It took all but a single of Alexa’s confirmations to have Kurt order Mishkin to continue, and then drag her all the way back out of the museum. Aerin, despite her greater application in that particular lab, elected to trail behind them, yet behind Alexa and not saying a word. The look on her face had been more of concern than annoyance or anger, and it only intensified when the three of them reached Kurt’s car.

In the ten or so minutes they had been inside, the sun seemed to have escalated its thermal assault on the city, and Alexa found herself having to shield the corner of her vision from it as she watched Kurt pop open the driver’s door and fumble for a button. “You might be overreacting!” she exclaimed, but it was half-hearted. “I don’t think it’ll hurt me. It hasn’t so far.”

“These kinds of things, they, urgh.” He strained as he flipped something, and then pulled his upper half out of the vehicle. “They escalate. Just because it doesn’t hurt you now doesn’t mean it won’t.” He nudged her aside and went around to the back, where he popped the trunk loose, keeping one hand on as he closed his eyes.

“You’ve seen ghosts before, then?”

“Most ghosts are just imprints,” Kurt muttered. He let go of the hood of the trunk and let the hydraulics lift it open. “Mostly when something that can bend reality dies in a really horrible way. The more violent the death the stronger the manifestation. Their power keeps the pain of their moments before death around. How much harm it does depends on whether you keep feeding that grudge.”

“So it’s a dead magician that followed me from the sh- what is all that?” She caught sight of the interior of the trunk.

It was full of stacks of old hardcover books, wrapped in brown waxed paper and bits of red string. Sitting next to them were several weathered boxes, some made of stone, others of deeply discoloured and warped wood, and there was at least one little glass coffin, bundled in bubble wrap. Kurt unlatched the wooden lock on one of the wooden boxes and opened it up to reveal a mess of crystalline ornaments, attached to metal chains and metal loops and keyrings.

“You know I really don’t believe in this sort of stuff.”

Kurt paused, and scowled at her. “You can laugh all you want, but all this stuff is legit. Maybe a bit old, but these are real catalysts. You can cast with them.”

Alexa crossed her arms. “Every one of those I’ve ever seen has been made of bones and organs or something.”

“Well, those ones are pretty standard. These are more refined.” He picked out an ice-blue shard of something on a chain, and peered into it with one eye. “It's just hard to make these now with less magical creatures around.”

Aerin had moved on the opposite side of Kurt, trying to see through the crystal as well.

“How do you have so many?” Alexa leaned in to get a better look at the remaining contents of the box, only to flinch when she saw one of the "crystals" looked exactly like a petrified eye.

“I’ve been collecting them for a very, very long time. This will do.” He held the one he was examining to her.

“Uh, no thank you. I can’t even use magic.”

“No, but she can, so you two will figure something out.” He tossed it into her folded arms, forcing Alexa to instinctively catch it.

The crystal was slightly cold to the touch, but aside from that, it was an ornamental rock. “Okay, can we get back to the banner and everything you’re bringing in?”

“About that.” Kurt closed the box and slammed the trunk shut. “If you’re being haunted then learning the actual history of the thing might make it stronger. Understanding what keeps them here will just validate them. Your best chance is to ward yourself until it fades away.”

She gripped the crystal in her hand. “And how long will that be?”

“Could be a couple weeks. Could be a couple decades.”

“This thing came from the ship, can’t we just like…put it back?”

Kurt sighed. “Maybe. But it’s a lot more complicated than that. For one, I have no idea how the hell it followed you home. I don’t think anybody else who went down there had that experience. So we solve that first, then figure out what it all means. Until then, you stay away from the dig and all the stuff coming out of it. Period.” He stepped around the car.

Alexa put herself between him and the driver’s door. “I’m not just sitting around.”

He stared at her, and within his eyes flickered something new. Something she couldn’t recognise, like a cocktail of pity and concern, but also a strange sense of experience underneath it. She’d always known that he hadn’t told her the entire truth, and she suspected he never told anyone such a thing, but now she found herself unable to comprehend the reason. There was nothing to prove, nothing to gain with the extent of his paranoia except if-

“Tomorrow,” Kurt said, lowering his voice. “I’m going to the reservation. One of them, anyway. I might not know how to solve your problem, but maybe the tengu or whatever other yokai live there will. Maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“Then we’ll try the next thing, and the next. Still seems like early in the process for you, there’s a lot we can still try.”

