Every Season

The transition from the Hall of Masks into the next gallery evoked the logic of a dream: the corridor gave up its warm wood for heavy, chill stone that the Museum’s designers had made look ancient, or maybe the stone itself really was ancient, quarried from some old world and shipped here as ballast for a place that liked to make memory feel as heavy as gravity. Andy noticed the chill, the way the air stilled and grew solemn, before Laura did, but only by a sliver. Her two bodies walked in perfect lockstep until they hit the corner and saw the change, and then both stopped, almost cartoonish, at the new sign above a doorway:

THE TWELVE: THE LAST HOST.

Each letter was carved so deep that the gold leaf inside it cast its own shadows. Below, in brushy italic, the subscript:

Arabella on Earth.

For a moment, neither of Laura’s faces moved—a double-take performed in stereo. She looked up at the sign, then to her other self, as if she could test the reality of it, then at Andy, all with the same fine-edged alertness he’d come to love and dread. “Is this—?” she started, but didn’t finish.

Andy’s mind tripped over itself. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen this part before,” he said, as if admitting a secret gap in his knowledge. “I thought I’d been through the whole museum.” The idea of a dedicated Arabella wing, concealed or maybe just new, felt both right and impossible, a little like finding an extra room inside your own house after years of living in it.

Laura’s faces, so different but so clearly hers, shared the same skeptical appreciation. “She does like to make an impression,” Laura said, the timbre dry, but the respect unmistakable. It was a voice used for describing hurricanes and rivals, or the rare person who could actually scare her.

The black glass door—thicker than any other they’d passed—opened with a brush of Andy’s palm, and the light inside was a different species from everywhere else. It was softer, yes, but also somehow denser, as though it had been left to steep for centuries. The stone floors reflected no sound; the walls, now polished onyx and veined marble, seemed to drink in every footfall, so that the only noise was the faint hum of the museum itself, a subaudible frequency that reminded you how much pressure memory could exert on a space if you let it.

The air inside the room felt weighty with meaning, but not cold or hostile. It was the inverse of a cathedral: instead of awe radiating from something above, it radiated out from the objects themselves, their arrangement less like a collection and more like a series of devotional altars.

The first display sat by itself, cradled in a shallow alcove so the entire geometry of the lighting was arranged to give it a halo. Inside, on black velvet, was a gold ring so simple it verged on generic—thin, narrow, plain, the only decoration a single, thumb-shaped depression half-polished to a duller shimmer. Andy’s first thought was that it looked like a wedding band you’d find at a thrift store, or something you’d see on the finger of a retiree at a diner, not the talisman of a legend. The detachment of the display, the way it hovered in the light, invited a kind of reverence.

A small brass plaque in front read:

Arabella’s Ring (Replica)

Laura, both of her, leaned in so close her hair swept the glass at perfectly opposite angles, like a stereoscopic camera. Her faces, usually animated and mobile, went flat with the kind of intensity Andy recognized from those times she’d gotten genuinely obsessed with a baby in a stroller, or been transfixed by the tragic beauty of a dead bird in the street. Laura would be thinking about what lay in this case for the rest of the day, if not the rest of the month.

She said, without looking away, “Is that… actually hers?”

Andy, who’d been about to say something light, stopped. He crouched to read the fine print under the display title, then nodded—though not quite to her. “It’s a replica,” he said quietly. “It says the original is still on her hand. Every time I’ve ever seen her, she’s had a ring like this. She wears it right now.” He tried to picture Arabella’s hands—long-fingered, elegant, manicured, the ring fitting there with a kind of mathematical inevitability, as though it had been set on her for eternity.

He read aloud the smaller text:

Presented at the close of the first Dilmun season (hosted as baseline), the original ring was a gift from Dumuzid, who offered it as thanks for attempting to rescue his beloved Inanna. The ring’s tradition has been carried forward for every subsequent season, regardless of era or persona name. It is said to symbolize both loss and forgiveness, and was never intended to bind, but rather to remind.

Andy let the words echo a second, then found his voice again. “Dumuzid was Inanna’s husband. Arabella said she tried every way she could think of to get Inanna out. Failed. Dumuzid found her, asked her to look after Inanna, then went to the underworld and traded himself for her.” He didn’t look at Laura as he said it; he watched the ring instead, letting it be a proxy for everything the story left out.

