❝death is only the beginning.❞
Mara El-Masri's fascination with the long-ago world of ancient Egypt started with the stories her stepfather would tell her when she was a child. Her brother Talib El-Masri is missing, left after their mother's funera...
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THE SUN ROSE ONCE MORE ON A NEW DAY, but it would still be another before they reached Abu Simbel. Three before the Scorpion King would wake. Until then, they could only prepare for what was to come and try to rest while they could.
It had been a surprise to Jamil when he woke this morning to the sight of the dawning sky and noticed that Mara, who previously had consistently been the first one awake each day they had been on the dirigible, was still sleeping peacefully against Jonathan's side. It was unusual to see her sleeping through the sunrise but welcome to see her resting after his conversation with Jonathan the other night and her sickness yesterday morning.
Instead today Rick was the first one awake, sat at the table as he sharpened a pocket knife in the burgeoning sunlight and paid no attention to anyone else until Jamil greeted him and sat across from him, intending to ask him how he had been these past days, but was silent as he tried to think of what to say to him. Before he could, breaking the brief silence, Rick said without looking up, "So, uh, you've been through this before. With Mara."
Jamil recalled once, after they had returned to London five years ago, that Rick said he couldn't imagine anything like what happened to Mara happening to Alex. He said, "I wouldn't compare it." Though the comparison wasn't something that hadn't crossed Jamil's mind, it should never have crossed Rick's. He shouldn't be thinking about the consequences of Riyadh in relation to what was happening now with Alex.
"Hard not to. My kid's been kidnapped. Yours was." Rick finally looked at him, halfway through sharpening the knife. He was seeking his advice, as someone who had lost a child to abduction before. "How'd you deal with it, when she was with him?"
"I took solace in the fact that I knew she was still alive," Jamil said. He didn't mention that he knew then, in those hours, that even if she survived, she was going to come back to them with horrible injuries, physical and mental. She wasn't going to be the same person she was before. She still wasn't. "He couldn't kill her until midnight."
"Didn't stop him from hurting her."
"There is a difference between Qadir and Imhotep," Jamil told him truthfully, far from willing to let Rick believe that Alex would return to them horribly injured. "Qadir was just a man. He took pleasure in inflicting pain on her. Imhotep, as bad as he is, isn't like that. There's nothing for him in hurting Alex. And none of the cultists are going to dare to cross him." They had seen proof of that in the form of two dead bodies at Karnak, cultists slammed into the ancient columns at a height only Imhotep's powers could have achieved. "Alex is safe so long as he keeps leading them to Ahm-Shere, which he is. And he's leading us."
