Read Before the Dawn for Free Online Page B

actual gold around. Creeping along the hallway, keeping close to the wall, Max's cat eyes registered the facility's other guard, a heavyset fella heading for the far end of the hall, her enhanced hearing picking up his heels clicking on the tile floor.
    She kept moving, sliding past raincoat-clad figures from a “musical” called
Singin' in the Rain,
and a quartet of mannequins dressed as a lion, a crude robot, a scarecrow, and a pigtailed girl in a blue-and-white-checkered dress, holding a little dog; the latter grouping represented something called
The Wizard of Oz,
though Max couldn't see how these characters had anything mystical or magical about them, and the only wizards she knew about were Harry Potter and his friends.
    What waited in the room beyond the hallway had nothing to do with the “Golden Age of Studios,” but it was the most secure room in the building . . . so this, of course, was where the most valuable exhibit was housed.
    Max watched from the shadows as the plump guard checked the door at the end of the hall, then disappeared into the stairwell, to continue his rounds on another floor. She waited to make her move, listening to the door click shut and the guard's footsteps—he was going down—on the metal stairs dissipate.
    Then she all but soundlessly sprinted (
This is the Golden Age of silents,
she thought) the last fifty feet to the exhibit's door, circumvented the alarm, picked the numeric push-button lock, and took a long deep breath.
    The lock and the alarm were the easy part. Mines, activated only when the museum was closed, lay beneath the floor, and lasers hooked to infrared beams crisscrossed the room with barely a foot between them. Taking one last look at the floor plan Kafelnikov had so thoughtfully provided, Max memorized it, tucked it away, and plotted her course of action.
    She opened the door, slipped inside, and eased it shut behind her. The chamber was windowless and silent, reminding her of the solitude of the barracks at Manticore after lights-out. Half a dozen glass cases stood around the room, each bearing props from a movie called
Titanic.
    A tall display case in the corner contained a mannequin wearing an old-timey diaphanous white gown, while a similar glass case in the opposite corner held a mannequin of an attractive if baby-faced young man in a tuxedo.
    Three long, flat cases were arranged in a triangle in the center of the room. One held silverware, another a model of a ship, and the third one was an arrangement of still pictures from the motion picture.
    At the far end of the room, encased in a Plexiglas box, under a narrow spotlight, her prize caught her eyes: a gigantic blue diamond on a silver chain encrusted with smaller diamonds.
    Max knew little of the film, which apparently was famous. Television was limited and very controlled in the post-Pulse era, and, anyway, she didn't care for fiction . . . what was the point? Few people in made-up stories lived more interesting lives than she did.
    But she did know—thanks to Moody—that although everyone back in pre-Pulse days had thought the great blue diamond, the “Heart of the Ocean,” was merely a film prop, it had indeed been real, a ten-thousand-dollar necklace commissioned by the director who later donated it to the Hollywood Heritage Museum.
    “Its true value,” Moody had told her, “is known to few—why attract thieves . . . like us? And to the public . . . those who still care about silly ancient celluloid . . . the magic of the prop is enough to make it stand on its own as a tourist attraction.”
    Funny,
Max thought.
In this town where dreams once were manufactured, one of the most famous artifacts was a fraud of sorts . . .
because
it was real.
    Now the famed Heart of the Ocean lay only twenty-five feet across the room from her.
    And if she could retrieve it, and get out of here with her skin, the Chinese Clan could fence it for enough money to set them up for years to come.
    Her breathing slowed as