the fascist Franco regime, and it’s outlived that and almost every other one to date. A lot of the greats from old Earth have been lost, but not this one. Given what it symbolises, even I’d say that it's worthy of its own mythology. Until, of course, it got to Virelle.”

Alexa activated the infrared camera on the secondary arm and took a couple more photos, coming up as a layered image on her screen. There were marks of the underdrawing that she could compare to known references, but more importantly were the patches of other paint that didn’t match the original layer, plastered on in small spots. The IR also reached something behind the canvas itself, giving off odd, faded shapes that made up a texture she couldn’t quite identify.

“There was an understudy of my own mentor, Professor Rasmus Iliadore. Carlotta. I wasn’t instated until after it all blew over. I don’t think there’s many paintings that could survive half a millenium, let alone six hundred years without starting to fade. It had to be restored, you understand. Rasmus wanted his star pupil to do it, of course.”

“She botched it?” Alexa approached the light switches and dialed down the intensity, then grabbed a pair of orange-tinted goggles from a drawer, strapping it to her face.

“Not at first. There was this new adhesive at the time. A sort of nanogel - I’m not sure if it’s in use anymore. But it was revolutionary, and there was already an old masterpiece that used it. Most of the fault was the material of the canvas finally failing after all that time, so Carlotta used it to strengthen the canvas with something new and synthetic. It was…it was five years before everything went wrong.”

Alexa turned the ultraviolet lamp on for a second, just long enough to gather more images of the painting. “Am I about to see something horrible?”

“Horrible is relative. I only found out from the professor after some time that the adhesive had reacted to some kind of unknown oil in the work, never documented. Probably from an unauthorised touchup that happened along the way. She couldn’t have known.”

She sent one of the UV photos to the projector screen, and looked up at it. The original paint was white, as with most old oil paintings. There were islands of green and amber, mercifully not many across the piece, that were indications of locally applied varnishes from the intermediate restorations. Then there were the solid black areas of newer paints that didn’t give off a fluorescence.

But all of it was inconsequential. Even counting the ripped bits of canvas and the tears, it was still manageable. All except the lower left quadrant, in the middle of where most of the facial tissue had been applied.

The longer she stared, the worse it got. Something glowed an icy blue, spiderwebbing through the original point like thin fractures in glass, pushing the original material aside and then pulling it back in as it shrunk, creating more fractal cracks that accumulated some sort of dust or soot. “What the hell is that?” the words left her lips before she could curate the attitude they projected.

“You just used UV, didn’t you?” Mendoza asked.

“I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“Rasmus said the same exact thing. He even took it to the board and tried to take responsibility…but she’d already submitted her report. They knew who did it and how it’d been botched.”

“It was a mistake,” Alexa breathed.

“Yes, it was. From what I recall, the report even included a recommendation to suspend all use of that particular adhesive across all projects. She’d even mailed a copy of her conclusion to other institutions.” Mendoza scoffed. “But the board already made up their mind. This is where Sullavahn comes in. They made a replica so good it fooled all the experts. But he hid the original, where it sat until the bombs came.”

Alexa slumped in her chair. She could guess the rest of it. A full coverup that the professor likely took to the grave. “So it’s my turn.”

“It’s your turn.”

She set her jaw. There would be a lot to do over the coming weeks.