At dawn the next day, after a few hours of restless, excited sleep, they had breakfast with Sheikh Ansar, who eagerly arranged a proper expedition for them. By the time the sun fully rose, they were leaving with a party of hired laborers, with sufficient supplies for a multi-day dig.

As they neared Peterson’s dig site, Vanessa urged the party to remain quiet and go the long way around, trying to avoid notice. The longer they could search before Peterson knew they were there, the better.

“We’ll start here,” she said as they reached the area on the map and the excavation crew began unpacking the supplies. “And grid the rest out. We want to clear each area as fast as possible, so we’ll just do a quick comb of each square—half an hour, an hour at most—before moving on.”

“You’re not worried about missing something?” Ramin asked.

“If we don’t find anything after we’ve checked the whole grid, we’ll go through and look again,” Vanessa said, rolling up her sleeves. “But an initial sweep will help us eliminate the most unlikely sites and narrow down our options. Let’s get to work.”

With a smile, she grabbed a shovel and jumped in beside the laborers, laying out the plans for each area they would search before they started shifting sand. Vanessa kept her eyes peeled for any sign of a potential site somewhere under the sand. They’d know they were in the right place long before they found any structures.

The day was long and hot. Vanessa and Ramin worked alongside the diggers, taking frequent breaks during the worst heat of the day. But even when they weren’t actively working, the possibility of finding the tomb was all either of them could talk about.

“This is going to change everything we know about this culture,” Vanessa gushed late that afternoon as they rested on their shovels, exhausted and dirty and still practically humming with excitement. “Between the translation of the map and the wealth of artifacts in the tomb, who knows what we might learn about them and their involvement in the ancient world? Roman records are notoriously thin and generalized about the sub-Saharan region. Who knows what was really happening in this part of the world?”

“Hopefully us, soon enough,” Ramin answered with a laugh. “What do you expect the tomb will be like? Are we going to be excavating a pyramid?”

“Possibly!” Vanessa said with an excited grin. “Kushite pyramids were a bit different from the Egyptian variety, however. The Nubians built more than two hundred pyramids that we know of, vastly more than the Egyptians. Their pyramids tended to be smaller, with steeper walls. But there’s a possibility the tomb may be beneath a tumulus, a burial mound, with the tomb itself dug into the bedrock.”

“Forgive me if I really hope it’s a pyramid,” Ramin said.

“That would be rather more spectacular, wouldn’t it?” Vanessa confessed.

They were interrupted as one of the laborers shouted for their attention. They hurried towards the man, Ramin conversing with him in Arabic as Vanessa knelt to see what had been dug up, carefully brushing the sand away.

“Oh, it’s pottery shards!” Vanessa exclaimed.

“Is that good?” Ramin asked, kneeling beside her to look.

“It’s fantastic!” Vanessa said, elated. “The Kush broke pottery on graves as part of the burial ritual! And look at the quality of these pieces! This was an incredibly fine vase, probably made for the occasion.”

“Fine enough for royalty?” Ramin asked, a smile beginning to spread across his face.

Vanessa nodded in agreement and Ramin waved the other laborers over, telling them to concentrate on that area. They hadn’t been digging more than an hour before they discovered the first opening, shifting a stone seal away from a dark shaft.

“Is it an entrance?” Ramin asked, peering down into the darkness.

“No, but we’re close!” Vanessa said excitedly. “It’s probably a vent, for letting in air and light while the workers were building the tomb below. God, I can’t believe the seal held so long! It looks like the sand has barely reached the tomb at all!”

“Should we go down?” Ramin asked, ready to start climbing at once.

“Oh, no,” Vanessa said with a small laugh. “It’s probably sealed off at the other end. It’s only a vent after all.”

“Oh good, that will make this much easier.”

Vanessa looked up in surprise as the familiar voice interrupted their conversation, to see a gun pointed at her face. Around her the team of diggers were backing away, hands raised, from Terrance Peterson’s line of mercenaries, their weapons raised. It was Taggert who had his gun trained on Vanessa and Ramin. Peterson himself stood behind the man, looking smug and self-satisfied. Behind him, Renée Dubois looked on, bored, while Professor Van Rees shuffled uncomfortably.

“You,” Vanessa hissed in undisguised animosity. “Get off my dig site, you Luddite.”

“I think you mean my dig site,” Peterson said mildly. “I’m the one with the official sanction of the university and the Sudanese government.”

“This isn’t Sudan,” Ramin said, bristling. “This is the sovereign territory of Ksatta-Galan and I—”

“Oh, shut up,” Peterson said, rolling his eyes. He gestured to Taggert, who struck suddenly, cracking the butt of his gun against Ramin’s head. The Sheikh slumped, dazed or unconscious, and Vanessa caught him with a yelp of fear and concern, holding him to her chest. His head was bleeding and his eyes were unfocused and unresponsive as Vanessa shouted his name.

“I do have to thank you for finding the correct location, Miss Hawkins,” Peterson said. “We’d barely started on that other site when Taggert spotted your little expedition here trying to sneak around us. I thought it would be prudent to keep an eye on you and, wouldn’t you know it? I was right.

“Once again, I couldn’t have done it without you, Vanessa. I’ll make sure there’s a footnote about you, or a plaque or something once they find your bodies.”

“What?” Vanessa and Professor Van Rees said at once.

“Peterson, you can’t just murder them!” Abraham said, horrified.

“Of course not!” Peterson said with a snort. “I’m just going to put them in that hole and let the desert do the hard work. A couple of idiots, a student and an amateur, fooling around on a dig site, stumble into a vent hole and are tragically lost. If anything, it’ll be great for publicity.”

“I won’t let you,” Van Rees insisted, grabbing Peterson by the arm.

“Well, that’s a shame, professor.” Peterson sighed. “You could have been quite useful. Taggert?”

Taggert whacked his gun over the professor’s head, and Vanessa shrieked as she saw him topple to the ground. Two more of Peterson’s goons dragged Abraham over to Vanessa’s side and, as she watched, stricken, dropped him into the vent. Vanessa watched him vanish into the darkness, as she still clung to Ramin.

Ramin shifted, trying to gather himself, and Taggert reached down to drag him out of Vanessa’s arms, shoving his gun in her face when she tried to hold on to him. Vanessa was helpless to do anything as the goon pushed Ramin into the hole after Abraham.

“You next, Miss Hawkins,” Peterson said lightly as Taggert dragged her to her feet and nudged her backward with the gun until her heels were against the edge of the opening. She watched sand sliding in past her heels and felt cold terror heavy as a stone in her gut. There was no way out.

“All of you,” Taggert yelled to the laborers, his gun trained on Vanessa. “If you want to survive to work another day, you work for us now. Get back to it.”

With that threat, the laborers scrambled to continue digging.

“You really should have accepted my offer back at Columbia,” Peterson said, shaking his head. “You could have saved yourself a lot of trouble. Then again, I still would have needed to eliminate you before you published your work on the Meroitic language. That would have been far too damaging to my work, you know. I suppose this was inevitable, really.”

“You’re a bigger idiot than I thought if you think anyone is going to believe you,” Vanessa said, summoning all her courage for a last spiteful moment, spitting at his feet. “You’re going to rot in prison for this.”

“That remains to be seen,” Peterson said with a shrug. “But by that time you will most certainly be dead. Goodbye, Miss Hawkins.”

Before Vanessa could say anything else, Taggert shoved her backward. With a shriek of terror, she fell down into the darkness of the tomb.