He was conscious of the way Laura’s hands moved at her sides, restless for something to hold or steady herself against. She didn’t speak for a few seconds, just stared hard at the ring, her hand reflexively coming up to her own fingers, as if to check for the weight of the rings Inanna had given them on the footbridge. He saw her thumb the band against her knuckle, spinning it the way she did when she was nervous or thinking so hard it left a physical mark.

Finally, she said, “That’s… a lot.” But her eyes had gone somewhere else, and Andy knew the look. It was the one she’d gotten in middle school when she saw the picture of the star that exploded so far away its ghost was only just now reaching them. The stillness in her, when it landed, was so total you could almost hear it.

“Hey,” Andy said, not softly, but not loud. “Where’d you go?”

She blinked back to him, both faces focusing at once, but not quite returning to normal. “I was just thinking about what it would feel like. Someone going into… that.” She gestured with her chin at the ring, then at the whole hall, as if the point was too big to be caught by words. Then, quietly, “Someone choosing that. For you.”

Andy held her gaze, the words heavy and alive between them. He could see her tracing some historical arc, not just the legend but the lived reality of what it meant to be the person left behind, the one who didn’t get rescued.

“You did that,” he said. “For me. Once.”

It was a truth they’d never needed to put into words after that first day: what happened to Laura, the way she’d disappeared from the world, the cost and the scale of what it had taken. For a second, the idea hovered between them, terrible and beautiful, neither of them able to say what it meant but both knowing the shape of the wound.

The stillness in Laura’s bodies turned, for a moment, into something absolute. Neither one breathed. Then, so soft Andy almost didn’t hear it—“That was different.”

“It wasn’t,” he said. “It was exactly that.”

Laura looked away, lips pressed flat. Andy could see the machinery of her mind grinding through it, the old reflexes fighting to minimize, to reframe, to say she’d just gotten unlucky or that it wasn’t that big a deal. But she didn’t say any of it. Instead, both faces dropped, just a little, the resistance draining out of her shoulders.

He stepped into the space between them, arms threading around both waists, one hand on each back, her bodies drawn in tight. He pressed his forehead to each, kissed the left one, then the right, slow and unhurried. In that moment, the three of them formed a single arc of memory and apprehension, a closed circuit of mutual knowing.

When he pulled back, both faces lingered near his, eyes a shade too bright.

“Okay,” she said, after a long second. Both mouths, same word, same breath. “Okay.” She looked at Andy with an expression he’d only seen a few times: the mix of awe and terror and gratitude that someone gets when they realize that history isn’t just repeating; it’s still happening to them, in unbroken lines. “You did that for me too.”

Andy tried to answer, but his words got caught in the moment; instead, he just squeezed her to him a little harder, letting the silence be its own answer.

Her next words were soft, almost reverent. “I keep forgetting how long they’ve all been around,” she said, “or what any of it must feel like for her. To run thousands of seasons. To remember all of them. To still wear a ring someone gave her seven thousand years ago.”

Andy nodded, and the action, meant to be a casual confirmation, felt instead like a concession to vastness. The kind of vastness that wasn’t measured in square feet or stone blocks or the breathtaking vault of the dome but in the strange, uneven warmth that settled into a space after centuries of hope and loss and repetition.

He tried to imagine how many times Arabella had walked these halls, or their earlier versions, trailing her own history through the silence. The room wasn’t a room so much as a confession box, and everything in it was arranged to implicate the viewer in the story of its subject.

“It’s hard to get your head around it,” he said, and as soon as the words left him he knew they were inadequate. Of course it was hard. That was the point. To contain something so outsized inside a case of glass and gold plaque and hope you could process it at the scale of an ordinary day.

Laura drifted a step closer to him. He watched her—both of her—and wondered how it felt to see the tokens of eternity arranged as museum fodder, knowing you’d only just started to learn what time actually did to a person. He wondered, and then he realized, that she wondered about it too, and about what would be left of her if someone built a room like this with her memories as its walls.

She turned to him, both faces in close orbit, and spoke in stereo: “You think she ever gets lonely?”

The question caught him just off balance enough that he answered honestly, without any joke or shield. “Yeah,” he said. “I think she spends most of her life surrounded by people, but I think she’s always alone. Maybe not always, but… It’s like she can’t quite touch anything.”

He thought about Arabella’s posture, the way she always hung back from a group, even in rooms she’d designed for herself, or the way she’d watch a conversation like a window shopper—never quite part of it, but always tracking everything inside with surgical intensity. He remembered how in his first week here, he’d caught her standing in the garden at sunset, just watching the horizon, so still she might have been a statue. He remembered a dozen moments after, each one building a case that the woman who ran the world for everyone else was herself locked out of it by design.

