Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Epilogue
Note from the Author
Connect with Cate
More Books by Cate
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Chapter One
They were going to take a bus to the Saqqara necropolis that morning—or so Leila had thought. Instead, she sat in the belly of a small helicopter with three others from her excavation team. The helicopter thrummed to life, stirring up a flutter of glee inside Leila’s chest. She’d dreamed of this since the moment her father put a trowel in her hand when she was a little girl, tagging along at one of his digs. She’d dreamed of it every day she studied for her bachelor’s in archaeology. Every day she sat in lectures and seminars for never-ending grad school.
It wasn’t a dream anymore. It was happening.
The pilot gave a thumbs up and the machine lurched. Leila ground her teeth together as the cracked asphalt shrank beneath them, tufts of grass whipping around in a churning cloud of sand. The machine hovered, rotated, then dipped forward as the pilot headed toward their first point of interest. Rippling sugar cane fields zipped by beneath them, and moments later, they were rising higher and higher over Cairo.
Dotted with white felucca sails, the Nile River cut through a brown-and-sand-colored Tetris board of buildings like a glittering blue snake. Lush green meadows hugged the winding Nile, giving way to yellow dunes that stretched to the horizon.
Leila held her breath as the Great Pyramids rose like golden mountains in the distance. She could only imagine their former glory over three thousand years ago when they were new, completely covered with polished white limestone that now only capped the top of Khufu’s pyramid.
She couldn’t help herself. She grinned. Here she was at last, on her way to excavate tombs and temples, to run her hands through the sand, to get the same dirt under her fingernails the ancient Egyptians once walked on.
“For the record,” her coworker, Emmanuela Giovanni, blurted from her seat by the other window, “I want to be buried in a pyramid.” Her melodic Italian accent sounded surprisingly clear on the headset, despite the permanent thumping from the rotating blades above them.
“You know, aliens built them,” Karl Tillman muttered from the middle seat. Though sitting in the helicopter was no trouble for Leila’s slim figure, Karl’s tall, rounded frame forced him to sit with his shoulders hunched and legs squeezed together.
“Yeah. They line up with Orion’s belt.” She lifted an eyebrow, shamelessly baiting him. Karl probably wanted to get into a discussion about a subject he was an expert in, like Star Trek.
“Ja, genau,” Karl said, his voice brightening. “Exactly!” He swiped a few strands of his ramen-noodle hair from his eyes. “That’s where the aliens live.”
“Karl,” Emma groaned, her face buried in her hands. “For the hundredth time, the ancient Egyptians weren’t aliens.”
“People didn’t believe Galileo when he said the earth revolved around the sun, either.” Karl shrugged and leaned back with his eyes closed. Clearly this conversation wasn’t going the direction he wanted.
“I’d hardly compare you to the father of modern science,” Emma scoffed.
“I heard that.”
With a shake of her head, Leila smiled and shifted her attention back to the window. The three of them had spent the last six weeks together at field school in Giza, where they received the mandatory instruction on archaeological excavation. After working with Karl and Emma every day in the trenches, she was used to their antics.
The flight south was only supposed to take half an hour, but the excavation leader pointed out more and more of the various archaeological sites from his place in the co-pilot seat. The pilot was more than happy to oblige, flying around each one for closer observation. Leila wasn’t about to complain. The tombs and temples were as interesting from above as from below. From up here, she could see exactly how precise and deliberate the ancient Egyptian architects were with their building arrangements.
After an hour, they descended toward their destination. At the excavation leader’s request, Emma snapped away with one of her cameras to get a few aerial shots of the excavation site.
They hovered over the Saqqara necropolis, a burial ground a few miles south of Cairo and much older than Giza. The area was pitted with trenches of varying depths from past and current excavations. Below them, archaeologists had already begun restoration work on crumbled stone walls.
Two rocky hills marked where ancient pyramids, prototype designs for the Great Pyramids farther north, once overshadowed the necropolis in their full glory. Trails wound around the pyramids and ruins, allowing easy access for the archaeologists and the tourists.
The paths lured her gaze to the massive 4,500-year-old Step Pyramid of Djoser situated on the northern end of the valley. Despite its crumbling façade, it towered over the dunes, casting a vast shadow over the site.
They circled for a few minutes until the excavation leader signaled to the pilot then pointed to a spot for him to land. Leila hardly noticed when the machine touched the ground.
