The PowWow

Harwick University had the quality of institutions that had been taking themselves seriously for long enough that the seriousness had become architectural. Stone buildings. Careful landscaping. The specific weight of accumulated credential pressing down on every hallway. The kind of place that made you aware of your own education in the way that a very tall person makes you aware of your own height — not unkindly, just as a fact of the environment.

Special Collections was in the basement of the Alderman Library, behind a door that required a key card and a second door that required a human being who had been expecting you. The human being was Dr. Petra Voss.

She was in her late forties, with the expression of a person whose work had become more famous than she had wanted it to. The kind of scholar who had spent her career in careful, specific, largely unread academic publishing and had recently discovered what it felt like to be cited by people who had not read her. She had the look of someone fielding objections from theologians on one side and congratulations from people whose congratulations made her uncomfortable on the other, and managing both with the strained professionalism of a woman who had signed up for neither.

She opened the inner door and looked at us.

Her eyes moved to Jacob.

I watched the internal calculation happen — the brief, involuntary recalibration of a person encountering Jacob for the first time in an enclosed space. The wheels behind her eyes doing their quiet, obvious work. Jacob received it with the complete stillness of a man who had been receiving it his entire life and had long since stopped noticing.

"Dr. Voss," I said. "I'm Levi. This is my brother Jacob. Thank you for the time."

She collected herself smoothly. Scholars were good at that — redirecting attention back to the work. "Of course. Come in. Jeremiah Yaats is a name I respect and I welcome you."

The reading room was small and climate-controlled, with the hush of a space maintained for the preservation of things that didn't survive carelessness. A single long table. Overhead lighting calibrated for examination rather than comfort. And on the table, in a shallow archival tray lined with conservation foam, the tablets.

They were smaller than I expected. Three of them — clay, darkened with age, the script pressed in careful columns from right to left across the surface. The kind of object that communicated genuine antiquity immediately, the way some things did, not through drama but through the simple physical reality of what time did to matter.

Voss settled into the chair at the head of the table. We sat across from the tray. Jacob looked at the tablets and did not touch them. He had the same expression he'd worn watching Elias Crane on his stage — patient, cataloguing, entirely inward. The expression of a man taking a long, careful reading of something he wasn't going to rush.

"The material is consistent with the claimed period," Voss said, with the practiced tone of someone who had delivered this opening many times recently. "Script, language register, surface treatment — all of it holds under examination. We've sent a portion for carbon dating. Results in six to eight weeks."

I leaned forward and looked at the script. Old. Genuinely old. The kind of old that wasn't performed. I couldn't read it — that wasn't the issue. I knew the carbon dating would prove the age. These tablets just felt old.

"Walk us through the claims," I said.

She did. The Nephilim as intended inheritors — not aberration, not deviation, but purpose. The flood reframed: not divine judgment on corruption, but the removal of competing lines, the clearing of the field. The bloodline as covenant rather than contamination. She presented it with academic scrupulousness, the careful ‘the texts argue’ and ‘the texts claim’ of a scholar maintaining distance from her material.

But the distance was narrowing. I could hear it — the slight shift in her framing as she moved through the argument, the places where the texts claim was starting to sound like and here's why that's interesting. Six weeks of public attention pulling her slowly toward what she'd found, the way attention always pulled. She was rigorous. She was also human.

"There's been significant social media coverage," I said.

She made a sound that was not quite a sigh. "Yes."

"Articles arguing this changes everything. Theology, history, the nature of the flood narrative."

"I'm aware." Flat. The tone of a woman who had been made very aware against her will. "I don't control the popular response to peer-reviewed work."

"No," I said. "But someone's amplifying it."

She looked at me. I let it sit.

"The funding," I said. "The Riel Foundation. You applied to them specifically, or they came to you?"

"Standard grant process," she said. "They fund Near Eastern archeology broadly. The name didn't stand out." She paused. "Should it have?"

I didn't answer that. Not yet.

Jacob had not moved. Had not spoken. Had sat across from the tablets for the full duration with the same expression, looking at them the way he looked at things he was deciding about.

Then, at the end, he asked his one question.

"Did the texts tell you who wrote them?"

Voss paused.

It was a real pause — not the pause of someone reaching for an answer, but the pause of someone arriving at the edge of the thing they had been not-quite-thinking. "No," she said. "That's the one thing they don't say." Another pause. "For texts this detailed about their subject matter, the authorial silence is unusual."

We thanked her. She walked us to the door with the professionalism of someone who was going to think about this conversation later and wasn't sure how she felt about that.

Outside, the afternoon was ordinary in the way of afternoons that have no idea what's happening inside the buildings they're adjacent to. Students crossing the quad. Leaves moving in a mild wind. The regular world doing its regular things.

"An author who doesn't name himself," I said.

Jacob walked beside me, bare feet on the university's carefully maintained path, unhurried.

"Because the name," he said, "would end the argument before it started."

I thought about that. About the patience required to write a convincing argument for your own supremacy and then remove the one piece of evidence that would identify the author as the beneficiary. The discipline of that. The long view of it.

"How old is long enough," I said, "to know that someone finding your name on a document would read as bias?"

Jacob didn't answer.

He didn't need to.