So he tried again, wanting to give Laura more than just the sadness. “But that doesn’t mean she can’t feel it. Or that she didn’t want it. I think the one thing she wishes she could have had, but never did, is family. Real family. Real parents, maybe, or siblings. Maybe just… being a child, growing up loved. Or maybe she misses the family she lost. Her siblings, or both. Maybe it’s just how it works, if you’re the Host.”

He watched the way that landed, felt it echo in the air between the three of them. Laura’s bodies had gone very still, but not in the way of a statue—more like something alive holding its breath, waiting to see if the noise would finish or if it would come closer. Then she said, almost a whisper: “She made us a family, though. Didn’t she? That’s what the whole season was for.”

Andy blinked, processing it. “I think so, yeah.” It wasn’t just a collection of lost girls and one solitary boy. Arabella had built them a family because she couldn’t have one herself. And maybe the whole game was a way of leaving a legacy that she would never get to live inside.

“Then she knows what it feels like. She built one.” There was a pause, and then: “She just can’t be part of it.”

It was so obvious, once she said it, that Andy felt something inside him tilt and slot into place. He’d always assumed the harem was a kind of elaborate joke or a test or an accidental offshoot of something ancient and self-replicating, like a meme that nobody could kill. But the way Laura put it, it wasn’t just a game—it was a love letter to the family that Arabella was never allowed to keep. He wondered, not for the first time, how much of Arabella’s actual story was even visible to any of them, even with all the tales she had told him, and how much was locked behind centuries of Hosts and seasons and careful, curated mystery.

He looked back at the ring, now no longer just a talisman but a kind of wound, and felt his own chest tighten. He had never been able to imagine that sort of exile, never tried, but now it pressed in from every glass surface.

Laura’s right hand found his, fingers weaving through so tightly it hurt a little. Neither of them spoke, knowing that the silence was more honest than anything they could say. Andy squeezed her hand in return, using the pressure to keep himself from destabilizing.

After a while, they just stood there, three bodies and a single shared thread of memory, watching the ring float in its halo of light. Andy wondered if Arabella would ever see this display, and if so, whether she would find it funny, or humiliating, or just sad. He hoped, for her sake, that she could love it a little, even if she couldn’t belong to it.

Eventually, Laura stepped back from the case, both of her at once, and nodded toward the next exhibit. “Let’s see what else is here,” she said, her voice clearer for having been through something. He followed, still tethered by her hand, and they walked together, their pace deliberate, as though the act of walking was itself an attempt to honor the room’s hush.

They walked together, Andy’s hand brushing hers, the two of them keeping a slow pace as if not wanting to disturb the hush of the room.

They passed a pair of glass cabinets framing a white stone stele etched with figures in gold. The carving showed a dozen women and one man at a long table, toasting or maybe making a pact. Laura slowed, both faces reading the dedication:

To the last Master of Dilmun, who chose peace over conquest.

She smiled, a little, and Andy smiled too, though neither of them could have explained what emotion exactly they were feeding. It wasn’t joy, but it wasn’t quite solemnity either. Maybe it was pride on behalf of a stranger who’d made it into the mural ring because she’d managed to end something without wrecking it for everyone else.

The next case was a low plinth, maybe waist-high, holding a sword mounted flat against blue velvet. The blade showed no forge marks, no fold lines, no bevel where an edge should have been ground, just a flawless surface the color of rain on slate that shifted faintly blue depending on the light. Near the base, a tight band of etching ran in a script too old for the sword's supposed age. After centuries in dozens of hands, it carried no wear at all.

A card at the front read:

Caledfwlch (Replica) — Harem Hotel: Avalon, Nimwen, S01

Laura’s right head tipped toward the sword, the other scanning the glass. “That’s… Excalibur?” she said, not quite a question.

Andy shrugged. “The original is, maybe. Arabella told me about it once. Said it couldn’t be broken, and wouldn’t fail its bearer, as long as he never drew it for himself.”

“‘He’?” Laura said, eyebrow raised.

Andy grinned, a little. “Arabella didn’t mention Mistresses when she was Nimwen, although I’m sure there must have been. But the test was always the same. If you used it for yourself, it turned on you. Arabella—Nimwen, I guess—gave it to people she thought could hold power without turning into a monster. She ran that contest for centuries.”