“Then let me go with you.”

He turned around to look at Aerin, who just shrugged at him. “Fine. We’ll go early in the morning when they’re not watching. You better learn quickly with that charm then. I’ll send details tonight.”

She moved out of the way, letting him get into the car, though it seemed he had no intention of starting the engine.

“Let me see that.” Aerin stepped up to her.

Alexa passed her the crystal as they started back across the parking lot. “I don’t know what’s worse: that he actually cares or that he keeps refusing to tell me the actual important stuff.”

“What else do you think he’s hiding? I don't think that car was one of his.” She peeked into the crystal.

“I don’t know, but he’s got a lot on his shoulders.” She gave his immobile a glance when they reached the doors to the rotunda, then turned to Aerin. “So what is it?”

“Well he’s not lying. It’s technically a catalyst.”

“Technically?” She stepped inside, heading for the spiral stairs.

“My magic history’s not the best but I’m pretty sure when humanity started being able to use magic again, the Return or whatever, they had different ideas about how to conduct and boost their abilities. These days we use catalysts that do everything at the same time, thanks to the Parabellian paradigm, but it wasn’t always like that. Especially with combat magic.”

“That’s…worrying. What about combat magic?”

“For one, the spellwork methodology is very different from normal casting. You can’t cast directly on another person most of the time, at least without prep, so find indirect ways of causing harm. But over a longer period of time, when you’re slinging spells at each other, you can really get to know your opponent’s…I don’t know what they call it, like aura? Your local circumstances that you use to cast. Then they can pick up your casting methods and start messing with your flow. This-” She held up the crystal. “-is a sort of charm that a battlemage would wear to make that harder. There’s definitely a real spell circuit in this, but it’s a passive one that you have to charge and modify. A ward to just encode your own magic so it can’t be manipulated in a fight.”

“A ward. He did say that.” At least it wasn’t another lie of omission. Alexa called the lift once they were in the staff area.

“I’ll have to look up how to mess around with this, but it does tell me Kurt actually understands ghosts.”

“How so?”

“Well it means he thought correctly that the ghost attached itself to you somehow, even if we don’t know why, so encoding your presence might actually help.”

“Huh.”

The lift door opened, but instead of being empty, Thalia stood there, just as surprised to see them as they were to see her.

“Oh, you two.” She smiled. “Kurt hasn’t run off anywhere, has he?”

“He’s in the car doing stuff,” Aerin said, handing the charm back to Alexa.

Thalia’s eyes followed it. “He gave you that?”

“Yeah. Did you know his trunk is full of it?” Alexa said, pocketing the gift.

“He still keeps them? Sentimental man.” Her gaze drifted past them, into a memory. “I think he was always disappointed that I never got his level of magic.”

“Well it’s a genetic lottery,” Aerin said.

“Well.” She adjusted her jacket and stepped out of the lift, triggering the door sensors so they couldn’t close. “Alexa, I do hope your project will go well. It would be a shame to lose such a piece.”

“Thank you,” Alexa said automatically.

Before she could ask her what the museum director had said, Thalia was already at the bottom of the stairs, climbing.

The two of them got into the lift and rode it down to the level of Steven’s studio, where the act of unlocking the Octopus room was beginning to earn a sense of familiarity. The lights were already on, and sitting on the work table was a large cardboard box and its accompanying screening slip, already ticked and signed. The tape was sliced open on top, and as Alexa peered into it, she found several large plastic bottles, each one two litres, filled with a clear, viscous liquid. She set her coffee down next to the computer terminal and pried one bottle out, turning it over. The labeling was simple, without as much as a logo. The identifier, in large generic font, said: “NAN-47 Consolidation Gel”.

“Holy shit it’s real.” She grinned, and placed it on the table while she checked the rest. “This is a lot for a sample.”

Aerin didn’t respond.

Alexa glanced towards her, and found her staring across the room at the Octopus. Or rather, at the 7-meter wide covered canvas hanging on its end. Instead of saying anything, Alexa went over the computer and manually moved the arm, bringing it closer to them. Once it was within reach, she carefully pulled the cloth off.

