Vanessa crammed her letter into an envelope and took off, racing across campus to the mailboxes in Lerner Hall, her jacket still only halfway on and her expression wild. She still couldn’t quite believe it was real, but god damn if she wasn’t going to question it until she’d seen the place with her own eyes. And Abraham would want to see the map. She’d need to go back and get that.

The awful plan came to her just as she was about to drop the letter into the outgoing mailbox.

Meroitic royalty were buried with all their finest possessions, their mummies covered in jewelry. If she discovered the tomb on a university-approved expedition, all the relics would be, rightfully, claimed by the government. But if she went herself, unofficially, then a few pieces might go missing without notice.

It wouldn’t take much from a tomb of that age to eliminate her student loan debt and give her a comfortable cushion until she could find work. The thought made her stomach churn, to be perfectly honest. It wouldn’t just be stealing from the dead. It would be stealing the cultural heritage of the Kush and the Nubian people. And, it would be actively hampering the continued study of that history by removing what might be crucial pieces that could reveal unknown aspects of Kushite life and burial practice.

She shook her head, slowly withdrawing the letter from the mailbox. She’d studied this culture for almost a decade. She could tell which pieces were important. And even if she sold a few pieces into private collections, was that such an enormous price to pay for an entire tomb’s worth of royal artifacts?

She crammed the letter into her pocket and pulled her jacket on the rest of the way, guilt gnawing at her. To keep this from Abraham, of all people, was the worst part. He’d been looking for this tomb his entire life, meeting disappointment after disappointment. Most people in the field thought Amanirenas was one of the many unidentified rulers buried at Jebel Barkal, and that she and Abraham were fools for even looking for a separate tomb. He’d endured mocking dismissal of his work for decades.

But this would fix all of that, she told herself as she hurried back towards the library. Sure, he wouldn’t be there for the moment it was uncovered, but he’d still get credit for all the work that had gone into the discovery, not to mention validation that he’d been right all along. He would understand.

She rushed back towards her table in the library, already mentally cataloging which books she should bring, only to pull up short in surprise as she saw someone standing near her table. The tall, thin young man was instantly recognizable.

“Peterson,” she said, suspicious.

Terrance Peterson turned to face her, casually sliding his phone into the pocket of his navy blue pea coat.

“Ah, Miss Hawkins,” he said brightly. “I was just looking for you. Professor Hayek and I were about to go to a late dinner with Dean Hardwell, and I thought, since your mentor is indisposed, you might like to come along.”

“I appreciate the gesture,” Vanessa said stiffly. “But no, thank you.”

Peterson smiled thinly. He hadn’t expected her to agree. He was just coming to brag, yet again, about his close personal relationship with the dean and his mentor, and rub in her face the continued absence of her own.

He already had a position at Columbia all but guaranteed. He was old money and insufferably smug about it. He was also a biblical archaeologist, which made him doubly unbearable in Vanessa’s book. In her opinion, biblical archeology had no place in a real academic setting. It was loaded with bias from square one.

When you went into any research looking for a specific conclusion, then that conclusion was all you would see. Biblical archeologists would ignore valid avenues of research to chase fancies and twist whatever evidence they needed to in order to make it conform to their narrative. Perhaps she was unfairly generalizing the entire field. And she certainly didn’t have anything against religious people in general.

But Terrance Peterson absolutely fit the worst possible stereotype. A self-absorbed, holier-than-thou pedant smugly passing judgment on everyone struggling for a scrap of what had been handed to him at birth, unflinchingly confident that his world view was correct, both objectively and morally. There was no person on earth that Vanessa wanted to punch quite as much as him.

“Still trying to rediscover a tomb that’s already been found?” Peterson asked, looking down at her work.

“Still trying to prove there are men in the sky who can turn water into wine?” she countered, elbowing past him to begin gathering up her notes. “And no, actually. Translating Meroitic just isn’t possible without more bilingual sources. I’ve moved on to something else.”

“You, giving up on Amanirenas?” Terrance laughed, leaning casually on the table to watch her. “I doubt it.”

“I thought having faith in the absence of empirical evidence was your specialty, Terry.”

Peterson scowled. He hated that name.

“Well, if you truly intend to finally give up the wild goose chase,” he said. “I have a suggestion for what you might try next. Very in line with your current areas of study.”

“Oh really?” Vanessa rolled her eyes, carefully picking up the glass-framed map and settling it into a cushioned wooden case. “And what’s that?”

“I’m planning an expedition to locate Cush.”

Vanessa closed the locks of the case with a snap and looked up at him, waiting to be impressed.

“Cush, son of Ham, son of Noah of the infamous arc,” Peterson explained. “Founder of the Kingdom of Kush.”

“That’s a bit of a stretch,” Vanessa said with a snort, picking up her case and her valise full of notes. “And patently uninteresting to me. Why would you want me along anyway? It’s hardly a secret that you can’t stand me. I’m not an idiot.”

“And neither am I.” Peterson planted a hand on the table near her, trying to keep her there. “You’re the foremost expert on Meroitic in the States, with a working knowledge of the hieratic and demotic scripts that preceded it. I would be a fool not to take advantage of your expertise in this.”

“Then I will take special delight in saying no,” Vanessa said with a smile, pushing past him and walking away. “I’m not interested.”

“Even if it would get you back into the Nubian desert?”

She stopped abruptly, her back to him.

“Right back to the spot you were searching for Amanirenas before,” Peterson continued, fixing her with a smug glare, convinced he’d already won. “You were forced to abandon the expedition early due to the storms, yes? Your mentor nearly bankrupted himself and the university just getting there, only to come out empty-handed. Wouldn’t you just give anything to try again, to prove you were right all along?”

Vanessa turned slowly to look at him, her expression carefully polite.

“I would rather walk across the Sahara alone,” she said in a calm, measured tone. “I would sell everything I own, camp out under a tarp, and excavate with nothing but my hands and a trowel before I would accept a single penny from you. In the very short, Mr. Peterson, I would not work with you if you had discovered the tomb of Sheba herself. Good night, Terry.”

She turned sharply on her heel before he could reply and hurried out, anger a bristling knot in her chest.