The Archaeologist
The Wayne Foundation grant ceremony was in the Gotham University Faculty Club, which was a nicer name than the building deserved. Oak paneling, brass fixtures, carpet that had been good in the eighties and was surviving on memory. The caterers had set up along the east wall and a woman in a black apron was arranging canapes on a tiered stand with the focus of someone defusing a bomb. Thomas was near the bar talking to the university provost about endowment structures, which was the conversational equivalent of anesthesia, and Lucius was standing by the window with a glass of water, watching the room.
Bruce was here because the Wayne Foundation funded twelve research grants per year and the ceremony required a Wayne. Thomas usually handled it. Thomas was supposed to handle it tonight. But the EPA paperwork on the Janus contamination had turned into a full audit, and Thomas had spent the morning on the phone with attorneys who billed in six-minute increments and looked like they'd never been outdoors, and by four o'clock he'd told Bruce that he could either attend the grant ceremony or have a stroke, and Bruce had offered to do both but Thomas hadn't laughed.
So he was here. Dark suit, foundation pin, handshake face. Twelve recipients in a row and he'd already met seven of them. A geologist who studied Gotham's subsurface fault network. An entomologist who'd described her beetle research for nine minutes without pausing for air. A marine biologist named Huang who had a limp handshake and shark eyes and was tracking deep-sea thermal vents off the eastern seaboard and wanted to know if Wayne money came with strings. Bruce had said the only string was an annual report. Huang had looked at him like she was deciding whether to believe him and left without committing to either option.
Recipient number eight was listed on the program as Dr. Barbara Ann Minerva, Department of Archaeology, specialization in pre-Hellenic cult sites and ritualistic transformation mythology.
He'd read her grant application three times. He'd funded it himself, over the foundation committee's recommendation to pass. The committee had flagged the proposal as high-risk, low-commercial-value, and geographically dangerous. Three previous expeditions to the Temple of Urzkartaga in the Bwundan region had ended in fatalities. The committee's notes used the phrase "reputational liability" twice.
He'd overridden them because the alternative was worse. If the Wayne Foundation didn't fund Barbara Minerva's expedition, someone else would. Veronica Cale's people had been circling the proposal. A defense contractor with archaeological shell companies had expressed interest. Neither of those options came with oversight, and neither of them knew what the Urzkartaga artifact would do to the woman who touched it.
He knew. Vaguely. A life he'd watched instead of lived. The curse turned her into something fast and hungry and permanent. Diana would blame herself for not preventing it. And the woman standing at the far end of the faculty club right now had no idea what was waiting for her in that temple.
Funding the expedition put it in his orbit. She'd report findings through the Foundation. He'd steer the research. When the expedition reached the temple, he'd have people on the ground who knew what they were looking for and what not to touch.
That was the plan. Control the dig, prevent the curse. Same approach as Pamela and the Woodrue situation. Get ahead of the thing that would destroy her by being the one holding the leash when it arrived.
He was getting good at this. Or he was getting good at telling himself he was.
Dr. Minerva came to him.
He was standing near the canape table with a glass of sparkling water and a cracker he hadn't eaten when a woman walked toward him with the specific stride of someone who didn't wait for introductions. She moved through the crowd without touching anyone, her path clean and efficient, and the crowd parted for her without seeming to notice they were doing it. A waiter carrying a tray adjusted his route by two feet when she passed and looked confused about it afterward.
British. Mid-thirties. Auburn hair pulled back tight, escaping at the temples in wisps she hadn't bothered to control. Amber eyes that picked up the overhead lighting and turned warm. She was wearing a charcoal blazer over a white blouse and her hands were tanned darker than her face, more time in dirt than in conference rooms. A thin chain around her neck disappeared under the collar. Small gold stud in her left ear. Her lipstick was a dark red that her coloring didn't need and that she wore anyway.
Attractive in a way that had edges. High cheekbones, a jaw that could have been carved, a mouth that defaulted to a line and opened to show teeth when it smiled. He'd read her faculty profile. Oxford at seventeen. PhD at twenty-three. Two published monographs before thirty. A disciplinary review at twenty-eight for entering a restricted excavation site without authorization and removing artifacts before the government liaison arrived. The review had been dismissed. The artifacts had been genuine.
She stopped in front of him and extended her hand.
"Mr. Wayne. I'm Barbara Minerva. Your foundation is funding my expedition to the Temple of Urzkartaga."
Her grip was warm. Warmer than a handshake should be. People's hands ran room temperature or slightly below. Hers were hot, like she'd been holding them over a fire. The heat came from inside the hand, not the surface. Pamela's hands ran warm too, but Pamela's warmth had a green-chemistry explanation. This was metabolic, animal, and it pulsed once against his palm like a second heartbeat.
He held the handshake a beat longer than standard and her amber eyes tracked the delay and she didn't pull away.
"Dr. Minerva. I read your proposal. Twice."
"Only twice?" She released his hand. The warmth stayed on his skin for a second after she let go. "Most committee members don't read it at all. They see the word 'Bwunda' and reach for the rejection stamp."
"The committee recommended a pass. I overrode them."
"I know." She tilted her head. The gesture was oddly quick, the angle sharper than a human head tilt usually went, and for half a second the overhead light caught her eyes at the wrong angle and the amber flashed. "I looked into who championed my proposal. Bruce Wayne, twenty-two, applied engineering student, no published interest in pre-Hellenic archaeology. I was curious."