Guernica, now free of the protective textile, was still larger than life before the both of them. Aerin sucked in a breath. “So this is what you’ve been working on.”

“Yup!”

“It’s hideous.”

“...right now it’s got a lot of facial tissue on it, that’s all. It’s so much worse than that once you see the scans.” She removed another bottle of adhesive, causing something in the box to flop down. The manual. Alexa fished it out and tabbed through it, skimming the text. “How much knowledge do you need for glue?”

“I’ll help you read it.” Aerin produced her phone. “On the back?”

Alexa flipped the booklet over to let her scan the code on the back, and pulled a chair out for herself.

The next half hour passed surprisingly quickly in Aerin’s company as they both traded statements from the manual, sipping on their iced coffees the whole time. Despite the morning’s interruptions, both of them had gotten back into lockstep, like they had been in their shared classes.

“Huh. This table of drying times is weird.” Aerin swiped at her phone screen.

“Yeah, I think…” Alexa searched for the same section in her booklet. “Ah. Oh wow they actually talk about…magical circumstances.” She looked up. “Am I seriously going to have to do metamath?”

“It’s not that hard.”

“It’s the worst part of magic!”

“Only if you keep thinking of it like that pure math class we had in high school. Metamagic is more to do with just telling you what parts of a spell are viable or not, so you don’t kill youself casting something that pulls all the energy out of your cells.”

“How comforting. I’ve never seen glue that has circumstance data though. What’s with this thing?”

“Here.” Aerin turned her phone around. “It’s not completely synthetic and uses a kind of magically conductive plant product, so there’s some level of latent conductivity. So high levels of local magic causes it to harden slower, and maybe worse.”

“I can see why nobody uses this anymore,” she mumbled, flipping to the next page. “It’s toxic in large quantities too.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not gonna sniff the glue.”

Alexa frowned. “There was a guy on our campus that was addicted to glue sniffing, right?”

“Holy shit, do not make me remember that. There was a whole police raid and everything” She chuckled. “Wait, what time is it?”

Alexa looked at her watch. “About forty-five till lunch break. Should we order?”

“I’d rather know where you go to eat around here.”

“Then…I’ll go get some sample canvas and paints, and we can try to set up some tests to dry over lunch. Sound good?”

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll just get acquainted with my new friend over here.” Aerin nodded towards Guernica.

“Then I’ll be right back.” A plan was already laying itself out in her mind. The crosstests would come first, and then she would have to look for penetration rate. Carlotta had patched the canvas from behind and it had taken five years, so either the NAN-47 was just that slow, or the reaction with the mystery material was. One way or another, she would have the truth.

Alexa unlocked the door and exited the lab.

-about to make some calls, actually. You can leave, if you want.”

“And Hanlon?”

“I’m not going to need his help for a couple of days. I know you don’t like it, but you really should give him something to do.”

“Oh I’ve tried,” Thaila’s voice said from the speaker in the car’s dashboard. “He still has no idea what he really wants to do. But he looks up to you.”

“I can tell. It’s just not a good idea, you know?”

A pause.

“I know,” she said. “At least when you’re on the planet he does something. When you leave, he’ll just go back to being directionless again.”

“You’re not suggesting he comes with me?”

“Just think about it. He learns fast, you’ll love it.”

Kurt leaned back in the chair…and felt something cold and metallic and curved against the back of his neck. It protruded between the backrest and the headrest, one that he scarcely ever raised.

“Kurt?”

“I’ll think about it,” he said, forcibly normalising his tone. “I gotta call someone else. See you back at the office.”

“See you.” Thalia hung up.

Kurt tossed his phone into the passenger seat. “You know, I was wondering when you were going to show up.”

“You’re getting rusty,” the man in the backseat said.

His head was down, if Kurt went by the rearview mirror in the corner of his eye. “You’re getting reckless. In broad daylight, really? Hardly your style.”

“I think you’ve lost the privilege of understanding how I work.” His hand shifted, and the barrel of the gun pressed further into the nape of Kurt’s neck. “Let’s go for a ride. Maybe towards that dig site of yours.”

“Yessir.” He turned on the ignition, and began to drive out of the parking lot.