Gold Without a Trace

Days in the Museum

Marta always volunteered for the morning tours.

The sunlight bathed the polished floors and climbed the glass cases in long, striking lines, as if it knew exactly where everything that adored it belonged.

“As you can see here,” she said, turning slightly toward the touring group, “the Inca believed the sun was their most important deity. Everything—agriculture, time, even leadership—was tied back to it.”

A man near the back nodded absently, already halfway into his phone.

Marta rolled her eyes as she turned to the next display.

She stepped closer to the display, her reflection twinkling against the glass. “Their ruler was considered a descendant of the sun,” she added, a small smile slipping in despite herself.

That usually got at least one person to look up.

Today, it didn’t.

She moved on anyway, a little more animated now, her hands gesturing lightly as she spoke.

“Gold, for example, wasn’t used as currency the way we think of it.” She motioned toward the pieces arranged beneath the soft museum lighting—ornamental, precise, almost too clean to feel real. “They called it the ‘sweat of the sun.’ It was more symbolic than practical.”

A woman in the front leaned in slightly, just enough for Marta to notice. She paused briefly, letting that settle, though she could already feel it slipping past most of them.

“They also didn’t have a written language,” she said, shifting her weight as she led them to the next case. “Instead, they used something called quipu—knotted cords—to record information. Numbers, records, possibly even stories. We’re still not entirely sure how much they held.”

This time, someone asked a question—something half-formed about whether it worked like math.

Marta answered easily, slipping into explanation without thinking, her voice warming as she spoke. This part always came naturally.

By the time she finished, the group had begun to thin in attention again, their interest drifting back to the walkway, the promise of the next exhibit and for some of them, the exit.

“That concludes this section,” she said, softer now, already feeling the tour ending before it actually did. “You’re welcome to continue through the gallery at your own pace.”

After a few polite thank-yous, she was alone again.

Marta lingered where she stood, her hands settling at her sides as the room exhaled back into stillness.

The sun's rays had stretched further now, almost reaching across the case in front of her, catching along the edges of something circular set carefully at the center.

She hadn’t talked about this one.

It was larger than the others, smoother and radiant. A gold disk.

Simple, at first glance. But the longer she looked at it, the less simple it became.

Marta stepped closer, almost without thinking.

The glass between them blurred her reflection, leaving only the gold—warm, steady, impossibly bright for something sitting in a controlled, temperature-regulated room in the middle of the Midwest.

Blaine & Camille

Blaine had never thought of himself as the kind of person who would steal priceless artifacts.

He preferred jobs that ended clean and risks that paid out clearly. In and out, no lingering consequences. He wasn’t completely reckless, not really. Not like his girlfriend Camille.

Camille liked the parts that ended in police chases and messy lovemaking. Plans that shifted halfway through made her excited. The feeling of getting away with something no one thought she could pull off was the ultimate thrill.

Blaine loved Camille.

They met in a bar after a few wrong decisions. Camille had smiled at him like she already knew how it would end, and Blaine had mistaken that for certainty.

He got used to following her rhythm. They grew used to the late nights, the half-serious plans, the way she spoke about things like they were already done.

“Don’t you ever get bored?” she’d asked him once, stretched across his couch like she owned it.

“Oh, so now stealing shit is boring?” he said.

She tilted her head, studying him. “That's not what I meant. You could always be more interesting.”

Blaine laughed then, completely unaware that her next request would be an unexpected one.

A week later, she was standing at his kitchen counter, flipping through something on her phone, the glow of the screen catching in her eyes.

“You ever pulled a museum job?” she asked, like she was asking about dinner.

Blaine didn’t look up from where he was leaning against the doorway. “Nah.”

“You could.”

“I don’t need to. Or want to.”

Camille hummed softly, not disagreeing, just… dismissing.

She turned the phone toward him.

A photo filled the screen—gold, circular, unmistakably expensive even through pixels.

“The Sun Disk,” she said. “Private collection on a rotating exhibit.”

Blaine glanced at it, then back at her. “So?”

“So,” she said, stepping closer hugging him from behind, “it’s not heavily guarded. Maybe one fat guard somewhere. It's just a small museum. Predictable foot traffic. The kind of place that believes in the best of people.”

He didn’t respond.

Camille watched him the way she always did when she was about to say something she’d already decided.

“I’ll marry you if you can take it.”

“You don’t even want it,” he said finally.

Camille smiled as she moved her hands down to his stomach.

“I want to know you can.”