Chapter 1
Chapter 1
Katarina was dreading this. She watched the school bus rattle to a halt outside the Munich Springs Community Museum. Even this early in the morning, it was hot. Boston hot. The kind of heat that sits on your head like a lead weight. She wiped sweat from under her mess of sandy blonde hair. She usually wore it tied back but she’d opted for a stylishly unkempt look. This had the double benefit of helping her to blend in with her temporary classmates, while hiding her face. Anonymity was important in her line of work.
She waited as the students scrambled off the bus; clambering and shoving like something out of a nature documentary. Katarina sighed and steeled herself. She’d never been particularly fond of people, especially in large groups. Never having to attend school had been a blessing. She lowered her eyes and adopted a placid smile, hiding behind a perfect mask of forgettable conformity. The wave of barely washed puberty broke around her as she merged with the chattering teens, slipping into their group as they left the bus. It was only temporary. She didn’t go to this school. She didn’t go to any school. Katarina Sharpe was a thief – a cat burglar to be exact.
When she’d started, at the age of twelve, Katarina would have been the youngest recorded cat burglar in history – if anyone had known about her. At fourteen, she aspired to a legacy that would make her famous, or maybe infamous would be a better word.
As the crowd shuffled towards the museum, Katarina felt a bubble of excitement begin to build. Munich Springs was a little ‘small-town USA’ for her taste, but this week it was playing host to a target she couldn’t afford to miss. Thanks to a special arrangement by the Nesbitt Foundation in honour of its founder, the Queen Xochiquetzal exhibit would be making a one-night stop in this backwater. It included the queen’s, supposedly cursed, death mask. Solid gold and holding the largest emerald in the world in its centre, it was a prize worthy of legend, and ‘The Legendary Katarina Sharpe’ had a certain ring to it.
“Shut it, Ramirez,” one of the students called across her.
She needed to focus. Her new classmates had noticed her, but she’d remained deliberately boring enough to not attract attention. That kind of studied mundanity was difficult to maintain, but apathy is a godsend to a good thief. People will overlook almost anything if it means it can remain ‘not their problem’.
A beleaguered teacher stepped to the front of the group, peered over her glasses at her clipboard and began rolling off names. The students answered habitually, with the teacher barely registering the class in front of her. Perfect.
The teacher finished, tucking her clipboard under her arm and rattling off the usual rules of engagement that govern most interactions between adolescents and delicate historical artefacts. “Everyone! The museum has been kind enough to – stop that Bobby! – to allow us to see their mummy exhibit a day before it goes on public display so – Ella! phone down! – so we can see some of the preservation and restoration techniques they use in their lab – Ella phone down or I will take it. You all know the rules…”
Don’t touch, don’t push, don’t yell, don’t cause inconvenience. It was a litany Katarina had always marvelled at, more because people her age seemed to accept it. There was this assumption that grown-ups always knew best. You could push them, tease them a bit, maybe yell at them if you really wanted to cause trouble but, in the end, you had to trust them; they were the grown-ups, right? They knew what they were doing.
There were times Katarina wished she didn’t know better.
A shoulder jostled hers, knocking her out of her reverie. She was greeted by an olive-skinned face and a flash of braces. “You’re new, right? Just moved here? How come they didn’t introduce you?”
“Yeah.” Katarina slid into character, quickly adopting a nondescript Midwestern accent. “My mom said I should get a start on meeting people before I joined properly. Think they’re going to parade me in front of the class tomorrow.”
The girl sucked air between her teeth in sympathy. “Forced social interaction. Not fun.”
Katarina smiled. “Depends who you’re talking to.” If you can’t be boring, be charming.
The girl blushed slightly in response. “So… wanna go see some dead people?” She looked up at Katarina searchingly, holding up the brochure they’d been given. “There’s supposed to be a curse or something.”
Katarina nodded. “Sure.”
A slight snicker from over her shoulder caught Katarina’s attention. Two girls were peeking over the top of the crowd to get a better view of her new acquaintance. The larger of the two sported lank blonde hair and a smile that put Katarina in mind of a hyena sizing up potential prey. She sighed. This was the last complication she needed. On the whole, she tried to avoid personal attachments to people her own age; they mostly led to trouble, but she really despised bullies.
The class continued up the steps of the museum, the usual divisions forming along the lines of academic eagerness and social self-consciousness. Katarina stayed towards the middle to better blend with the others, casting a surreptitious eye over the building. It was impressive: an old white relic of a structure built around the design of a classic manor house. Its east and west wings standing stark and straight against the horizon. Although Katarina’s eyes swept the buttresses and gables, she had more pragmatic things on her mind than architectural design – she was counting security cameras.
