Free Reliquary by Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child Page B

fire. An indescribable feeling of power and well-being surged through him. His senses, already hyperacute, seemed to expand until he could see infinitesimal dust motes hanging in the pitch black; until he could hear all of Manhattan in conversation with itself, from cocktail chat in the Rainbow Room seventy stories above Rockefeller Center, to the hungry wailing of his own children, far below-ground in secret forgotten spaces.
    They were growing hungrier. Soon, not even the Ceremony would control them all.
    But by then it would no longer be necessary.
    The darkness seemed almost painfully bright, and he closed his eyes, listening to the vigorous rush of blood through the natural gates and alleys of his inner ears. He would keep his eyelids closed until the peak of sensation--and the odd, silvery sheen that temporarily covered his eyes--had gone. Whoever named it glaze, he thought with amusement, named it well.
    Soon--all too soon--the fierce bloom faded. But the power remained, a constant reminder in his joints and sinews of what he had become. If only his former colleagues could see him now. Then they’d understand.
    Almost regretfully, he stood again, unwilling to leave the site of so much pleasure. But there was much that needed doing.
    It would be a busy night.

= 9 =
    Margo approached the door, noting with distaste that it was as dirty as ever. Even in a museum known for its high dust tolerance, the door to the Physical Anthropology lab--or Skeleton Room, as the staff universally referred to it--was almost unbelievably grimy. This can’t have been washed since the turn of the century, she thought. A patina of hand oils coated the knob and the surrounding area like a shiny varnish. She considered getting a tissue out of her carryall, then dismissed the thought, grabbed the knob tightly, and turned.
    As usual, the room was dimly lit, and she had to squint to make out the tiers of metal drawers that rose to the ceiling like the stacks of some vast library. Each of the twelve thousand drawers contained, either whole or in part, the remains of a human skeleton. Although most belonged to native peoples of Africa and the Americas, Margo was interested in the subset of skeletons that had been collected for medical, rather than anthropological, purposes. Dr. Frock had suggested that, as a first step, they examine the remains of people with acute bone disorders. Perhaps, he’d hypothesized, the victims of such ailments as acromegaly or Proteus syndrome could help shed some light on the bizarre skeleton that waited for them under the blue plastic sheet in Forensic Anthropology.
    As she threaded her way between the giant stacks, Margo sighed. She knew the impending encounter would be unpleasant. Sy Hagedorn, administrator of the Physical Anthropology lab, was almost as old and desiccated as the skeletons he watched over. Along with Curley manning the staff entrance, Emmaline Spragg of Invertebrate Biology, and a few others, Sy Hagedorn was the last remnant of the Museum old guard. Despite the Museum’s computerized collection database, and despite the high-tech laboratory that lay just beyond the Skeleton Room, he steadfastly refused to bring his cataloguing methods into the twentieth century. When her erstwhile colleague Greg Kawakita had made his office in the lab, he’d had to endure Hagedorn’s withering scorn every time he opened up his laptop. Behind Hagedorn’s back, Kawakita had nicknamed the administrator “Stumpy.” Only Margo and a few of Frock’s other graduate students had known the name referred not to Hagedorn’s diminutive size, but to Stumpiniceps troglodytes, a particularly mundane kind of bottom-feeder that populated the oceans of the Carboniferous period.
    At the thought of Kawakita, Margo frowned guiltily. He’d left a message on her answering machine maybe six months before, apologizing for dropping out of touch, saying he needed to speak to her, that he’d try again the same time the following