Laura’s faces narrowed, her attention snapping to Andy. “Did anyone ever pass?”

He nodded. “She told me yesterday: one. Out of hundreds.”

For a moment, neither spoke.

Then Laura looked back at the sword, both faces softened with something Andy couldn’t quite name. “That’s a hell of a test.”

He said, “She didn’t know if anyone could pass. She just wanted to see if anyone could get it right.”

Laura looked at him, one side of her mouth curling up in that way she had when something scared and thrilled her at once. “And now you’re the one she’s testing?”

He laughed, but it came out thin. “I hope it’s not a test. I’m not sure I’d pass.”

Both Lauras snorted softly, but the sound died quickly. Her left head tilted, studying him with an expression he knew well—the one that saw straight through to the parts of him that still felt like a boy fumbling in the dark. “She didn’t give you a sword, though,” the left one said. Her voice was softer now. “She gave you… this.” She waved twin hands at him, a gesture that took in not just his body but the weight of what he carried—the Gifts, the trust, the terrible, tender responsibility.

He swallowed. “Gifts instead of a weapon.”

“Not just Gifts,” Laura said, her right head turning fully toward him now. Her eyes held his, unwavering. “The chance to make things better. Or worse. The chance to not screw it up.” She paused, and he could see the fear in her—not for herself, but for him. “You could have taken all this and turned it into something ugly. Something for yourself. But you didn’t.”

He wasn’t sure if that made him feel better or worse, but he let the idea sit between them, heavy and real.

After a beat, she stepped closer, both of her, until he could feel the warmth radiating from her skin. “If you hadn’t passed,” she said quietly, “you wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t be on the edge of… whatever comes next.” Her hand—the right one—reached out and brushed his wrist, a touch so light it was almost not there at all. “But you are here. I am here. And I’m not afraid of what comes next. Not with you.”

He shrugged, but felt the words land deep, where the old guilt lived. “I guess we’ll see,” he said, his voice rough.

Both of her smiled then—small, private smiles that held all the years between them, all the forgiveness, all the love. “We will,” she said. She stood there a moment, before she nodded to the next case.

Beside the sword, set in another frame, was a single white feather, huge and mounted flat against dark velvet. The feather wasn’t ordinary: it looked, on first glance, like something a swan might have lost, but the closer you looked, the more you noticed the faint sheen of gold at the very edge of the barbs. It was beautiful, but also a little sad, the way single feathers always seemed when you found them on the sidewalk after a storm.

The card beneath said:

Feather of Ma’at (gift of Rusat) — Harem Hotel: Du’at, Seshat, S521

Both of Laura’s bodies leaned in, noses nearly touching the glass, her four eyes catching the display’s gentle spotlight and throwing it back in miniature stars. The feather, propped to float in its shadowbox, was not just white but luminous, with filaments and insubstantial whorls that no earthly bird would ever manage.

“Ma’at?” said Laura, her right voice light but reverent. “As in, the Egyptian goddess of justice and truth?” She looked from the feather to Andy, searching his face for confirmation or refutation.

Andy nodded, the gesture small and precise. “Rusat is… Well, Arabella told me she was one of her oldest friends, back when she was Seshat.” He kept his voice low, respectful of both the room and the stories it held. “Arabella said Rusat was family once. Closer than most siblings you’d ever find. They ran together for centuries, learned the game of the world side by side, until one of them wanted out.”

Laura’s left face, the more skeptical one, studied Andy. “Is out even possible for people like them?”

He shrugged. “I think so. Rusat—Isis—was a goddess, not a Host, and managed it. She left, really left, or so Arabella says. She made the break and did not look back.” He let the idea rest between them, as if even saying it risked drawing the attention of the wrong kind of cosmic bureaucracy.

Both Lauras fell briefly silent, their eyes flicking between the artifact and Andy’s profile, reading the layers of what he wasn’t saying. The left Laura, sensitive to the social math of things, did her best to focus on the feather’s provenance. “So Rusat is Ma’at, or Isis, or both? I thought those were separate stories.”

“They are and aren’t,” Andy said. “Arabella implied there was a lot of… role-trading. Sometimes Rusat, sometimes Ma’at. The names are just costumes, recycled. All the old myths are like that, apparently. If you look long enough, you realize the people behind the masks keep running into each other, over and over.”

Both Lauras nodded, not because it made sense but because it sounded true.

