I stared in fascination at the slim, neat rows of metal. How can this tell something what to do?

My father shrugged. Well, how does an engine tell a train to move? He glanced at me. How do we tell the Ghosts to attack or to stay? The Early Ones were always searching for that.

For what?

Control.

Why’d they want that so badly?

He stood back up, patted my shoulder, and fell silent. If you could control the entire world, all of life, with a touch of your hand, you would. In his expression, I could see a glimmer of my mother and the sadness that always accompanied it.

I looked away from him and across the room, my eyes finding Laeni as she stood on tiptoe to peer at a mechanical doll on display in a glass case. Whenever my father got quiet like this, I found myself shying away, wanting to give him his space.

Looking back, I realize that maybe I was trying to control my own narrative.

The memory fades. I am looking straight across the same room and seeing the same mechanical doll on display against the opposite wall. Except now there’s no Laeni standing in front of it.

“Control,” I whisper.

Jeran looks at me.

“Everything the Early Ones created was about seeking control,” I explain, leading us around the room, relying on the muscle memory of a hundred trips in here. “The philosophy behind Ghosts was to reduce a human down to something you could control. Electricity, to control when you could have light. Trains, to control a massive machine that could take you where you wanted to go.”

I finally stop before a series of small objects in three separate glass cases.

“I guess the question is what the Early Ones wanted to control with those artifacts,” Jeran murmurs.

I look down at the objects. All three are identical, and all three look exactly like miniature versions of the cylinders that I’d seen dug up in Mara. The rush of familiarity comes back to me. No wonder I watched those things loaded onto the train cars and thought I’d seen them somewhere before. They were here, all along.

“‘Purpose unknown,’” Jeran reads from the placards alongside them. “It’s all that’s written about them.”

I shake my head, then bend closer to the objects. “These look like models of those artifacts, except these have their ends opened up.” I point to the insides of each miniature cylinder, which was loaded with thinner rods structured around a hollow center.

“Now, come take a look at this.”

I gesture for Jeran to follow me to the other side of the room, then point at several engravings on display against the wall. “Maybe there’s a reason they buried those artifacts so deep underground.”

“Energy source?” Jeran asks.

“Maybe,” I reply, nodding up at the engravings. “But to power what?”

It’s a series of paintings long faded by time, but the grooves are deep enough to reveal what must once have been on the wood panels. “A depiction of life as it unraveled during the end of the Early Ones’ reign,” I say.