Max stood, moving behind her and resting his broad hands on her shoulders, grounding her. “These men don’t care whether we find anything or not. Their job is just to get us there and back. You have a theory, Eden. And I trust your theories, even if I don’t understand the astronomical math behind them.” He squeezed gently. “We are here. We’ll follow your instructions, and if it fails, we’ll turn around and try again. That’s all. No tragedy, just an adjustment.”
She nodded, sucking in a slow breath. “Thank you. I needed to hear that.”
“Now, go find your hunter,” he instructed, kissing the top of her head before moving away to check on the quiet, huddled shapes of the Bedouin crew farther down the dune.
Eden made her way to a flat patch of limestone where she had established her observation point. She had set up the telescope the night before, aligning it precisely with her calculations. Her hands were numb, but her mind moved with the icy clarity she reserved for her best work. She sighted the telescope at the eastern ridge, adjusting for the atmospheric distortion and the slight wobble of the Earth itself. It felt as though she was carving through the centuries, clearing the way to a single, perfect moment.
The sky unrolled itself slowly, the indigo softening to ash, then to the faintest suggestion of gold. The stars bled out one by one, giving way to the coming light. Eden watched her pocket chronometer, her heart racing as she neared the precise moment predicted by the scroll.
Max joined her again, his arms folded, standing sentinel. “What do you see?”
“Only cliffs and ravines,” she murmured, her voice tight with tension. She nudged the instrument a fraction, aligning it with the coordinates derived from the papyrus: the moment the “hunter’s eye” should theoretically crest the ridge.
The false sun.
She adjusted the focus, then stilled, breath held captive. The world came into focus: striated cliffs, dry channels, and the fractured peaks that formed the valley’s rim.
And then, it happened. For the briefest instant—a pinprick of light, improbably bright, appeared on the shoulder of the ridge. It was small, intense, and vanished almost immediately as the sun’s edge cleared the distant horizon. It wasn’t a star, but a calculated reflection, a moment of geometric deceit wrought by the positioning of the valley and the sun’s first ray. She felt her pulse thrum at the base of her skull, a profound sense of triumph and relief washing over her.
“There,” she whispered, her voice cracking with emotion. She jabbed a finger at the spot. “The third cleft from the southernmost promontory. It was there for a single second. The reflection of the dawn.”
Max bent to the eyepiece and peered through. He watched the spot, which was now just an ordinary patch of sunlit rock face.
“I see nothing now but rock,” he said, his voice carefully neutral. “Could have been a vein of quartz reflecting the light.”
“Exactly!” she nearly laughed, giddy with vindication. “That’s why no one’s ever found it. It’s not an object; it’s an event. You have to be standing right here, at this time, on this specific day of the celestial alignment.”
He straightened, his expression unreadable for a moment before a slow, genuine smile spread across his face. He reachedout and cupped her face in his hands, his eyes blazing with admiration.
“Bloody hell, Eden. You were right. You were absolutely right.” He leaned down and pressed a long, deep, and utterly possessive kiss onto her mouth—a kiss of pride and relief.
When he pulled back, he was breathing hard. “So, now what? Do we ride over there and knock on the door?”
Eden felt the heat in her cheeks, but her composure had returned. “Now we make tea and break our fast. And we mark the spot precisely with Amir. We won’t attempt the entry until tomorrow at dawn, after we’ve had time to scout the terrain and make a full plan. We don’t want to go in blind.”
She glanced over to where Amir was climbing the dune toward them. The guide’s face was, as always, unreadable, but his pace had quickened.
Max gently pulled her to his side. “I can’t wait to see what we find.”
They waited for Amir, watching as the sun finished its climb. Eden leaned into Max, feeling the steady strength of his body next to hers, and for the first time since leaving Cairo, she felt no anxiety about her theory at all. She had faced her deepest fear—that she would be wrong—and overcome it. The labyrinth was real, and she had found it.
The days of waiting at the oasis had been a nice respite from the punishing trip through the desert, but the next morning, Eden was eager to be moving once again. When they broke camp for the final push, the air was almost painfully frigid—impossible to reconcile with the scorching oven she knew awaited them hours later.
They’d only ridden an hour or so, following the precise bearing Max had marked when Eden spotted the false sun,before they reached the foot of the jagged, chalky outcrop. The boulder was precisely as she’d imagined: far too large, too round, too deliberate, but aged into the landscape by centuries of sand and wind.
When Amir had first explained Eden’s theory—that a trick of the sunrise marked a hidden, buried stone—his crew had exchanged skeptical glances. But now, as the sun cast sharp blue shadows across the slope, the Bedouin team held no trace of doubt.
The coolness of morning hadn’t yet given way to the heat of the day when she dismounted her camel. This was it. They’d found it.
“Amir, get the tents up before the heat becomes an enemy!” Max said, all business when she was so excited she didn’t think she was even capable of speech.
The crew erupted into a choreographed chaos. The Egyptian crew moved with practiced ease, unrolling heavy canvas tents that snapped in the dry wind. This time, they would put up an extra one around the boulder so they wouldn’t have to work in the sun.
She shouldered her satchel and moved toward the ridge before anyone else could get up there, her eyes scanning the rock face.
“It’s here,” she whispered to herself, pinching herself for good measure.
Max was suddenly beside her, his sleeves already rolled up, revealing the corded muscle of his forearms. He carried a heavy coil of hemp rope and a crate of steel chisels. “If the entrance exists, the weight of the ridge has likely spent three thousand years trying to choke it shut.”
