The Geometry of Betrayal

The East River tasted like rust and forgotten languages. Lia clutched Qasim's ruler against the predawn chill, its cuneiform numerals burning 23:42:17 into her palm. Across Pier 11, a cargo container marked 九江/JIUJIANG pulsed with the sickly green glow of unstable magic.

"Last chance to explain why I shouldn't call Homeland Security," she hissed into her burner phone.

"Bring the ruler, or your mother's autopsy photos go viral." The voice synthesized Mandarin, Spanish, and static.

Qasim materialized from shadow arches, his tweed coat reeking of Ottoman library dust. "Charging into traps? How very Western of you."

"You followed me?"

"I follow the math." He tapped his vibrating brass compass. "That container's dimensions violate the Hagia Sophia's sacred ratios by 0.618."

The container door screeched open. Inside: a floating Dunhuang-Persian mural torn from history books, its Buddhist deities morphing into Zoroastrian Amesha Spentas.

"Eleventh-century cultural exchange project," Lia's academic instincts overrode fear. "Silk Road monks and—"

"—Sabotaged by both empires," Qasim finished. His ruler sliced air molecules into golden triangles. "The fracture points... here, here, and here."

Their hands collided on the mural's central lotus.

Flash.

Sogdian merchants burning manuscripts in Samarkand

Tang Dynasty envoys drowning Persian envoys in tea

The vision shattered into prismatic shards. Qasim caught a fragment midair – his Syrian features warping into Central Asian ancestry.

"Fascinating." He trapped the shard in a geometric prison. "Your curse preserves what history tried to erase."

"Call it a curse again and I'll—"

"Preserve me in amber?" His smirk died as the mural revealed star coordinates under their mixed blood. "These match the stolen MoSSul crown's pattern."

The container walls began folding like origami. Qasim's compass shrieked in Euclidean distress.

"Someone's weaponizing cultural collisions!" He shoved Lia toward a fractal-shaped exit. "The blast radius—"

"Will erase every hybrid business from Flushing to Dubai." She grabbed his satchel. "Your precious ratios or their lives. Choose."

Qasim's ruler carved a Klein bottle portal. As Chinatown's energy grid destabilized, Lia hurled her trauma jar.

Amber crystals fused with his geometry, creating a temporary bridge. Refugees of blended cultures surged across – their footsteps erasing the star map.

"Congratulations," Qasim spat blood and algorithms. "You just destroyed our only lead."

In the aftermath, Lia found a microfilm hidden in her jar:

1989 Taipei Cultural Bureau memo:

"Project Phoenix requires mixed-race infants for..."

Her phone lit up with Viktor's black-market emporium address. The attached photo showed Qasim's compass at a 1990s Aleppo dig site – beside a woman who shared Lia's eyes.

As dawn broke, the reconstructed mural whispered in a dead dialect:

"The Antarctic machine awakens. Bring the architect."

Qasim's ruler began counting backward from 12:00:00.