She did not say that yet. What she said was, "We need to go."
They were back in the corridor and moving toward the side exit when the sound reached them: a door further along the building opening with the particular sound of something being pushed rather than pulled. Then, footsteps—more than one set, moving with the fast, quiet efficiency of people who knew where they were going and did not want to be heard.
Ethan took Nyla's arm and they moved faster. They were through the side door and into the outer corridor when they heard behind them the sound of the archive room being unlocked. They did not run. Running created noise, and noise created attention, and Nyla had spent years knowing that the best way to move through a building unnoticed was to look like you already belonged in the next space you were moving toward. She walked with her head straight and her pace even, and Ethan matched her.
And they were out the service exit and into the cold street air before anyone behind them had reason to raise an alarm.
Two blocks away, Ethan stopped walking, leaned against a wall, and breathed. "Someone was going in there tonight regardless of us," he said.
"Yes," Nyla said. "And now they know we were there, too. The case will show condensation from being stood near. They'll see my breath on the glass." She looked back in the direction of the museum. The building's upper windows were lit. "They're going to move on us tomorrow, maybe tonight."
"Victor?"
"He's going to try to detain me. Use the authorities, use my situation: no guardian, no records. Turn me into a legal problem so nobody has to listen to what I know."
Ethan was quiet for a moment. "Then we can't be here when morning comes."
She nodded once. They started walking.
A block further on, Nyla stopped and turned back to look at the museum one more time. The gold lettering of the banner was still visible from here, caught in the light from a streetlamp: Discovery Unveiled.
She stood there for a moment with the cold moving around her. "They think this is about land," she said, not loudly—barely more than a thought spoken outward. "They don't even know what they're about to wake up."
Then she turned and walked, and Ethan followed, and the city closed around them both the way cities do: indifferent, enormous, and full of places to disappear into if you knew how to move.
The row house sat on a narrow street that the city had mostly forgotten. It was three stories of dark brick with boards across the ground-floor windows and a front door that had not been painted in so long the wood beneath had gone gray and soft at the edges. Ethan's grandfather had owned it for 40 years and lived in it for 20 of those, and when he died, he left it to nobody in particular, which in legal terms meant it stayed in a trust that nobody had bothered to dissolve. Ethan had a key. He had always had a key; he had just never had a reason to use it at 2:00 in the morning with a 14-year-old girl who knew a dead language and a corporation trying to find them both.
Inside, the air was thick with the particular stillness of a place that had been closed too long: dust on every surface, old books stacked against walls in arrangements that had once made sense to someone, a kitchen with a working tap and nothing in the cupboards but a tin of tea and a jar of instant coffee that had fused into a single solid mass. The heat worked, barely.
Nyla stood in the center of the front room while Ethan went through the house checking windows, and found herself staring at a shelf of field journals along the far wall, their spines labeled in small, careful handwriting by year and location. She was not looking for anything in particular; she was simply doing what she always did in unfamiliar spaces—reading the room before the room could read her.
She pulled one journal from the shelf, then stopped. On the trunk beneath the shelf, half-buried under a folded canvas map, was another journal, thicker than the rest and with a different binding. She lifted the canvas. The cover was worn smooth at the corners from handling. She opened it.
The first page was a sketch: seven symbols arranged in a diagonal line.
She had seen those seven symbols two nights ago in the upper left section of the Aldrin scroll, the first thing she had recognized when she pressed her fingers to the glass.
She sat down on the floor right where she was and began reading.
Ethan's grandfather, a field researcher named Douglas Cole, had participated in an excavation of the disputed land site 31 years earlier. The journal covered six weeks of fieldwork and then stopped abruptly in the middle of a sentence.
The entries before that stopping point described, in the clipped notation of a man more comfortable with maps than prose: the discovery of a stone cavity in the eastern perimeter; the recovery of what appeared to be an intact scroll in a sealed clay casing; and the subsequent arrival of a private contractor who presented legal paperwork and took control of the site within 72 hours of the discovery. Douglas Cole had copied every symbol he could before they locked him out.
On a page near the back, in handwriting that had become less neat, he had written: "The text appears to identify a future speaker, not a past owner."
Nyla read that line twice. Then she set the journal on her knee and looked at the wall for a moment while the shape of something very large rearranged itself in her mind.
The scroll was not preserving a claim. It was not a historical record in the ordinary sense. It was oriented forward. It had been written with the expectation that whoever needed to read it had not yet arrived.