London. March 15th

Three months.

Ninety-two days since Emile’s blood dried on my hands. Ninety-two days since I watched a four-thousand-year-old king shatter under an assassin’s club. Ninety-two days since Julian Ashworth killed a man to save my life, and ninety-two days since I stopped pretending I didn’t dream about the way he held me in that burning house. Even now as I write this, my skin crawls in chills of intensity and anxiety.

The nightmares haven’t stopped. They’ve just changed shape.

Now I don’t just see Emile dying. I see Sekhemkhet sitting up in his sarcophagus, his crushed skull turning toward me, his jaw grinding out words that should have been dust four millennia ago. “You will carry my voice in your throat.” And I do. I wake up with the taste of ancient sand on my tongue, and for one terrible moment, I don’t know whose memories are whose.

Julian says it gets easier. Julian is a liar. But he’s a liar who makes me tea at 4 AM without being asked, so I let him keep saying it.

The Order gave us three months of “administrative leave.” A euphemism for “We don’t know what to do with two archaeologists who just blew a hole in four thousand years of accepted history, so please sit quietly in your flat until we decide whether to promote you or bury you.”

I haven’t been sitting quietly.

The notebook—Emile’s notebook, the one I snatched from the fire, still smelling of smoke and blood—sits on my desk every night. I’ve transcribed everything. Sekhemkhet’s confession. The names of Djoser’s co-conspirators. The location of the foundation deposit where Imhotep’s scribe hid the truth. I’ve cross-referenced every name against every king list, every temple inscription, every papyrus fragment in every museum from Cairo to Berlin.

And I’ve found something.

Djoser didn’t just murder Sekhemkhet. He erased him. Systematically. Methodically. The way you’d erase a name from a ledger if you never wanted anyone to know he had ever existed. But erasure leaves traces. Gaps. Inconsistencies. Little pocks of silence in the historical record where a man should be.

I’ve found seventeen of them. Seventeen places where Sekhemkhet’s name was carved into stone and then chiseled out. Seventeen witnesses to a murder that happened forty-seven centuries ago.

Seventeen reasons the Lotus Ascendancy wants me dead.

Julian sleeps on my couch now. Not because he has nowhere else to go—he has a flat in Bloomsbury, apparently very nice, apparently heirlooms and leather chairs and a library that would make a cardinal weep—but because he refuses to let me be alone. He says it’s “security protocol.” I say it’s because he can’t sleep either, and my couch is closer than his bed, and neither of us wants to say the real reason out loud.

The real reason is simple. And terrifying.

We’re the only two people in the world who know the truth about Djoser’s pyramid. The Order knows fragments—enough to be dangerous, not enough to act. The Lotus Ascendancy knows we have something, but not what. And Emile is dead, so he can’t tell anyone anything.

That makes us alone. And alone is a dangerous place to be when powerful people want you silent.

I went back to the British Library last week. Not for research—for a meeting. The old woman with cataracts, the one who sat at the head of the Order’s table, summoned me to a reading room that doesn’t exist on any floor plan. She sat behind a desk piled high with papyrus fragments, her blind eyes somehow finding my face.

“You’re going to publish,” she said. Not a question.

“Yes.”

“The Order will try to stop you.”

“I know.”

“The Lotus Ascendancy will try to kill you.”

“I know that too.”

She was quiet for a long moment. Then she reached into her desk and pulled out a small wooden box—ebony, inlaid with ivory, older than anything I’d ever seen outside a museum. She pushed it across the desk toward me.

“Emile wanted you to have this. He left it with me, in case something happened to him. He said you would know when to open it.”

I took the box. It was heavier than it looked.

“When did he leave it with you?”

“The night before you left for Saqqara.”

The night before. He knew. Somehow, impossibly, Emile Bouchard knew he wasn’t coming back from that dig. And he left me a box instead of a warning. Instead of a goodbye.

I haven’t opened it yet.

It sits on my desk, next to the notebook, next to Emile’s magnifying loupe—the one Julian rescued from the fire, the one he pressed into my palm with soot on his fingers and tears in his eyes. Every night, I put my hand on the box. Every night, I feel the weight of whatever Emile thought I would need to know.

And every night, I take my hand away.

Because once I open it, once I know whatever is inside, I can’t go back to not knowing. And I’m so tired of knowing things that hurt.

***

Julian caught me staring at the box tonight. 2 AM. He’d woken up—he always wakes up at 2 AM, sometimes screaming, sometimes silent—and found me sitting at my desk with my hand on the ebony lid.

“You haven’t opened it,” he said.

“No.”

“Are you going to?”

“I don’t know.”

He pulled up a chair. Sat down across from me. Close enough that our knees almost touched. His hair was a mess, sleep-tousled and gray at the temples. His eyes were clear, though—too clear for 2 AM, too clear for a man who had nightmares of his own.

