By the time I got a glimpse of Wyatt’s white shirt in the distance, I was sweating and red-faced, cursing the fact that I hadn’t grabbed a hat. I called his name, but the syllables were snatched by the wind.

“Hey,” I yelled, as he tracked into a dry valley east of the necropolis. “Hey!”

Wyatt whipped around to face me. His eyes darkened, as if I were the last person he had hoped to see. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

“What are you doing here?”

“Taking a walk,” Wyatt said. “I wasn’t being productive.”

“I don’t believe you.”

He smirked. “As charming as your faith is in my efficiency, I was falling asleep over the text. I needed some fresh air.”

It was high noon in the desert; this was not fresh air. “I want to talk about last night,” I said.

“Well, I don’t.” Wyatt spun on his heel and started off into the wadi again.

“I don’t want you touching me again,” I called out.

“Perfect.” Wyatt tossed back over his shoulder. “Since I don’t want to touch you.”

I stood, watching him stride deeper into the desert. “Where are you going?”

“Wherever you aren’t,” Wyatt said.

His words set a fire in me; I immediately remembered what an arrogant dick he was. I didn’t have to worry about what had happened between us last night because I was never going to get close enough to him for it to happen again.

Suddenly Wyatt stopped moving. He pivoted, his hands in his pockets. “I apologize for taking the liberty of kissing you,” he said, so formal. “I could blame it on the alcohol, or I could say that spending all this time in tombs makes me atypically horny, or I could just chalk it up to an egregious mistake. Take your pick.”

I didn’t disagree with him, but I didn’t particularly like being called an egregious mistake, either. Yet I’d wanted to get him to admit to that, didn’t I?

And if he had, why was I still standing here?

“But right now, Olive, I have a hangover the size of Russia with a side order of self-loathing, and I’d appreciate being left to my own devices. Run along home.”

For a moment I just stared as Wyatt turned and walked deeper into the crevice of the wadi.

Run along home.

Like I was a child, not a Ph.D. student. Like I was not equally as qualified to be hiking through this goddamned parched desert as he was.

“Fuck you,” I said, fuming. “Fuck you, you entitled, condescending asshole.” I ran until I had caught up to him, furious, hating that last night, for even a millisecond, I’d been fooled into thinking that he deserved compassion, that we were a team instead of rivals.

Wyatt turned, stumbling backward as my rage rose over him like an angry djinn spinning out of the sand.

I poked one finger at his chest, driving him deeper beneath a rock ledge. “I am just as smart as you are. I am just as capable as you. And I am—” My voice broke off, and I fell forward, brushing my fingertips against the granulated limestone beside his left shoulder. “Wyatt,” I breathed. “Look.”

In the little worn groove of the wadi, beneath a natural rock shelter that was shielding us from the punishment of the sun, there was a dipinto—faded ink on stone.

My heart thumped, out of beat. I thanked God for the class we’d taken on Middle Kingdom papyri—and all the Twelfth Dynasty hieratic we’d had to translate as part of the course. Unlike hieroglyphs, which could be read in either direction, hieratic was always read right to left. Wyatt spun around, his arms braced over me as I crouched, reciting the transliteration. He translated haltingly over my shoulder. “Regnal year 7, fourth month of Peret, day 14 under the majesty of the king of Upper and Lower Egypt Kha-kau-re, living forever and ever…”

I knew that the nomarchs of Deir el-Bersha had left commemorative inscriptions at quarries to the north of the necropolis at Hatnub. They’d been used by scholars to reconstruct family histories. It wasn’t unlikely that, thousands of years ago, nomarchs might have stopped here, beneath this rock ledge, to celebrate something.

I scanned the next part of the dipinto, but it was fainter than the words at the beginning.

“On this day, the count, hereditary noble, and nomarch of the Hare nome…” I murmured.

“…Djehutyhotep,” we said in unison, having seen those signs dozens of times in the tomb where we worked.

This was the ancient equivalent of Kilroy was here. Except it was the nomarch whose tomb we had been copying meticulously for the past three dig seasons.