Andy let his gaze return to the feather. “A feather just like this—it was dissolved into the water that fed the Blue Rose. The night before we brought you back.” He offered it as simply as a weather report, but when Laura looked up, there was something in his face as tender as it was terrifying.

Laura, both of her, froze into a shared silence. Every part of her seemed to narrow to a pinpoint, eyes locked on the feather. She drew a slow, careful breath. “I didn’t know there was an Egyptian goddess tangled up in my own resurrection.”

Andy smiled, quiet. “I didn’t, either, until Claire remembered. But it makes sense. The old stories, the mythologies—they’re all just echoes, anyway. Arabella and her siblings, all the way back to the start. Gods of the First Gate, ascended mortals, it all echoes again and again. Inanna’s descent to the underworld, Persephone’s kidnapping, Osiris’s death… All the old myths repeat themselves across cultures. I think she wanted to see if something could survive all that.”

Andy smiled, but it was a crooked, haunted thing. “The rules are there, but if you stare at them too hard, they blur into chaos.” He paused, then: “But you’re here. That’s not chaos. That’s… I don’t know what it is, but it’s not random.”

She met his eyes, both faces dead serious for the first time all day. “It’s love,” she said, like it was the simplest thing in the world. “That’s what survived everything. I’m here because you wanted me. Because you wouldn’t let go, even when you thought I was gone for good.”

Andy swallowed, throat suddenly thick. “It wasn’t just me,” he managed. “Everyone helped. Erin, Claire, even Marissa—”

“Stop,” said the left Laura, with a gentleness that ruled out argument. “You’re allowed to take credit for the thing you did. Laura Marie Cooper, resurrected by the world’s most stubborn boy.” Laura grinned, then looked at the feather again, as if searching for echoes of her own survival in its fine gold shimmer.

Andy watched her, watched both of her, the way a man might watch a star on the edge of flickering out, aware that every second spent looking was both a gift and a risk. He had never stopped being afraid that he’d lose her again—not since the first time, not since the day in the woods. But here, in this bright and impossible hall, she was more real than he’d ever known her.

She seemed to sense it. Both faces softened, and the right Laura reached up, fingers light on his jaw as if she wasn’t sure she wouldn’t pass right through him. “You’re doing it again,” she said, but there was no accusation in it. Only the mild exasperation of a girl long since resigned to the heart she’d chosen to love.

He tried to deny it, but nothing came out.

Laura’s left head leaned in close. “You’re allowed to grieve what you lost, but you’re not allowed to make me a ghost again. Deal?”

He nodded, the movement a little jerky.

She stood there, both bodies so close he felt the arc of warmth off her skin, and let the silence stretch. “Andy,” she said, “I’m real. You made me real.”

“Yeah,” he said, and his voice came out rougher than he intended. “You are.”

Laura’s right hand slipped into his, fingers lacing with the practiced ease of girls who have spent a lifetime unlearning the language of loneliness. He squeezed, not too tight, and the three of them—one boy, two girls, one thread of old pain—stood there for a moment, letting the scene settle into a new kind of quiet. “Let’s keep going,” she said.

They moved on, the sound of their footsteps muffled by the rich carpet, the weight of everything they’d just seen settling quietly between them.

They didn’t have to walk far—just around a shallow bend in the corridor—before the museum’s mood shifted again. The next display was a heavy, battered ledger, open beneath glass, the thick pages splayed as if it had been abandoned mid-argument. The book’s spine was scuffed raw, corners blunted, the ink in places run or blotted by water stains. Even from a step away, Andy could see the names: row after row of them, packed so tight together it was almost a texture, the columns of ancient Greek script dividing up each page like a roll call in an army that hadn’t been paid in centuries.

The plaque was plain:

Kallias’s Ledger — Harem Hotel: Nysa, Hecate, S119

Andy watched Laura take it in, both bodies converging at the edge of the glass, one head dipping in to peer close, the other staying back a half step, as if measuring the distance the words might travel.

She ran her eyes over the cramped, brown-black lines, squinted, then looked up at Andy. “Any idea what it says?”

He shook his head. “Not in Greek. But Arabella told me the story once, the short version. Kallias was a Master—he kept a ledger for every debt he convinced himself the contestants owed him, even if the debts were all in his own head.”

Both of Laura’s faces went hard, the corners of her mouth tightening in a way that said she did not find this romantic or tragic or even very interesting, just appallingly familiar.

