❝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 ROOM MARA was to stay in while they were on the barge was hardly any bigger than a broom closet, but at least there was a bed. She was willing to go through some discomfort if Hamunaptra waited for her on the other side. Besides, it wasn't like she had to stay in the tiny room all the time. She'd never been down the Nile River before and it was sure to be a beautiful sight.
It was still close enough to Cairo that Mara could see the pyramids in the distance. They had always been breathtaking to her. The only one of the seven wonders of the ancient world that still stands and she was in awe of it. The first thing she had done when she moved to Cairo was travel out to them and sit in their shadow in the blazing sun. Her father had gone with her and he had told her all the stories he knew about the pyramid complex—well, told her again, because she'd heard them so many times before, and yet each time he told it again it was like hearing it for the first time.
Mara had gotten the puzzle box from Evy to study it with the view of the pyramids in her peripheral vision, while Evy was going to spend the journey studying the burned map, and they were going to compare notes when they were finished. They worked well together, able to bounce ideas and hypotheses off each other, but they were also quite good apart.
It took Mara about ten minutes to find a suitable spot for her work, one where she couldn't be caught in the glare of the sun while still being able to see the pyramids. She found it at one of the tables on the deck but hardly got a chance to sit down before she noticed O'Connell through the windows of the room just across from it.
"Mr. O'Connell!"
O'Connell looked up and through the window, squinting his eyes. After realizing it was her, he fastened the clasps on the bag he had brought with him and went through the door to her on the deck. "Mara, right?"
"El-Masri, yes," Mara said. She recalled what he had said earlier about Hamunaptra, but faced with the prospect of asking him what happened there himself without Evy or Jonathan there to hear the answer with her had her balking. Instead, she asked, "You're a military man?"
"French Foreign Legion," O'Connell confirmed. He looked at her evenly, and after a few seconds he added, apparently seeing through her, "Go ahead, ask me about Hamunaptra."
Oh. Was she that obvious? If so, she'd have to work on that. It was a few moments before she realized she had been staring at him, embarrassed she'd been caught so easily. "A—all right," she stuttered. She took a breath. "What happened there?"
"Hell."
"Sorry?"
"There's something there," he said, but it didn't do much to clear up what he had meant, "underneath the sand. Whatever it is, it's nothing good."