“Emile loved you,” Julian said quietly. “Not like a daughter. Not exactly. Like… a colleague he trusted more than anyone. Like a friend he would have died for. He left you that box because he believed you were the only person who could handle what’s inside.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

Julian reached out. His fingers brushed mine, feather-light, asking permission. I didn’t pull away. So he took my hand. Held it. Grounded it.

“Whatever’s in there,” he said, “you’re not facing it alone. I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. And I’m very good at killing people who try to hurt you, in case you’ve forgotten.”

I almost laughed. Almost.

“Why are you doing this, Julian? The Order pays you to protect artifacts, not archaeologists. You could walk away. Go back to your leather chairs and your heirlooms. Forget you ever met a woman who talks to mummies and wakes up screaming.”

His thumb traced a slow circle on the back of my hand.

“Because you’re the first person in twenty years who made me feel like the dead deserve more than just… preservation. You made me feel like they deserve justice. And I’ve spent my whole life guarding secrets. You’re the first person who made me want to tell them.”

I looked at him. Really looked. At the scar through his eyebrow—a fencing accident at Oxford, he’d said once, though I’d never believed that story. At the shadows under his eyes—gifts from whatever he’d done before the Order, whatever he’d seen, whatever he’d lost. At the man who had killed for me, who had held me in a burning building, who slept on my couch and made me tea at 4 AM and never once asked for anything in return.

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay?”

“Okay, I’ll open it. Tomorrow. Not tonight. Tonight I need to… I need to sleep. Real sleep. Without the nightmares.”

Julian nodded. He stood, still holding my hand, and pulled me gently to my feet.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll read to you. That always helps.”

It does. He reads in Latin—his voice low and steady, the words washing over me like water. I don’t understand half of what he says, but I don’t need to. I just need the sound. The proof that someone is awake, someone is watching, someone will be there when the screaming starts.

He led me to the couch. Covered me with the blanket Emile had given me three Christmases ago—fleece, ugly, covered in hieroglyphs that spelled out “I Heart Archaeology.” Sat down in the armchair beside me. Opened his book—something in Virgil, something about arms and the man—and began to read.

I watched him for a while. The way his mouth shaped the Latin. The way his fingers traced the lines of text. The way his eyes—those ridiculous, piercing blue eyes—flickered up to check on me every few seconds.

I closed my eyes.

For the first time in three months, I didn’t dream of Emile.

I dreamed of Julian.

And when I woke up at dawn—safe, warm, alive—he was still reading.

***

Tomorrow, I open the box.

Tomorrow, I find out what Emile thought was important enough to hide from the Order, from the Lotus Ascendancy, from everyone who would kill to keep the truth buried.

Tomorrow, everything changes.

But tonight, I’m going to sit here on this ugly fleece blanket, listening to Julian Ashworth read Latin in a voice that makes my chest ache, and pretend that we’re just two archaeologists who fell in love with the dead and found each other in the wreckage.

Pretend that Emile is still alive, still in Cairo, still sending me passive-aggressive emails about my excavation techniques.

Pretend that the world isn’t full of assassins and conspiracies and women like me who carry the voices of murdered kings in their throats.

Pretend that I’m not terrified of what’s in that box.

Pretend that I’m not terrified of what Julian makes me feel.

Pretend that I’m not falling in love with a man who has killed for me and will kill again.

Pretend that I’m not already lost.

— M.K.

P.S. — I opened the box. Not tomorrow. Tonight. I couldn’t wait.

Inside: a photograph. Old. Sepia. A woman in Victorian dress, standing in front of the Step Pyramid. She looks like me. Same eyes. Same jaw. Same stubborn set to her mouth. On the back, in Emile’s handwriting:

“Your great-grandmother, Clara Kessler. 1897. She knew. She tried to publish. The Order buried her work. Don’t let them bury yours.”

And beneath that:

“The Lotus Ascendancy is not your only enemy. The Order is not your only ally. There is a third way. Find the Kessler Codex. It contains everything. Tell Julian. He already knows.”

I showed Julian.

He went pale. He went very, very still. And then he said: “I was wondering when you’d find out about the Codex. Emile told me to tell you when you were ready. I guess you’re ready.”

I punched him in the arm. Not hard. Hard enough.

“You knew? About my great-grandmother? About the Codex? About any of this?”

“Not all of it. Not the photograph. But I knew Clara Kessler wasn’t just an archaeologist. She was a member of the Order. And she died trying to protect something. Something the Order has been hiding for over a century.”

“What?”

He looked at me with those ridiculous blue eyes. And he said: “The truth about what happened to the Library of Alexandria. It wasn’t burned. It was buried. And the Kessler Codex is the map.”

So now I have a photograph, a conspiracy, and a man who apparently keeps world-altering secrets from me on a regular basis.

I’m going to kill him.

After I kiss him.

Probably in the wrong order.

— M.K.

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