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Liora had only been asleep for a few hours when the sounds of other members of the dig team preparing for breakfast woke her. She resisted the feeling of consciousness for as long as she could, feeling the heaviness and exhaustion of her body now even more than she did before she went to sleep. Finally, she couldn’t resist it any longer and she groaned, dragging herself out of the tent and immediately over to the outdoor shower set up behind the main tent.
This was not her favorite part of her job. She loved the feeling of stepping into a room no other human had touched for thousands of years and brushing away the dust, coaxing out the secrets held just beneath the surface. What she didn't love was the days spent sleeping in tents, the oppressive, burning heat, and not seeing a bathtub for the entire length of the dig.
The water broke through the haze of sleepiness and washed away the fine layer of dirt that always seemed to cover her when she was working. When she felt like a person again, Liora dressed and joined Ethan at the long table in the center of camp to choke down breakfast and swallow two cups of black coffee.
Twenty minutes later they were climbing down into the pyramid and the combination of carb-laden flat bread and caffeine had kicked in so that she moved confidently along the tight corridors to the section they had just had the opportunity to enter the day before. Impatient as usual, she didn't bother to wait for the crew behind her to set up the floodlight that would illuminate the work area ahead of her and instead held a lantern up to splash light on the path at her feet and penetrate the intense, almost tangible darkness that filled the chamber.
The incredible darkness was one of the most terrifying elements of her explorations. This was a darkness unlike any other, so deep it was almost as if the ancient people who closed the chamber thousands of years before had trapped the night within it.
Liora took several strides into the chamber until she felt like she was near the place she had been the night before when they had to stop their research. She held the lantern up so it glowed across the wall and made the hieroglyphics visible in the aged stone. The stone had a finely grained texture beneath her fingertips as she traced the shape of the symbols etched into the wall, translating the message in her mind as she went.
The space around her suddenly lit up as the crew managed to get the floodlight in place and direct it into the chamber. Ethan came up beside her and she saw him running his eyes along the hieroglyphics.
"They tell about when the pyramid was built. This section," she said, running her hand along a series of hieroglyphs, "says that this pyramid was meant as a monument to cooperation and civility among strangers."
"What does that mean?" Ethan asked, glaring at the symbols as if convinced that they didn't actually say what Liora said they did.
"You know what I think it means," she said softly, "Look."
She pointed out one of the markings that did not fit with the other hieroglyphs. It was positioned slightly to the side and beneath the rest of the symbols like a signature or footnote to the message. Liora touched it carefully, feeling an inexplicable connection to the marking.
"I don't see any other entrances," Ethan said, gazing around the chamber, "This must be the end of that corridor."
"Maybe," Liora said.
She continued along the wall, following the hieroglyphics as she walked. When she reached the corner, she found that the symbols seemed to disappear into the seam of the two walls, breaking off in the middle of a phrase and picking up on the other wall in the middle of another thought. She took a few steps back and followed the symbols again, taking note of the symbols that didn't fit in with the others and translating as she went to try to understand the odd separation of the two phrases. Her fingers touched the final symbol at the seam and she felt the wall give slightly.
Liora withdrew her hand sharply. During her career, she had learned that stones within a pyramid suddenly moving often had devastating results and she braced herself. When several seconds passed without anything happening, she cautiously raised her hand and applied pressure to the symbol again. A section of the wall shifted and she was able to push it completely out of the wall. She glanced back at the rest of the crew, but none seemed to notice her and she stepped forward through the false wall and into the space beyond.
The false wall slid closed behind her and Liora raised her lantern to illuminate the newly discovered chamber. It was a small space, no larger than a walk-in closet. It was the smallest chamber Liora had ever seen within a pyramid and panic started to rise in her chest as she realized that the purpose of such a chamber was probably to trap those trying to compromise the pyramid. She lifted her hand to the wall beside her and felt the deep grooves of hieroglyphs beneath her fingers.
Liora illuminated the wall with her lantern and found the surface covered with scattered symbols. Some seemed to stand independently of the others, while others were clustered together like sentences.
These carvings looked newer and more precise than the others she had studied, almost as though they had been carved only recently. She didn't recognize them as the language she had been translating in the larger chamber and the longer she looked, the more she noticed the six unusual symbols she had shown Ethan. A new one stood out to her and she felt compelled to touch it, drawn to it with an even stronger appeal than the interlocking circles that had entranced her since she first discovered them.
As soon as her fingertips rested on the symbol she saw a flash of blinding light and felt her body lifted from the floor. An intense pull within her made her feel as though she were being sucked toward the wall in front of her and she prepared for impact, but it never came. Nearly as quickly as the sensation came, it ended and she hit the ground. She had dropped her lantern, but the darkness around her was not as deep as it had been only moments before. Ahead of her was a narrow corridor and beyond it, the bright flare of sunlight.