Breaking into a building is a peculiar mixture of art and science, especially if you’re planning to do it without being seen. There’s a surprising amount of geometry involved. Sight lines and camera angles have to be calculated, timings and distances measured, a symphony of sums that have to be brought together to form a perfect performance that nobody will ever see. But any great performer knows it’s more than just hitting the right notes at the right time. You have to play the crowd; the temperament of the security guards, their attentiveness and professionalism; how likely they are to see a shadow move and think, “It’s probably nothing.” Katarina was submerged in this mindset when movement at the edge of her vision caused her to surface.
A flick, a spin, a tiny flash of something white heading straight for the head of the girl who had welcomed her. Her instincts kicked in before she could stop them, and her hand shot out and closed around the speeding object. Quizzically, she looked down and watched as strands of gum clung to her outstretched fingers. She looked back to see two pairs of eyes widened in shock. The girls who’d been snickering earlier. Her head turned back to their intended target. The girl with braces had no idea. Katarina reddened, imagining them laughing as they left it in there for hours, the girl’s humiliation when she found out, when she had to cut her hair and face them again the next day.
Katarina looked from the girls to their victim and back again. This time she got to watch their eyes turn from shock to fear. When she’d been very young, Sister Nichola, her guardian, had taught her how to use ‘The Stare’: a terrifying technique of divine fury known only to nuns, headteachers and certain grandparents. As her eyes locked with the two girls, they realised somewhere deep down, in the place our genetics store a fear of long teeth and too many legs, that a line had been crossed, and that they were going to pay. Both turned away, becoming suddenly very interested in the ceiling as the class passed through the door.
The floor echoed under the students’ feet as they stepped into the welcomed coolness of the air-conditioned atrium. The intended victim turned back. “So, there’s the mummy, or they’ve got this really cool collection of butterflies. I’m Becca, by the way…” But Katarina was gone; there was nothing but empty space behind her.
Katarina watched from the alcove she’d just ducked into as the girl’s face fell in disappointment.
“No making friends on the job, it will only get you caught, Little Sparrow,” the voice of Sister Nichola reminded her.
Katarina waited a couple of seconds and then made her way into the central hall of the museum, opening a copy of the museum’s brochure, a light green pamphlet with a stylised symbol of a snake devouring its own tail at the top.
The outside might have looked like an old stately home, but the inside revealed a real rarity. In the early 1900s, the ruin of the original building was bought by Rupert Gulliman: an eccentric millionaire from a time when that title was earned, not just handed out to every idiot with wealthy parents and an Instagram account. Rupert had wanted to give something back to the little town where he’d made his fortune and had a vision of a glorious public monument. The centre of the old mansion house had collapsed in on itself, leaving only the front and rear walls standing. Rupert had ripped out everything and reinforced the walls, placing a huge glass roof over the top to let sunlight fall into his newly created central hall. He’d cut through the floor, opening a small hole down to the basement and there he’d planted a tree.
The museum’s brochure said it had started as an odd science experiment. He’d intended to have the hall converted into a museum, using the East and West wings of the building to house exhibits and archives and have the tree in the centre as a little reminder of who put it there – but the tree kept growing. As the years went by, it outgrew the hole, which had to be widened. Rupert refused to uproot it, and it soon became the focal point of the building. He opened the two floors of the East and West wings out onto the hall, creating balconies so visitors could look down on it. He added steps leading up to those balconies, then walkways between them. They rose in layers around it like theatre seating: one for the ground floor and two more above; concentric circles rising around the tree.
Parched from the heat outside, Katarina picked the pocket of a bored-looking tourist to pay for a lemonade from a nearby machine. She dropped the brochure onto a nearby bench. There wasn’t anything more about the building’s layout in there, and the history of Gulliman and the mask wasn’t of any practical use. She gazed up to admire the tree from the first-floor balcony, ducking past a security guard and waving away the scent of his spiced cologne.
The tree, an enormous oak, was awe-inspiring. The upper branches just grazed the glass panes of the roof. Katarina continued to stare, an idea forming in her head.
“How did you get up there? Better come down, Little Sparrow,” the voice of Sister Nichola echoed at her from her childhood.
That was where it had started, she supposed. She’d always had a head for heights, always climbing to places she shouldn’t, just to see if she could. The other nuns had treated it with tired exasperation. Sister Nichola had always smiled. Katarina focused her gaze, making calculations. A little bird could fly down to that tree, if she could just get through the glass. She took a sip of lemonade.
