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Ellie looked up—and realized that the desert was moving.
The sands beyond the wadi shifted like the waters of an impossible golden sea, rising and falling in the fiery light of the moment before dawn. With a sibilant hiss, a wave lifted from the plateau and rolled toward them.
It grew as it approached—andgrew. The shadow of it fell across Ellie’s boots, then rose to cover her entirely as it raced at the wadi, roiling and building like an impossible tsunami.
Adam’s arm tightened around Ellie’s waist. He pulled her back against him, and she knew that he was also wondering if this was the last moment they would have together before the desert itself ruthlessly devoured them.
The wave fell.
A roaring cascade of sand spilled into the wadi, spraying up against Ellie and the others with a stinging heat. Adam whirled, shielding her with his body as the air filled with a maelstrom of dust and grit.
She braced herself for the impact—for the hot, suffocating crush.
The wind softened. Clouds of sand drifted down around her boots.
The air was filled with a shifting, deafening hiss. Ellie twisted in Adam’s grip, far enough to look back.
The sun had crested the horizon, blazing from red to gold. It spilled a clear, wild light out over the scene that lay before her.
The wadi was gone. Where the deep cut of the canyon had once lain was only a river of dawn-gilded sand. Nothing remained of the crown of high cliffs that had cradled Neferneferuaten’s tomb, save for scatter of jagged rocks that poked up here and there from the settling, drifting mass of sand.
Ellie took a careful step forward to where the ridge ended. Instead of a steep fall into the ravine, the ground dropped only a single step onto a softly whispering dune.
Neil gaped at the transformation, adjusting his spectacles as if that would make it more believable. Constance had a hand clapped to her mouth, her eyes wide with shock and wonder.
Sayyid swayed.
“I believe I might be sick,” he announced flatly as his knees gave out.
Adam darted forward to catch him, softening Sayyid’s collapse into an abrupt sit.
Sayyid promptly leaned forward and put his head between his knees. He held out a shaking hand, which was still holding the was-scepter. “Could someone please take this from me?” he asked a little desperately.
Zeinab stepped forward and gently removed the staff from her husband’s grasp.
Gravel crunched behind them. Ellie glanced back to see Mustafa climb up from his place by the camels.
The early sunlight highlighted the perfect angles of his cheekbones. His hawk-like eyes took in the impossible change to the landscape, then dropped to the arcanum Zeinab held in her hands.
“We must return the camels,” he announced imperturbably. “It is time to depart.”
He left without any further to-do. The breeze tugged at his elegant layers of robes as he returned to the place where Yusuf waited with the saddled beasts, the bells of their harnesses jingling softly.
Zeinab gazed solemnly down at the relic. With a neat twist of her wrist, she plucked the bronze head from the ancient tamarisk.
She tugged the tail off as well, slipping both ends of the was-scepter into the voluminous pockets of her abaya. Her eyes lingered on the unadorned stick of ancient wood—and then rose to the newborn desert that sprawled before her.
Zeinab took three neat steps out onto the gilded river where the wadi had once been and drove the tamarisk rod into the sand.
Jemmahor carefully joined her. Without speaking, she unwrapped a black scarf from around her waist and tied it to the top of the staff.
She stepped back.
A breeze drifted over the ridge, brushing across the newly minted dune and twisting up little eddies of sand. It picked up the fine, soft fabric, setting it dancing as it pulled toward the west.
Ellie’s chest tightened with grief as she realized what she was looking at—the only surviving monument to the final resting place of a woman who through love, loss, and principle had helped reshape the world.
A place now deeply, safely concealed beneath an impossible river of sand.