Andy continued. “It did not end well. Arabella said that eventually, one of the women got through to him enough that he called Hecate for confirmation.” He looked at the ledger, the ugly weight of it, and added, “Hecate didn’t lie, and once he knew his righteousness had doomed two contestants for false reasons, he broke. The other contestants broke with him, once they no longer had anyone to hate for what they were going through.”

Laura traced a line in the glass, as if following a name from margin to margin. “Did any of them ever pay him back?” she asked, but the tone made it clear she wasn’t expecting a yes.

Andy said, “I don’t know. I get the sense the season didn’t end well.” He felt the answer land.

Laura nodded, both faces, but neither of them looked satisfied. “Sounds about right,” she said. There was an edge in her voice—a knowing, sharp skepticism that ran under almost everything she said when she wasn’t busy performing delight.

She lingered there, staring at the messy lines, then said, “You know what bothers me? Not the debt. The arrogance of thinking you could ever put it in writing and have it mean the same thing to someone else.” She tapped the glass, the gesture small but final. “That’s the part that never changes, no matter how many millennia you run it through.”

Andy watched her for a second, then said, “He would’ve hated you.”

Laura flashed a brief, mean smile, but it faded instantly. They left the ledger behind.

The next case was a broad, well-lit one, the inside arranged with what looked like a miniature burial mound of Sumerian relics: polished beads, small fragments of clay tablets, shards of blackened wood. In the center, though, was an iron collar—not a delicate or ornamental thing, but a brutal loop of rough-forged metal, heavy and scarred, sitting on the velvet as if it would weigh down the table if not for the glass. The plaque was as plain as before, but the name made Andy freeze:

Abi-Eshu’s Collar — Harem Hotel: Dilmun, baseline (pre-Geshtinanna), S01

He felt his own hand go tight on Laura’s, almost without noticing, and she felt it, too. Both bodies stilled, as if some silent alarm had triggered and sent the warning through both at once.

She looked at him, right face first. “Who’s Abi-Eshu?” she said, and the question had none of her usual irony.

Andy hesitated, then said, “He was a Master. The first one Arabella ever hosted on Earth, before she even became Geshtinanna. It was the first Dilmun season—the one that ended up with Ereshkigal and Inanna.”

He did not elaborate. He didn’t need to.

Both of Laura studied the collar a long time. The left face moved in closer, the right stood back, but both watched the same spot, the seam in the iron where it had been heated and bent closed. Andy saw the way the light threw a faint shadow on the velvet, as if even in replica it could cast something real.

She said, “Did he make them wear it?”

Andy said, “I don’t know. But it was a bad season.” He thought about saying more, about the stories Arabella had shared—how the first Master had believed ownership was love, and how he’d enforced the lesson until the women in his care either broke or outlasted him. He decided Laura didn’t need to know the details.

She stared at it another long minute, both faces gone flat and hard, then said, “He should have worn it himself.”

Andy nodded, slow. “In the end, he did.” He looked at the plaque, the iron, then at Laura. “After he died, Ereshkigal enslaved him for eternity. At least, it’s what Claire believes.”

A chill went through the space, a cold that had nothing to do with the air conditioning. Andy watched Laura, saw the way both bodies recoiled in perfect sync, the kind of instinctive, animal response that couldn’t be faked. “Good,” she said after a moment, “the world didn’t need another Greg.”

But the satisfaction didn't hold. Andy watched it drain out of her face almost as fast as it had come, replaced by something quieter and colder: the same hand that forged this collar was the hand holding whatever was left of her own debt. She didn't say it. She didn't have to. Her fingers found his again, gripping harder than the walk over had required.

She stepped back from the case, both faces turned away from it now, and Andy did not need to be told to move along.

The two of them walked on, the weight of the iron and the story trailing after them down the corridor.

It was Laura who shook off the collar’s chill first, turning both bodies away from the glass and dragging Andy with her by the hand. “Let’s see something less… medieval,” she said, the words echoing in the hush.

The next case was a sharp contrast: a tiny, perfect blue glass bead, barely larger than Andy’s thumbnail, suspended in a coil of golden wire. It sat under a spotlight that made the blue shimmer and darken in the center, almost like it was lit from within. The plaque beneath it was short:

Moongem (Replica) — Harem Hotel: Athanor, Amabilis, S01

Andy stopped, the name twitching something at the base of his skull. He leaned in, not to read, but just to study the bead—how the gold wire caught the light, how the blue changed shade from every angle. Laura noticed his pause, both bodies pivoting back to look at him. “You okay?” she said, but softer this time, as if afraid the glass might be listening.

