The letter of termination sits folded on the small table beside his sofa, its sharp creases catching the dim light from the streetlamp outside his Bloomsbury flat. He does not look at it again. He already knows every word by heart. The museum had been quiet when he left, too quiet, as if the relics themselves had turned their backs on him. Even now, lying still, he feels as though something unseen is watching, patient, ancient, waiting.
He turns the small relic over in his fingers. It is no bigger than his palm, dark stone worn smooth by time, its surface etched with symbols that do not belong to any single dynasty he knows. He found it years ago in a collapsed cave in China, half-buried beneath rubble, its presence strange enough that he had pocketed it without thinking. The museum never catalogued it. No one ever asked. Sometimes, when he holds it like this, the air around him feels heavier, as if the room remembers something he does not. Marcus exhales and closes his eyes.
Morning comes quickly, Bloomsbury wakes beneath pale sunlight, buses groaning past narrow streets, café doors opening one by one. The world does not care that Marcus Reed is now unemployed. It moves on without pause. By the time he steps into the café near the square, the one that always smells faintly of burnt milk no matter how early it opens, the smell of coffee and warm bread already filling the air.
Noah is there first, hunched slightly over his cup, fingers wrapped around it as if for warmth rather than taste. Lena sits across from him, her map tube resting against her chair. Ethan arrives moments later, apron folded under his arm from the café where he works, eyes already distant, calculating something no one else can see. Maya comes last, breathless, hair tied back hastily, clutching a worn writing pad to her chest.
"Happy birthday," Marcus says, and means it more than he expects.
They clap, softly at first, then louder. Maya laughs, embarrassed, the sound brief but genuine. For a moment, the world feels normal again. Five people, a small table, shared jokes and half-finished dreams.
Conversation drifts, as it always does, toward what none of them quite know how to fix.
Lena talks about maps she redraws from memory. Noah mentions another rejection, delivered politely and without explanation. Ethan stirs his drink absentmindedly, murmuring about probability, about patterns that do not lie even when people do. Maya listens, pen tapping against her notebook, eyes bright but unfocused.
Marcus watches them and feels a strange pull in his chest.
He tells them about being fired. Not dramatically. Just the facts. The manager's voice. The paper. The door closing behind him.
There is silence after, and Ethan is the one who breaks it. "Maybe," he says slowly, "this is timing."
They all look at him.
He reaches into his bag and pulls out several folded pages, edges worn, covered in numbers, angles, coordinates. Lines intersect where they should not. Distances align too cleanly to be coincidence.
"I've been working on something," Ethan continues. "Patterns in ancient structures. Pyramids. Not just the ones we know."
Lena leans forward first, instinctively. "These coordinates," she says, tracing them with her finger. "They don't point to any registered site."
Marcus feels his pulse quicken.
Outside, the city hums on, unaware. Beneath centuries of sand and silence, something stirs—though none of them know it yet.