Wyatt rubbed his jaw. “4pd.t,” he said, pointing. “He came to this mountain to see the rising of Sothis.”

Other words jumped out at me: Peret, day 15. Priests. Tomb.

“I’m missing a few bits,” Wyatt said, “but I’m pretty sure the gist of it is that he came here to party and stayed overnight in the necropolis, in someone’s tomb.”

“Djehuty…nakht?” I translated, touching my fingertip to the name of the tomb owner. “The ones from the Boston MFA?”

“No. A different Djehutynakht. Born of Teti.” He read carefully. “We spent the night in the forecourt of the tomb of Djehutynakht, born of Teti, which is…cubits from…” Wyatt rubbed his hand over the back of his neck. “There used to be a measurement here.”

We couldn’t read the numbers, the damage of four thousand years was too severe. I turned to Wyatt. “Still. A tomb in the necropolis…”

“…that hasn’t been found yet.”

The gravity of this—not just the discovery of a painted rock inscription but one that might point to a new, undiscovered tomb—knocked the breath out of me. Suddenly, my feet flew off the ground as Wyatt wrapped his arms around me and spun me around. “Oh my God,” he cried, as I laughed. Then, just as quickly, he dropped me. “We can’t tell anyone,” Wyatt said.

“What?”

“It’s illegal to be here without an inspector. We have to figure out a way to bring Dumphries here and pretend to discover this all over again.” His eyes pinned me. “Are you with me?”

It would have been far easier for Wyatt to throw me under the bus—tell Dumphries I’d been off exploring where I shouldn’t be, and take all the credit. Instead, he was offering me a partnership.

“I thought you hated me,” I said carefully.

Wyatt ducked his head. “I wanted to. I tried to,” he admitted, his words slick with frustration. “You waltz in here from U Chicago, and of all the things you could be studying, it’s my thing.”

I bristled. “You don’t hold the monopoly on the Book of Two Ways.”

“I know that,” he said. “But still. Hardly anyone focuses on Middle Egypt.”

“That’s why I like it.”

“That’s why I like it, too,” Wyatt snapped. “And I was good at it. The best, even. It was like being the only child, the golden boy. But then you arrive with your crazy microcosm ideas and suddenly Dumphries decides he wants two TAs that year, instead of one. He invites you to come on the dig, even though first-year grad students never come. Fast-forward to now, when he’s grooming you to be his little protégée—”

“What are you talking about?” I exploded. “You’re so far up his ass you’ve probably built a condo.”

“Because I can’t risk ceding any more ground to you,” he argued.

I was roiling with the shock of learning that Wyatt was just as jealous of me as I was of him.

“Haven’t you noticed that when visitors come to the dig site, you’re the one he asks to give them a tour? Or he asks me to haul maqtafs while you get to trace inscriptions? He notices you, when he’s supposed to be noticing me. And fuck it, Olive,” he said angrily. “I can’t help but notice you, too.”

As aggravated as Wyatt’s words were, his touch was the opposite. His hand came up to my hair, rubbing a strand between his fingers. His eyes were the sea. This is how people drown, I thought.

This time, when he kissed me, I kissed him back.

* * *

—

IT WAS A rare feeling, being allied with Wyatt instead of being at each other’s throats. We walked together to Djehutyhotep’s tomb, trading whispers, trying to come up with a way to rediscover the dipinto and make it look completely happenstance and net us equal credit for the find. We tossed out a variety of scenarios, but ultimately decided the best way was to replicate exactly what had happened: Wyatt wandering off, me spotting the ink on stone.

The next morning we worked in the outer chamber, tracing on Mylar in uncharacteristic silence. At one point, Wyatt snuck up behind me. “That’s not right,” he announced.

I pivoted, glaring at him. “Yes it is.”

“It’s a triliteral sign,” he said. “Not a scepter.”

I hesitated. I was used to Wyatt’s transliteration being better than mine, but I was confident about this interpretation. “You’re wrong—”

“I know,” Wyatt murmured, and suddenly, quickly, he winked. “I just thought we should act like our normal selves.”

“In that case, stop being a dick,” I replied.