Leaving me. Which, frankly, I deserved.

I sank down beneath the scene of parental grief and cried. Nefertiti and Akhenaton had lost one beloved daughter; I had lost nearly everyone I cared about. I couldn’t even blame Wyatt. Through his eyes, this was stupidity at best and betrayal at worst. Either I had set him out of my mind so quickly fifteen years ago that it seemed our relationship meant nothing; or I had made the calculated decision to hide his own daughter from him. I imagined him walking out of the tomb and giving the keys back to the gaffir. Maybe thousands of years from now, tourists would come to see my dessicated body: Here lies the woman who destroyed her own life.

An hour passed before I heard someone walking back toward the chamber. Wyatt sat down beside me, his shoulders against the rock wall. “When you left home the first time,” he asked, “where were you headed?”

Of all the questions he could have posed, this was the one I had not been expecting. “I don’t know. I didn’t have a plan.” I swallowed hard. “But I think I’ve been running in place for a long time, because I knew if I stopped, I’d wind up wherever you are.”

In this tomb, where time stood still, I waited seconds, weeks, a lifetime, until I felt Wyatt’s hand cover mine where it rested on the dirt. “I lost what I loved once, and I don’t plan to do that again,” he said quietly. “I’d like to meet my daughter.”

* * *

—

“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,” a voice announces, “we have just been informed by the captain that we’re going to have a planned emergency. Please listen to the flight attendants and follow their directions.”

Wyatt had insisted on getting the first flight out of Cairo, in spite of the fact that he was in the breakthrough stage of an excavation (He’s been dead for four thousand years, Olive, he’s not going anywhere…); although I thought he should sleep on his decision. I believed my anxiety had stemmed from the confrontation that would face us in Boston, which would not be easy, even if it was right. But maybe there had been a sixth sense warning me away from this flight.

Shock rolls through the cabin—but no screams, no loud cries. “We’re crashing,” the woman on the aisle whispers. “Oh my God, we’re crashing.”

Fasten your seatbelts. When you hear the word brace, assume the brace position. After the plane comes to a complete stop you’ll hear Release your seatbelts. Get out. Leave everything behind.

I have heard that when you are about to die, your life flashes before your eyes.

But I do not picture Brian or Meret. I do not envision my mother or Kieran.

Instead, I think of Wyatt, only of Wyatt.

I imagine Wyatt in the middle of the Egyptian desert, the sun beating down on his hat, his neck ringed with dirt from the constant wind, his teeth a flash of lightning. A man who hasn’t been part of my life for fifteen years. A place I left behind.

A dissertation I never finished.

A future we’d never get.

I try to imagine Wyatt and Meret and me, a family. I think about how many people we have wounded, just by falling in love fifteen years ago. I think about the feather of Ma’at, and whether I will pass to the afterlife, given all I’ve done.

I fumble for my phone, thinking to turn it on, to send a message—an apology?—even though I know there is no signal, but I can’t seem to open the button on my pants pocket. Wyatt’s hand catches mine and squeezes.

I look down at our fists, squeezed so tight a secret couldn’t slip between our palms. “Dawn,” Wyatt says, his voice breaking through my panic. “Listen to me. This is not how we die. We’re Orpheus and Eurydice. We’re Romeo and Juliet. Catherine and Heathcliff. Our story doesn’t end before it can even start.”

I wonder if he realizes that none of his examples have happy endings.

Wyatt’s nails dig into my skin. “I love you, Olive. Always have. Always will.”

I want always to be more than the next three minutes.

Brace, the flight attendants yell. Brace!

The plane plunges vertically. Bags fly out of the overhead compartments and the oxygen masks drop on their strings like macabre marionettes. Someone screams, and my head whips around. “Look at me,” Wyatt commands, his words lost in the roar of the plane breaking apart. My world narrows down to those fierce blue eyes, which have criticized me, challenged me, surprised me, seduced me, loved me.

As we fall out of the sky, I wonder who will remember me.

