The excavation house at Saqqara was cold in ways that had nothing to do with the desert night. Dr. Miriam Kessler sat across from her mentor, Professor Emile Bouchard, a single kerosene lamp between them, the fragmented limestone relief spread like a wound on the folding table. "You're wrong about Djoser," Emile said, not for the first time. "You've been wrong for eighteen months, and the Order is growing impatient." Miriam didn't look up. She traced her finger along the carved hieroglyphs—the name of the king, the title of his vizier, the enumeration of his years. "The Order can be impatient. The dead are not." She had been saying versions of that sentence since she was twenty-two years old, a fresh-faced doctoral student who had stumbled into the Order's orbit by accident. Or perhaps not by accident. Perhaps the dead had guided her there, the way they guided everything else. Fifteen years ago, she had been a different woman.