Katarina heard the clack of heels approaching on the marble floor followed by a rich voice. “Are you looking for the exhibit?” The woman walking towards her was mid height, in her late twenties or early thirties, black hair tied back in a bun with a set of thick-framed glasses perched on gorgeous angular cheekbones. Katarina sank back into her laconic teen persona. “Got separated from my class.”
The woman nodded, smiling slightly. “I thought so. I am just on my way to escort them on the tour. Would you like to accompany me?” Her accent was difficult to place, possibly South American.
Katarina smiled. “In a bit, I was just looking at that.” She pointed up at the tree.
The woman stepped up to the balcony. “Ah yes, we are quite proud of the Gulliman Oak. She will be 122 this year.”
“Wow.” Katarina attempted to strike the right note of polite teenage interest.
“She’s a rare breed, even bigger than she should be. Do you see the hole where the trunk goes into the floor?” The woman motioned at the guard rail surrounding the base of the tree. “We have a hydroponics lab under there to monitor its growth. Although right now…” She offered up a playfully ghoulish smile, “…there is a mummy in the basement.”
Katarina didn’t quite catch her own sudden intake of breath. So that’s where they were storing it. “The one from the exhibit?” She didn’t have to feign interest now. Sensing the excitement, the woman came alive in the way only academics can when talking about their specialist subject.
“It is the only place in the museum with the right level of climate control. The conditions are perfect. Still, it can be a little spooky working down there next to a dead body, especially when it’s wearing cursed treasure.” The mischief in her grin indicated that ‘little spooky’ could have been easily exchanged with ‘really cool’. She looked like a five-year-old at Christmas.
“Cursed? You mean that?” Katarina motioned up at the banner announcing the special exhibit. The death mask dominating the image.
“Oh yes.” The woman leaned in conspiratorially. “By Hernan Cortez, the great conquistador. He desperately wanted the death mask for himself, for legend has it that it holds not just the emerald at its centre, but the key to an even greater treasure. A way to open the crucible of the gods, the well of rebirth, where anything can be made anew.
He offered its owner, the Queen Xochiquetzal, a mountain of gold for it, but she refused him. So, he hunted her out of the Aztec highlands, cornering her and her last few followers in a ravine. He thought he had her, but he was betrayed by one of his own, who helped the queen escape into the jungle.
Driven mad by rage, he turned to dark arts he had discovered in the temples he had pillaged and laid a curse upon the mask. The dark powers prophesied that he would chase the queen, the chosen of the mask, forever, and that neither she, nor her people would ever know rest, in this world or the next, until it lay in his grasp before the gate of the crucible, opened by the touch of Huitzilopochtli, the god of war, upon the queen’s heart.
Until then, the bearer of the death mask would know hunger that could only be satiated through the taking of human life.”
“Like a vampire… But what was the Queens’s heart, or the crucible?” Katarina really hoped she wasn’t overplaying her response.
“Nobody knows…” The woman tapped her nose conspiratorially as she started walking to the stairs. “…but your class is getting a behind-the-scenes tour of the lab, maybe you can figure it out before we lock it in the safe tonight.”
Panic rose in Katarina’s throat. “Lock it away?”
Dr Flowers laughed. “Don’t sound so worried. I’ll be stuck working on it until at least midnight, courtesy of Raymond Nesbitt’s ‘adjustments’.” She rolled her eyes. “We’ve got plenty of time.”
Katarina held back. “Can I join you in a minute? I really need the toilet.”
“Of course,” said the woman, “we start from the base of the tree in ten minutes. Do not be late. Oh, and I am Dr Flowers, by the way, Selena Flowers.”
“Anne Howard.” Katarina lied fluidly and made a beeline for the nearest restroom sign, waiting until the woman was out of sight before doubling back towards the exit.
She’d seen everything she needed to. She knew where the death mask was, but the tour guide had noticed her. Katarina wasn’t just a face in the crowd anymore; she had a fake name that wasn’t on the class register. Hanging around any longer was going to get her caught, and she had little to no time left to prepare.
There hadn’t been any mention of a safe. The information she’d been given had said the death mask would remain in its display case until morning. She already had the building schematics for the basement. She’d have to plan her way from those without taking the tour and wait until tonight to see the lab.
Taking another sip of her lemonade, she walked towards the stairs when a familiar snickering caused her to pause. She looked over the balcony to see the pair of girls from earlier giggling at something on their phones. She glanced down at the can in her hand and smiled. How apt. Sweet revenge. She grinned with all the benevolence of a hawk eyeing up a field mouse and upended the contents of her can over the side.
autho's note; “This story is also part of a new audio fiction project I’m part of — Fictra — where writers can share stories in new ways. If you’re curious, come say hi!”