Andy frowned. “Arabella hasn’t mentioned a persona called Amabilis, but I suppose she might do so later. But the name,” he said. “Moongem. I’ve heard that before.”

Laura looked at him, both faces alert. “Where?”

He tried to chase the thought. “Sam, maybe? Someone told me about it while we were in the Gardens, long ago, when they had first looked at the Commissary menu. She said there was an item—a moongem—that could permanently strip away any transformation. Like, unmake it. Even the worst ones.”

Both faces went still, surprise flickering across Laura’s features. “Did you buy it?”

He shook his head. “That was the problem. You didn’t buy the moongem: you used the moongem to buy the transformation removal.” He looked at the bead, uneasy. “I didn’t think much of it, but… seeing it here, it feels different. I wonder where it might be.”

Laura’s left head tilted, the right narrowed its eyes. “Do you think it’s pretty?” she asked, after a pause. “Or unsettling? I can’t decide.”

He studied the blue bead, the way it glowed against the black felt. “Both, I think,” he said.

Both of Laura’s mouths curled up in a small, weirdly pleased smile. “Me too.”

They stood there a moment, the blue bead hanging between them, before Laura pulled him on, her hand warm in his.

The next display was tucked into a shadowy recess, almost like it didn’t want to be found. It was a gold-and-lapis scarab, thick as a thumb, set on a silk pillow the color of dried blood. The label was longer:

Sin-Iddinam’s Coercion Scarab — Harem Hotel: Dilmun, Geshtinanna, S145

Laura read the title, and her face—both faces—wrinkled in disgust. “That’s a hard pass,” she said, and didn’t ask for the story.

Andy agreed. “Yeah. No need to dwell.”

They hurried past, not lingering.

A few steps later, they nearly missed it—an enormous sword, comically oversized, thrust hilt-first into a plinth of fake stone. The blade was at least twelve feet, the grip as thick as an arm and wound in red leather, the pommel carved into the unmistakable shape of a rounded, upturned… Andy didn’t want to say it.

Laura choked, both faces breaking into laughter as she read the label aloud: “'Thrustworthy — Harem Hotel: Avalon, Nimwen, S19.'” She wiped a tear from the right eye, then looked at Andy, delight in both faces. “Do you think anyone ever actually lifted that thing?”

Andy said, “If they did, I hope I never meet them.”

“And do you think anyone ever used Thrustworthy for, say, the other thing?”

Andy blinked. He kept the joke going, because it was easier than telling her the sword wasn't a joke at all, that he'd already seen someone he loved holding it. “Same answer.”

Laura doubled over, then straightened, both heads grinning. “This is the best exhibit in the whole place.”

Andy looked at the sword, then at her, and realized she was right. “I think it’s meant to be a joke,” he offered, trying not to sound like he cared.

She smirked. “Or a warning.”

They traded a few more jokes, each more outlandish than the last, then moved on, Andy’s face burning from the effort of not laughing too loud.

On a nearby shelf, Andy noticed a pale pink mug, its shape unmistakable: rounded, with small jiggly silicone breasts. The label was new:

Sumiku (Replica) — Harem Hotel: Takamahagara, Amaterasu, S341

Andy didn’t laugh. He stood there, looking at the mug—the pale pink glaze, the ridiculous shape of it—and felt something go quiet in him.

Laura noticed. Both faces turned toward him, the humor draining out. “She’s in there,” she said. Not a question either.

“Arabella keeps her asleep.” He reached out, stopped just short of touching the glass. “She left her in the Hotel kitchen because being around people helps somehow.” He thought of Katherine, the way she’d looked out from the frame the first time—present, watching, unreachable until she wasn’t. “I have to try.”

Laura’s left body drifted closer to the case, both faces studying the mug with a seriousness it deserved. After a moment, her right hand found the back of his. “Add her to the top of the list,” she said quietly.

Andy nodded. He took one last look at the pale pink shape under its light, then let Laura pull him gently forward.

The corridor opened, without warning, into a final, quiet room. Here, the lights were warmer, softer, less like a laboratory and more like the inside of someone’s home at dusk. There were no velvet ropes or security sensors—just a series of cases arranged in a gentle, loose spiral around a low platform in the center.