"I have an interest in people who are passionate about their work."
"Passion is a prerequisite for my field. Excavation is tedious. Cataloging is worse. Travel to politically unstable regions is dangerous and expensive. Nobody does this without passion." She picked up a canape from the table and ate it in one bite and chewed while looking at him. No self-consciousness about eating in the middle of a sentence. "The temple has killed three previous expeditions. Terrain, disease, local militia. Two members of the 1987 team were never recovered."
"That's in your proposal."
"That's in the first paragraph of my proposal. I put it there on purpose. The kind of person who reads past it is the kind of person I want funding my work."
"And the kind of person who funds it anyway?"
She smiled. It showed her canines, which were sharp, and her eyes sharpened instead of warmed.
"Either very brave or very interested," she said. "Which are you?"
"I'm interested in what the temple contains."
"Transformation mythology. The cult of Urzkartaga worshipped a plant god who offered his followers a covenant. Power in exchange for devotion. The power was physical, total, and permanent. The devotion was absolute." He'd heard this tone before. Pamela, talking about her plants. A woman describing the thing she loved and the thing that would consume her, and the two sounding identical. "The archaeological evidence suggests the transformation was real. Not metaphorical. Not ritualistic theater. The remains we've found show skeletal changes consistent with rapid, systemic metamorphosis. Bones that grew in weeks. Dentition that shouldn't be possible in a human skull."
"Sounds dangerous."
"It sounds beautiful." She said it without hesitation. The amber eyes steady. "A biological process that rewrites a human body at the cellular level, directed by a theological framework older than any recorded religion. If the temple contains what I think it contains, it's the most significant archaeological discovery of the century."
"The annual report requirement," he said. "I'd like to add a condition."
"I'm listening."
"Quarterly updates. And I want a Wayne Foundation observer on-site for the temple phase of the dig. Not interfering. Documenting."
Her jaw shifted. Her chin came up a degree and her eyes went flat and the collegial warmth dropped out of her voice.
"I don't work with minders."
"Not a minder. A documentarian. We're funding a dangerous expedition and I'd like evidence that the danger is being managed."
"The danger is the point, Mr. Wayne. The temple is dangerous because it's real. Every safety measure that insulates my team from the site insulates them from the findings."
"I'm not asking you to insulate. I'm asking you to document."
She held his gaze. The amber eyes didn't blink. She had the stillness of a woman used to waiting in holes in the ground for months, and she was applying that patience to him now, deciding whether the money was worth the condition.
A server passed between them carrying a tray of champagne. The interruption lasted two seconds. When the server was gone, Minerva was smiling again. Teeth and all.
"Quarterly reports," she said. "And your observer stays out of my trench."
"Agreed."
She extended her hand again. The second handshake was hotter than the first, and this time she squeezed and the strength in her grip was more than her frame should have produced. Her fingers were thin and her wrist was narrow and the pressure said otherwise.
"It's been a pleasure, Mr. Wayne. I'll send the expedition timeline by the end of the month."
"I look forward to it."
She turned and walked back through the room and he watched her go and the crowd parted for her again and the waiter with the tray adjusted again and she moved like something that was used to moving through spaces that hadn't been built for her.
Thomas found him at the bar afterward.
"You look like a man who just had an interesting conversation."
"Dr. Minerva."
"The archaeologist." Thomas took his glasses off and cleaned them on his tie, which was what Thomas did when he was thinking. "I read her file when the committee flagged it. Brilliant woman. Difficult reputation. Oxford called her gifted and impossible in the same sentence."
"I added a foundation observer to her expedition."
"Good." Thomas put his glasses back on. "She agreed?"
"After a negotiation."
"How long?"
"Under a minute."
Thomas looked at him. Running math his son couldn't see.
"You overrode the committee on a high-risk proposal and added conditions she wouldn't normally accept. For an archaeology grant." Thomas sipped his drink. "Should I ask why?"
"The research is significant."
"The research is niche. The foundation funds significant research every year. You don't usually attend the ceremonies." He sipped again. "Let alone override committees."
Bruce picked up the cracker he'd been holding for twenty minutes and ate it. It was stale. He ate it anyway.
"I think her expedition is going to find something important," he said. "And I think if we're not involved when it happens, the outcome will be worse than anyone expects."
Thomas watched him. He didn't push.
"Okay," Thomas said. "Keep me informed."
"I will."
Thomas went back to the provost. Bruce stood at the bar with the stale cracker taste in his mouth and Minerva's handshake heat fading from his palm. Pamela reaching into contaminated soil. Barbara Minerva reaching into a cursed temple. Him funding the rope they'd both use to climb down.
He finished his water and went home and sat in the cave and pulled up everything he could find on the Urzkartaga cult. Barbara Minerva's published papers. Expedition reports from the three failed digs. Geological surveys of the Bwundan temple region. A photograph of a carved stone idol with a feline face and human hands and the word URZKARTAGA scratched into the base in a script that pre-dated any known African writing system.
The idol's eyes were amber.
He closed the laptop and sat in the dark and listened to the bats overhead and did not think about the fact that his solution to a woman walking into a curse was to hand her better shoes and a map.