Suddenly Wyatt stopped moving. He pivoted, his hands in his pockets. “I apologize for taking the liberty of kissing you,” he said, so formal. “I could blame it on the alcohol, or I could say that spending all this time in tombs makes me atypically horny, or I could just chalk it up to an egregious mistake. Take your pick.”
I didn’t disagree with him, but I didn’t particularly like being called an egregious mistake, either. Yet I’d wanted to get him to admit to that, didn’t I?
And if he had, why was I still standing here?
“But right now, Olive, I have a hangover the size of Russia with a side order of self-loathing, and I’d appreciate being left to my own devices. Run along home.”
For a moment I just stared as Wyatt turned and walked deeper into the crevice of thewadi.
Run along home.
Like I was a child, not a Ph.D. student. Like I was not equally as qualified to be hiking through this goddamned parched desert as he was.
“Fuck you,” I said, fuming. “Fuck you, you entitled, condescending asshole.” I ran until I had caught up to him, furious, hating that last night, for even a millisecond, I’d been fooled into thinking that he deserved compassion, that we were a team instead of rivals.
Wyatt turned, stumbling backward as my rage rose over him like an angry djinn spinning out of the sand.
I poked one finger at his chest, driving him deeper beneath a rock ledge. “I am just as smart as you are. I am just as capable as you. And I am—” My voice broke off, and I fell forward, brushing my fingertips against the granulated limestone beside his left shoulder. “Wyatt,” I breathed. “Look.”
In the little worn groove of thewadi,beneath a natural rock shelter that was shielding us from the punishment of the sun, there was a dipinto—faded ink on stone.
My heart thumped, out of beat. I thanked God for the class we’d taken on Middle Kingdom papyri—and all the Twelfth Dynasty hieratic we’d had to translate as part of the course. Unlike hieroglyphs, which could be read in either direction, hieratic was always read right to left. Wyatt spun around, his arms braced over me as I crouched, reciting the transliteration. He translated haltingly over my shoulder. “Regnal year 7, fourth month of Peret, day 14 under the majesty of the king of Upper and Lower Egypt Kha-kau-re, living forever and ever…”
I knew that the nomarchs of Deir el-Bersha had left commemorative inscriptions at quarries to the north of the necropolis at Hatnub. They’d been used by scholars to reconstruct family histories. It wasn’t unlikely that, thousands of years ago, nomarchs might have stopped here, beneath this rock ledge, to celebrate something.
I scanned the next part of the dipinto, but it was fainter than the words at the beginning.
“On this day, the count, hereditary noble, and nomarch of the Hare nome…” I murmured.
“…Djehutyhotep,” we said in unison, having seen those signs dozens of times in the tomb where we worked.
This was the ancient equivalent ofKilroy was here.Except it was the nomarch whose tomb we had been copying meticulously for the past three dig seasons.
Wyatt rubbed his jaw. “4pd.t,” he said, pointing. “He came to this mountain to see the rising of Sothis.”
Other words jumped out at me:Peret, day 15. Priests. Tomb.
“I’m missing a few bits,” Wyatt said, “but I’m pretty sure the gist of it is that he came here to party and stayed overnight in the necropolis, in someone’s tomb.”
“Djehuty…nakht?” I translated, touching my fingertip to the name of the tomb owner. “The ones from the Boston MFA?”
“No. A different Djehutynakht. Born of Teti.” He read carefully.“We spent the night in the forecourt of the tomb of Djehutynakht, born of Teti, which is…cubits from…”Wyatt rubbed his hand over the back of his neck. “There used to be a measurement here.”
We couldn’t read the numbers, the damage of four thousand years was too severe. I turned to Wyatt. “Still. A tomb in the necropolis…”
“…that hasn’t been found yet.”
The gravity of this—not just the discovery of a painted rock inscription but one that might point to a new, undiscovered tomb—knocked the breath out of me. Suddenly, my feet flew off the ground as Wyatt wrapped his arms around me and spun me around. “Oh my God,” he cried, as I laughed. Then, just as quickly, he dropped me. “We can’t tell anyone,” Wyatt said.
“What?”
“It’s illegal to be here without an inspector. We have to figure out a way to bring Dumphries here and pretend to discover this all over again.” His eyes pinned me. “Are you with me?”
It would have been far easier for Wyatt to throw me under the bus—tell Dumphries I’d been off exploring where I shouldn’t be, and take all the credit. Instead, he was offering me a partnership.
“I thought you hated me,” I said carefully.
Wyatt ducked his head. “Iwantedto. Itriedto,” he admitted, his words slick with frustration. “You waltz in here from U Chicago, and of all the things you could be studying, it’smything.”