Andy recognized it first: a blue rose under a bell jar, petals glittering as if the rose were made of glass, containing swatches of blue shades. Beside it, in a chipped old coffee mug, a single small saguaro cactus, still alive, still stubborn. On a plinth between them, a Polaroid—faded, edges curled up, the image of two kids at thirteen on the hood of an old Chevy, grinning at the camera, clinging to each other.

Laura’s two bodies drifted toward it, both heads cocked at the same angle, but this time the tension was gone—no bracing, no skepticism, just a kind of unguarded softness Andy hadn’t seen since the nursery. She stood, both bodies, in front of the Polaroid a long time, not moving, not talking.

After a while, she said, “It’s weird to see yourself in a museum. Especially when you’re still alive to see it.”

Andy stepped up behind her, wrapped an arm around her shoulders, and put his chin on her left one. “At least we make good company,” he said.

Both faces went quiet, then the right one laughed—a low, warm sound. “If nothing else, future contestants will have excellent gossip material.”

He smiled, and together, they let the silence work for a while, the glow from the blue rose shining off the glass, the cactus blooming even here, in the cold.

On the last curve of the spiral, tucked into a case so ordinary Andy nearly walked past it, just past a case containing the masks the women had worn during the Fifth Challenge, was a plain, unpolished iron ring. The plaque read:

Adrien Moore’s Ring — Harem Hotel: Athanor, Amabilis, S01

Next to the ring sat a black-and-white photo of a man.

Andy stopped walking.

Both of Laura did too, one body halting at his shoulder, the other a foot ahead. She glanced at him, then at the case, then back again. “Something wrong?” she said.

He shook his head, not sure how to answer, and let his eyes go back to the photo. The man in it was tall, lean, with a tight-cut beard and a dark, careful mustache. The hair was black, a little longer than fashion, swept back off the face. The suit was old, the kind of cut nobody wore now. The man looked straight at the camera with a composure that was both familiar and unplaceable.

Andy stood there a minute, every detail going sharp and cold, as if the world had just pulled a trick he wasn’t going to get to understand.

Laura watched him, both faces now tuned entirely to his. “What is it?” she asked again, softer.

Andy pointed, slow, at the photo. “I know this face,” he said. “I’ve seen it before. In person, not in a picture.”

Laura’s right head cocked, the left watching his face. “Where?”

He turned, looking at her, then at the case again. “The Library of Alexandria,” he said, and the words hit the room with a hush even Andy could hear. “Back when Claire and I—” He stopped, then started again. “We were in the scroll room. There was a scholar. Called himself Andronikos. He helped us find the Democritus scroll. But—” Andy pointed at the photo again, the black hair, the beard, the set of the mouth. “That’s him. It’s not a resemblance, or a descendant. It’s the same face. The same person.”

Both of Laura went still, the twin heads mirroring each other in uncertainty. “Are you sure?”

Andy nodded. “I stood three feet from him. I’d know that face anywhere.” He felt the echo of it, the moment in the Library, the way the man had moved, watched, the way he had mentioned emerald tablets.

Laura stared at the picture now, both faces reflecting a tension that was half curiosity, half unease. “You think it’s… what, an immortal? Like Arabella? Or someone else?”

He shook his head, slow. “I don’t know. But it’s not an accident. All I know is, he was in Alexandria in forty-eight BCE. And, apparently, he was there sometime in the nearly twentieth century, based on the suit. I just—” He trailed off, hand still in the air.

They stood that way for a while, neither of them speaking.

Then Laura’s right hand slipped into his, and squeezed, as if to anchor him back in the here and now. “Are you okay?” she asked.

He looked at her, the double line of her concern, and said, “I think I will be. But I’m going to have to let Claire know about it. She saw him too.”

Laura nodded, both heads, but the worry didn’t quite go away.

They turned from the case, the silence of the museum now a little heavier, a little less safe, as if the walls might suddenly remember more than they were supposed to.

At the edge of the final room, Laura stopped, both bodies catching him up. “I’m glad we came here,” she said, both voices as one, soft and sure. “Even if some of it sucked.”

He squeezed her hand. “Me too.”

They looked back once at the blue rose, the Polaroid, the saguaro—signs that something, at least, had survived all the stories and all the centuries. Then they left, side by side, the sound of their footsteps marking the way home.

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Author's Note: Don't forget to send in your questions for the AMA!: https://forms.gle/Lvo78fCsiPudbMer6