Monday came faster than Delia had hoped.
“Hooooaaahhhm!” Delia yawned widely.
The alarm went off at six in the morning, something that had not happened since the last semester of college, because Delia was the type of person who philosophically opposed the concept of waking up before the sun had fully appeared.
But today was different.
Today she was an Everette Museum staff member.
Delia sat upright in bed with messy hair and half-closed eyes.
In the corner of the room, a pair of blood-red eyes watched her with an expression that was hard to distinguish between amusement and affection.
“You look like an owl that fell out of its nest,” Alexander commented from behind the novel he was holding.
“Shut up!” Delia grumbled, then headed to the bathroom.
20 minutes later she came out with tidy hair, a thin navy blazer over a white shirt, black pants, and flat shoes comfortable for walking.
Alexander looked her over from head to toe.
“Beautiful,” he commented.
Delia did not answer, but her face flushed slightly.
* The Everette Museum welcomed Delia with its mysterious cold air.
The hallways were still quiet, the lighting still yellow, but something felt different today.
“Delia!
Right on time!” Robin greeted her near the reception desk with the same warm smile.
Still wearing the brown wool vest that Delia suspected was his daily uniform.
“Officially welcome,” Robin continued.
“Your first day won’t be boring, I guarantee it.” “Absolutely!” Delia replied.
Robin chuckled softly, then invited Delia to walk toward the museum’s back wing, the hallway they had not fully explored yesterday.
A large dark gray door opened.
The research room.
Colder.
Quieter.
The characteristic scent of a mixture of old dust, preservative resin, and colder air.
In the center of the room, on a long steel table with white spotlights hanging from the ceiling, lay a sarcophagus.
The sarcophagus that had arrived by forklift last Friday.
“This is what you’ll be working on,” Robin said, standing on the right side of the table.
Delia stepped closer.
It was large, bigger than the standard Egyptian sarcophagi she was used to seeing.
Its color was somewhere between gray and bluish-black, with a surface layer made of some material she could not identify because its texture was too smooth for ordinary granite.
The outer surface was covered in dense carvings that surrounded the entire body of the sarcophagus from top to bottom.
“Its origin is unknown,” Robin said.
“We obtained it from a customs seizure, from Eastern Europe.
No documentation of origin, no ownership claims, no information except one sheet of paper containing the coordinates of its discovery location.” Robin sighed softly.
“What we know is that this object is very old.” Delia had already taken out her notebook.
“Where should I start, Mr.
Robin?” The old man smiled again, this time there was something in his eyes that looked like relief.
Like someone who had been waiting a long time for the right person to arrive.
“Start wherever you think is logical, Delia.” For the next four hours, Delia did not move from the sarcophagus’s side except to pick up a pencil that had fallen.
She documented everything.
Width, length, height, estimated weight, surface material, which she marked with a big question mark because she could not identify it yet.
Then the carvings.
Hundreds of symbols encircling the sarcophagus’s body in several neat rows, precise, with consistent spacing between symbols like formatted text.
“This isn’t decoration,” Delia thought.
“This was writing.” But writing in a script she did not recognize.
Not Hieroglyphs.
Not Demotic.
Not Linear B or Proto-Sinaitic.
Not any Mesopotamian script from her textbooks.
But there was something familiar about their shapes, something Delia could not yet attach to any reference.
She took notes.
Copied every symbol she could reach into her notebook, carefully, exactly.
Some parts she photographed with the camera Robin lent her.
When Robin returned to the room around twelve to check on her progress, Delia had already filled half her notebook.
“You’re not eating lunch?” Robin asked.
Delia looked up.
“Oh!
Is it noon already?” Robin laughed heartily.
“This kid!” he muttered, shaking his head, then went to get Delia a pack of bread from the break room.
At exactly four o’clock, Delia went home with a notebook full and a head even fuller.
Alexander was in the apartment, lying on the sofa with another novel in his hand, his legs stretched out casually over the armrest.
When Delia entered and immediately sat on the floor while opening her laptop, he raised one eyebrow.
“Hello,” he greeted.
“Hello to you too,” Delia replied without looking up.
“What did you cook?” “Pasta.
It’s ready.” “Thanks…” They ate dinner with minimal conversation.
Delia was too busy studying her photos on her laptop screen while eating pasta, Alexander too busy observing Delia with an expression that, if translated, would roughly read, “This girl won’t be able to talk until she finds her answers.” After the plates were clean and Alexander had swiftly cleared the table, Delia sat cross-legged in front of her laptop with her notebook open in her lap.
She enlarged the symbols from the sarcophagus photos one by one.
Familiar.
Where from, exactly?
She opened a search tab.
Typed various possibilities.
Etruscan script, Glagolitic script, Proto-Bulgarian script.
Nothing matched.
Then her eyes stopped at one detail that had been there but she hadn’t examined closely.
The basic shape of the symbols.
Boxes.
They were all based on squares and vertical-horizontal lines.
No organic curves, no dramatic diagonals.
And when Delia looked more closely…
It was Cyrillic script!
Russian letters but reshaped.