* * *

—

I HAVE SUNK into the lake of fire, between the two routes of the Book of Two Ways. It roars around me, smoke billowing, coating the inside of my mouth and underneath my eyelids, making tears burn down my face. Flames grab at my clothes, my shoulders, my hair. I am shouting but no one can hear me.

Knowledge. I need knowledge. That’s what will get me through the gates, past the demons. They are everywhere—a monster with half its body torn off. A mangled seat with a man strapped to it, shrieking as the fire consumes his fastened seatbelt. A girl with flame where her braids used to be. Their eyes are as wild as mine, and I try to get past, as I scream for Wyatt.

There are two ways out—land and water. I know this viscerally, as if it’s been stamped into my heart. But I am not going without him.

Wyatt, I yell.

The smoke becomes a beast, clouds rolling into the blackened form of a person, coming for me. I stagger backward. Wyatt! Wyatt!

A flight attendant steps out of the smoke like she’s shedding a second skin. She grabs my arm. You need to come with me. I can read her lips, but there’s no sound.

I don’t need to come anywhere. I wrench away from her and dodge through a hoop of fire and fuselage. As I am running I trip and fall flat onto the soft mattress of a man wearing a white shirt; a man, facedown, with yellow hair. Wyatt.

It takes all my strength to turn him over and I am coughing and my lungs are ribbons and his eyes, his sightless eyes, are staring up at the black sky.

But this man is wearing glasses, and has a mustache. This man is not Wyatt.

I start crying so hard that I can’t get to my feet. A fine mist covers my face and my hair. The water route. I turn toward it and mark the distant glint of fire hoses, magical hydras fighting the breath of dragons.

But it also makes the smoke thicker and viscous until I am breathing soup, and I can’t find my way through. The land route is nothing but an inferno. I’m trapped.

The smoke parts like wood split by an ax and another monster stalks toward me. This one has blood covering its face.

This one is shouting my name.

I get to my feet and he pulls me against him, holds the back of my head with his hands, kisses me like he could gift me the oxygen from his own lungs.

That’s when I can see it: a way out. A next life.

WHEN I OPEN my eyes, everything is white, so white and bright that I wince. There are objects, unmoving, unfocused, surrounded by halos.

The first thing I notice is the pain.

My head is too heavy to move and it has its own pulse. My throat is a ribbon of desert. It takes a Herculean effort to open my eyes.

I can’t be dead if there’s pain, can I? But none of us knows what the afterlife holds. Maybe it’s nothing but pain.

Immediately, as if a blanket has muffled all that light, it isn’t quite so blinding. I let my vision adjust, realizing that a curtain has been yanked across a window. The objects become a chair, a sink, the foot of a hospital bed. Then I hear Brian’s voice. “Better?” he asks.

His hand, warm, enfolds mine. His face rises in my field of vision like a blood moon, familiar, but unexpected.

He smiles down at me, and there are tears in his eyes, and I realize he is having the same trouble finding language that I am.

“You were hurt,” he says finally. “You had to have surgery to relieve the pressure on your brain.”

Gingerly I raise my free hand, feeling the edges of a bandage wrapped around my entire head. I try to stay calm, but inside, I am terrified. My brother has told me about some of the neurosurgery cases he’s seen: Workmen who fall off ladders and never wake up. Award-winning professors who have seizures and cannot remember how to dress themselves. The brain, Kieran says, is a fascinating and frivolous organ. You never know what it’s going to do.

The hammering makes sense now. I try to remember what happened, where I am, where I was.

Wyatt.

Egypt.

The plane crash.

I turn my head to the side and see stars, it hurts that much. I roll my eyes from side to side, searching. But there is only Brian, as if he is true north and I am a compass that needs adjustment.

Did I imagine it all?

Was Egypt and the tomb some fever dream? Was my reunion with Wyatt just a synapse firing beneath the probe of a surgeon?

At that thought, my own eyes swim. I close them, and a tear tracks down my cheek.

“It’s okay,” