“Wonder which bronze?” Kit mused as they threaded their way toward Primary.
“Proserpina, actually,” Robert Li’s voice said from behind him.
Kit turned, startled, then grinned. “Proserpina, huh?”
“Yeah, beautiful little thing, about three feet high. Holding a pomegranate.”
“Is that what you wanted to ask me about?”
The antiquities dealer chuckled and fell into step beside them. “Actually, no.” He held up a cloth sack. “I wondered if you might know more about these than I do. A customer came into the shop, asked me to verify whether or not they were genuine or reproduction. He’d bought ‘em from a Templar who came through with a suitcase full of ‘em and is selling them down in Little Agora to anyone who’ll pony up the bucks.”
Curious, Kit opened the sack and found a pair of late twentieth-century, Desert Storm-era Israeli gas masks, capable of filtering out a variety of chemical and nerve agents.
“Somebody,” Kit muttered, “has a sick sense of humor.”
“Or maybe just a psychic premonition,” Ann put in, eyeing the masks curiously. “It’s illegal to discharge chemical agents inside a time terminal, but nothing would surprise me around here, these days.”
As Kit studied the gas masks, looking for telltale signs of recent manufacture, he could hear, in the distance, the sound of live music and chanting. Startled, Kit glanced up at the chronometers. “What’s going on, over toward Urbs Romae?”
“Oh, that’s the Festival of Mars,” Ann answered, just as Kit located the section of the overhead chronometers reserved for displaying the religious festivals scheduled in the station’s timeline.