Modified, simplified into square geometric patterns that made them not immediately readable as Cyrillic.
As if intentionally disguised so that the script would not be easily recognized by just anyone.
“Alex,” Delia called.
“Hmm?” The vampire did not look up from his novel.
“Do you speak Russian?” Two seconds of silence.
“Of course!” “Please translate this.” Delia turned her laptop toward Alexander.
Alexander lowered his novel, looked at the screen, then furrowed his brow.
Without moving from the sofa, he read, or more accurately, stared at the screen in a long enough silence.
“The script is Cyrillic,” Alexander said finally.
“But the language isn’t Russian.” Delia stared at him.
“Huh?
It isn’t?” “No,” Alexander repeated, tilting his head slightly.
“The word structure is different.
Older.
More…” he searched for the right word.
“…Western.” Delia was already typing again even before Alexander finished speaking.
Cyrillic – not Russian – Eastern Europe – older…
A new search.
And three minutes later, Delia stopped typing.
Romanian language!
Written in Cyrillic script because before the 19th century, Romanian was indeed written in Cyrillic script before switching to Latin.
Not impossible.
Not something unheard of in history.
But on a sarcophagus that long, in carvings that would have taken years of skill and labor to create?
Strange!
Who was buried there?
Delia began translating fragment by fragment with the help of an online Old Romanian dictionary.
Slowly, words began to form from symbols that had previously had no meaning.
Titles!
There were repeatedly written titles.
Delia could not read them perfectly yet, but there was a sequence of words that kept appearing in several different lines.
And then, she found a name.
Two syllables repeated four times at the top of the sarcophagus, in a position that in any burial tradition was where the name of the tomb owner was carved.
DUDU YAI??
Delia stared at her laptop.
Then at her notebook.
Then at her laptop again.
Who is Dudu Yai?
A king’s daughter?
An empress?
A noble concubine?
Whatever the title, this woman, and Delia was quite sure Dudu Yai was female based on several grammatical markers she had found, meant that Dudu Yai was important enough to be mummified and stored in such a luxurious sarcophagus.
But all that could be thought about tomorrow.
Because now, all that was in Delia’s head was one thing.
Dudu.
Dududu.
Without realizing what she was doing, Delia was already standing.
Her hand reached for her phone.
Opened her music app.
And four seconds later, the opening beat of BLACKPINK’s DDU-DU DDU-DU filled the small apartment at a volume that did not care about disturbing the neighbors.
“Du du dudu, aah yeah ah yeah!
Blackpink in your area!” Delia sang, half-shouting.
Alexander lowered his novel at full speed.
“What the…?” “DUDU YAI, Alex!” Delia shouted while dancing on the table, spinning down to the middle of the room with movements that contained about 30 percent BLACKPINK dance moves and 70 percent uncontrollable scientific excitement.
“The mummy’s name is DUDU YAI!
DUDUDU!
DU DU DU DU DU DU, AH YEAH AH YEAH!” Alexander watched the scene before him with the expression of a nearly thousand-year-old creature witnessing something unprecedented in his life.
“You…” he started that sentence without knowing where it would go.
“One clue, Alex!
One clue and I already got the name!
Yippie!” Delia spun again, her hair, already somewhat messy from a full day’s work, now completely surrendering to gravity.
Alexander placed his novel very gently on the sofa.
His expression did not change.
But at the corner of his pale lips, something moved sideways without its owner’s permission.
Delia danced until the song reached the second chorus.
Then she sat down on the floor again.
And…
did not get up.
The music was still playing softly from the phone lying next to Delia when Alexander approached her a few minutes later.
The girl had fallen asleep on the floor with her back against the sofa leg, her notebook open in her lap, and her head tilted to the right with hair covering half her face.
The laptop was still on.
On the screen, the Old Romanian translation page was open, with the name DUDU YAI circled twice in red ink.
Alexander stood still before her for quite a while.
His hand gently took the notebook so it wouldn’t fall, placing it on the table.
He closed her laptop.
He turned off the music on her phone, then placed it next to the notebook.
Then he crouched down, adjusted his position, and lifted Delia from the floor with a movement that made no sound.
The girl mumbled something unintelligible, frowned briefly in her sleep, then her head fell onto Alexander’s shoulder as if finding a place that had always been meant for her.
Alexander carried her to the bed.
Covered her with a blanket.
Turned off the bedroom light.
Then he returned to the table.
Opened Delia’s laptop.
Read everything Delia had discovered that day.
The name, the translation fragments, the photos of symbols that Delia had transferred to the laptop before dinner.
His eyes stopped at one unfinished line of translation Delia had been working on.
His lips moved, reading in the Old Romanian that he had not heard in hundreds of years.
And for the first time since the full moon night when he first met Delia, Alexander’s expression changed into something that was neither calm, nor amused, nor amazed at a human who didn’t know the limits of her curiosity.
Something closer to…
cautious.
“Dudu Yai,” he murmured softly.
“I hope I’m wrong about you.” On her bed, Delia slept soundly.
Not dreaming, or at least, nothing she was aware of.