“Above the feathers are phonetic signs that say the same thing.”

His hand is warm. He digs a needle beneath the pad of my thumb, rooting for the splinter. There is a bead of blood on my thumb. Wyatt lifts the wound to his mouth and sucks it away. He doesn’t take his eyes off mine.

I stare down at the bandage from this morning’s knife injury, as if it has started bleeding fresh.

Win interrupts my reverie. “You are wasted as a death doula,” she says. “You could be teaching college classes!”

I shake my head, smiling. “I’ll be a lot more useful to you this way than I would be as a professor.”

“Do more!” She gestures toward another part of the painting, where a table behind Osiris has the names of the gods of the tribunal, and the hieroglyphs are in retrograde—they face to the right, but are read from left to right, in reverse, like some other religious spells from the Coffin Texts and the Book of Two Ways. “This part is the negative confession,” I tell Win. “The deceased denies forty-two ways he might have screwed up in life.” I point out the red arms with the palms facing down, the sign for negation, and the sparrow—which the Egyptians called ‘the bad bird,’ and which was a determinative for wrongdoing. I did no wrong. I did not tell lies. I didn’t fornicate with the fornicator.

“And here I thought the Egyptians were so sexually progressive.”

“Well, they were okay with premarital sex,” I say. “There’s no word for virgin in Ancient Egyptian.”

“How egalitarian.”

“Yeah, but there were conditions. You couldn’t have sex with someone married. Infidelity was grounds for divorce.”

“So that was the deal breaker,” Win muses. She flattens her hand on the edge of the artwork, tracing the border. “Would it be one for you?”

For a moment, I wonder how she has seen past the fa?ade I’ve presented, to know so much about my private life. I haven’t even told her Brian’s name.

“I think there are lots of ways to be unfaithful that don’t involve fornicating with the fornicator,” Win murmurs, before I can even respond.

“That’s why there are forty-one other negative confessions,” I reply.

Win sets the frame down beside her on the couch. “So that was it? You said your confessions and you got through to the next round?”

“No. You said four times: I am pure, I am pure, I am pure, I am pure. And then you had to be given a lot of detailed knowledge, like how to answer the floor about the names of your feet before it would let you walk across it, and the titles of the doors in another room. There were instructions about what to wear during the judgment, too, and what to offer and where and to whom. But if you did all that, and answered all the questions right, and had a heart lighter than the feather of truth, and you were nice to the really snarky Divine Ferryman who transported all the souls, you could wind up in the Field of Offerings, where you were given back everything you’d left behind—your loved ones, your pets, your backyard. Your souvenirs. The view from your favorite window. Everything that brought you joy during your life, but for eternity.”

“That sounds…nice,” Win says. She traces Osiris’s crown. “What about the people whose heart was heavy?”

“They got eaten by a monster that was part crocodile, part hippo, and part lion.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“No, not for another couple thousand years,” I say.

Win stands. I automatically catalog how steady she is on her feet, how frail her arm looks as she braces against the side of the couch. “So, Dawn Edelstein,” she says, “a lot of people go through an Egypt stage as kids, and build pyramids out of blocks and wrap their little brothers up in toilet paper as mummies. But something tells me you never grew out of that. Are you going to tell me why you know all this?”

“I used to be an Egyptologist, in another life.”

Win’s eyes narrow. I get the sense she is taking stock of me just as thoroughly as I am taking stock of her, and for a moment I wonder which of us is in charge. “Do you believe in other lives?” she asks.

I picture Wyatt walking away from me, the heat rippling through the air to make him seem like a mirage, a figment of my imagination.

“I want to,” I say.

IN MY DREAM, Brian is trying to open the door to a parallel universe. In a gleaming lab, he sets up his experiment. He is going to send a beam of subatomic particles down a tunnel, past a giant magnet, into a wall. If he does it correctly, some of those particles will become mirror images of themselves, and will go right through the wall, proving that there’s a shadow world cozied up beside the one we live in.

I see him flip the switch of the particle accelerator. I am close enough to notice his square-cut nails, the scar on his thumb from when he hit it with a hammer putting together Meret’s big-girl bed. Then the knocking starts, like the metallic heartbeat of an MRI machine. I feel an enormous pressure, a thunderstorm caught in my ribs, and suddenly I realize why I am close enough to witness all this: I am trapped in that beam of particles. Wait, I try to tell Brian. There’s been a mistake.

But he is too focused on his work to notice me. There is so much heaviness; my chest is caught in a vise. I remember Brian’s voice: We’re all made up of molecules, like those electrons. If you zoom in and zoom in and zoom in, everything we do is explained by quantum mechanics.

And then I am light, I am air, I am speed, I am nothing. I brace for the impact but there isn’t any. I find myself on the other side of a mirror, pounding hard, my knocks drowned out by the steady rap of the particle accelerator. All I can hear is the banging.

Whack. Whack. Whack. And then: “Dawn?”

My eyes fly open. I am lying on a twin mattress in a room I do not recognize. I squint at my watch: 4:30 A.M.

I scramble to the door and open it a crack; I’m wearing a T-shirt and underwear, since I have nothing else to sleep in. I find myself blinded by a beam of light, and for a moment, my dream comes rushing back to me.

The light switches off. It is pitch black, but I can make out the shape of Wyatt, the white of his teeth, a headlamp on his brow. “The electricity’s out,” he says. “Here.”

He pushes a spare headlamp into my hand. Immediately I am flooded with muscle memories of moving around in the dark every time the electricity failed during the dig season, which was often. I slip it onto my head, turn on the switch, and Wyatt frowns.

“You need pajamas,” he says, and he turns and walks away.

It’s cool this early in the morning, which is why we start work, as Dumphries used to say, at “the ass crack of dawn” (before looking at me and adding, “No relation.”). The Dig House feels like a voles’ burrow—dark and hushed, with scurrying in all its corners as everyone gets ready for the day. Without electricity, there’s also no water, which means no shower. I find a wet wipe in the bathroom and drag it over my face, under my arms.

By the time I get to the table, Joe is already seated. Wyatt and Alberto are deep in conversation, but when I walk in, they abruptly stop. I wonder what Wyatt has said to them about me. I wonder why Alberto lifts his cup of juice as if it is the most interesting thing in the world and refuses to look at me. “Good morning,” I say evenly, and I sit down as Mohammed Mahmoud brings food to the table that doesn’t require a stove: bread and jam, honey, cereal. No coffee, because there’s no hot water. The condiments get passed around, and I try to figure out people’s morning personalities based on how they interact. Joe is chatty and cheery; Alberto silent. Wyatt scrolls through his phone.

Suddenly, the phone rings. Wyatt answers the call, stepping away from the table. “Omar’s motorbike is broken,” he announces. “He’ll be late.”

“Who’s Omar?”

“The antiquities inspector,” Joe says.

“Per piacere, il sale?” Alberto mutters.

“He doesn’t do English till he’s caffeinated,” Joe explains. He passes me the salt, but I set it on the table somewhere between me and Alberto.

“You can’t pass salt,” I say. “It’s bad luck.”

Wyatt catches my eye and raises a brow.

I eat a piece of bread with honey, feeling too queasy to put anything else in my stomach. I have effectively begged or bullied Wyatt into letting me work at the site. But even if I manage to not make a fool of myself, so much has changed with technology that I might be completely in over my head.

“Dawn? Hello?”

When I hear his voice, I realize he’s been speaking to me. For a while. Everyone else is staring.

“We leave in five,” Wyatt says, all business. “Be ready.”