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“Do you need assistance?” Ellie called up through the tomb shaft—though at a careful pace away.

“Nope,” Adam said tightly. “Just… gonna breathe here for a minute.”

With a string of muttered curses that raised Constance’s eyebrows and made Mr. Al-Ahmed blush, the sounds of Adam’s ascent resumed.

“Made it up,” he reported back, his breath a little tight. “Just… need to clear the slabs.”

A loud scrape indicated the movement of the paving stones laid over the shaft’s mouth. Ellie risked another look and saw Adam haul himself through the new-formed gap—and immediately flop over out of view.

“Told you I wasssn’t gonna puke,” he called down triumphantly from above, the words a little slurred. “Imma man of m’word.”

“You most certainly are,” Ellie said in return. “Now could you send down the rope?”

“Sure,” Adam promised. “Just as soon as the sky stops spinning.”

?

Adam hauled each of them up in turn. Constance went first, Ellie following to emerge into a splendid desert twilight. The sky had turned to a deep purple, casting the rubble-strewn plain of the necropolis into gloom and shadows. Ellie could just make out the lumpy silhouettes of a few small Old Kingdom pyramids and the ragged walls of funerary temples.

She had only a moment to take it in before Constance tugged her down behind the knee-high remnants of a Twentieth Dynasty chapel wall. Her white lawn dress was smudged with dirt, as was her face. Her hair had come mostly unraveled, dark curls falling around her shoulders.

“Looks like they’re on the hunt,” Constance reported in a slightly gleeful whisper.

Neil’s excavation lay about forty yards to the north. The pit that held Horemheb’s funerary temple sparked with escaping flares of lantern light. Voices called out urgently as more lights fanned out across the surrounding ruins.

Neil squirmed from the tomb shaft with an awkward groan and staggered free of it, half slumping against another pile of rubble. Mr. Al-Ahmed ascended last, Adam lending an arm to lever him free. The foreman brushed at his trousers in a futile attempt to tidy himself, but he remained as hopelessly disheveled as the rest of them.

Adam worked to shove the slabs back into place over the opening.

Neil staggered to where Ellie and Constance hid. He stared out at the lights of the dig with a forlorn expression. “I had recommendations from four Cambridge deans.”

“What’s that?” Ellie prompted, confused.

“One even wrote to his cousin at the Royal Geographical Society to put in a word for me,” Neil continued mournfully. “How is anyone from the Royal Geographical Society going to put in a word for me after this?”

Constance rolled her eyes. Ellie felt a dart of guilt.

“I’ve lost all of it, haven’t I?” Neil said, a note of panic entering his voice. “My position. My reputation. My prospects for future employment. It’s all gone.”

“I am sorry, Neil.” Ellie’s heart sank like a lead weight. “I promise you that was never my intention. The timing just turned out to be awful in a way none of us could have predicted.”

“Wouldn’t have happened,” Adam cut in with a grunt as he shoved the final slab into place, “if I still had my lucky rock.”

Ellie barely suppressed her huff of frustration. “Your lucky rock must’ve weighed eight pounds,” she pointed out impatiently. “Were you going to carry it around the whole of Egypt with you?”

“It still would’ve worked if I’d left it with my stuff,” Adam returned authoritatively as he came over to join her.

Ellie threw up her hands. “How does that make any sort of sense?”

“But why do you know about Bates’s lucky rock?” Neil asked helplessly.

Ellie went still—and Neil’s eyes widened with a dawning and terrible understanding.

“You… you didn’t just arrive at my tomb at the same time. Did you?” he demanded. “You came here together! Why did you come here together? How…Howdid you come here together?!”

Constance popped down to sit on a block of limestone, making herself comfortable. “I won’t say I haven’t been looking forward to this,” she admitted conspiratorially to Mr. Al-Ahmed.

“Mr. Bates and I have been traveling together,” Ellie replied carefully, her pulse fluttering nervously, “after a series of unforeseen circumstances necessitated that I undertake a journey to British Honduras, where by pure chance—”