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She hadn’t realized how small the inside of the safe was; she must have been much smaller the last time she had seen it. From its contents, her parents had probably not looked in for a long time either. There was a copy of her birth certificate, printed in the blue optical ink of official records from sixteen years ago; and her parents’ as well, the ink plain, the paper heavily creased. The mortgage was in there too, its next-generation optical ink black and probably encoded. The last of the papers was a sealed envelope, marked “Melia” in a jagged, paper-engraving version of her mother’s normally spidery writing. Darica knew it would be a birth and death certificate together, perhaps a photograph, the only physical reminders they had been able to bring home from the hospital twelve years ago. She set it aside gently, mentally saying the prayer she had learned then and lost the habit of as time went on.

There were three small boxes beneath the papers, one of cardboard plastered with various kinds of tape, and two of wood. Darica slit a piece of the tape with her knife, and the top flaps of the box flopped open to reveal a pile of coins. This was money she might actually be able to use, especially with the age of some of these coins. A few were even old enough not to have dates minted in, but from what she could tell, they were all dollar coins. Strangely, two of them were current, and another was close enough that she guessed it would still fit in a vending machine. She checked the dates: 628, 661, 665. I was born in 661… The coins fell back into the box. One for her mother, and one for Melia. Darica could feel the prickling threat of tears. How many generations…? Quickly, she shut the box. This wasn’t spending money, even now.