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Sayyid stared after her, his face drawn with worry. He glanced back at the rest of them, his eyes drifting from Constance and Adam to Ellie.
They stopped at Neil, and for a moment his gaze hardened, flashing with something that Ellie was startled to realize she recognized.
It looked like hurt.
He stalked after his wife without another word.
Neil hadn’t noticed, lost in his own uneasy thoughts. “Is it possible to be both excited and abjectly terrified at the same time?”
“We might very well be on the verge of discovering the final resting place of one of the most important women in Egyptian history,” Ellie replied. “And we are doing it under the noses of your villainous ex-employer, a batch of mercenaries, and an unflinchingly ruthless killer who can detect lies.”
“So pretty much just your average day,” Adam concluded.
“What are you all waiting for? Christmas?” Constance hissed as she hurried past them.
Neil cast a forlorn look up at the stars. “I miss books,” he moaned and trudged after her.
Jemmahor hopped over the rocks like a long-legged gazelle. Umm Waseem swung her ubiquitous satchel over her shoulder and trundled after her.
Adam lingered at Ellie’s side. The two of them stood alone together under a cobalt sky sparkling with a thousand stars. The wind that danced over her skin smelled of dust and time.
“I won’t try to talk you out of coming along,” Adam commented quietly. “I’m aware that would go over about as well as a sack of bricks. Even though there’s a good chance this whole business could end with all of us being shot.” Heat mingled with worry in his gaze. “But I’d appreciate it if you’d do whatever you could to stay alive for the rest of the night.”
“I will if you will,” Ellie replied softly.
The shadow of a smile tugged at his lip. It fell away as he glanced out across the canyon. “You really think the Staff of Moses is over there?”
“I think if there is even a chance,” she replied deliberately, “then it is worth any cost to protect it.”
Adam’s calloused thumb smoothed gently over the curve of her cheek. “Suppose we’d better be getting on, then.”
Ellie gazed up at him, memorizing the familiar lines of his face in the slender moonlight. “I supposed we had.”
They set out across the ridge.
??
Thirty-Two
Neil followed theblack-cloaked form of Sayyid’s wife down the mountain, hoping he wasn’t about to plummet to his doom. The path Zeinab picked along the steep face of stone would barely have accommodated a cat. It followed the line of an ancient washout rife with loose stones and slender ledges that fell straight down to the hard floor of the wadi.
The light from Julian’s lanterns washed over the walls perhaps two hundred yards ahead, which still felt far too close. Voices echoed from the excavation site, laughing heartily or calling out orders before another spill of spoil was tipped over the ledge to rattle down into the gorge.
Neil’s calves ached. His boots found every loose stone with an uncanny accuracy. He lost track of the number of times someone glared back at him in a silent imprecation to keep quiet.
Hewaskeeping quiet. The cliff was making all the noise.
When they finally reached the ground, Neil breathed out a sigh of relief—one that cut short when he looked up at the wall of sheer, ragged stone that they now needed to climb on the opposite side.
Sayyid’s wife led them up another precarious route of steep runnels and narrow perches that wound them back in the direction of Julian’s excavation. The sounds of the dig grew louder as they neared it. Neil flinched at the bark of a rough cough and the crack of the pickaxes.
They rounded another turn, and Neil faced a moonlight-washed depression that looked as though it had been scooped out of the top of the ridge by the hand of a giant. The ledge was framed on three sides by steep, high walls of stone. On the fourth, the land fell away precipitously to the canyon floor.
The rest of the group tucked themselves into hiding places behind the boulders as they surveyed the terrain. Only Neil lingered—until Adam’s hand clamped onto his shoulder and yanked him behind the cover of a ragged crust of limestone.
“Where does your hundred and ninety feet take us, exactly?” Zeinab demanded of Adam in a low murmur.
Adam crept forward to join her, keeping to the shadows with the grace of a jaguar. “Right there.” He pointed a little beyond the center of the hollow curve of the rock, near to where Julian’s lights spilled up from beyond a slight rise in the landscape.
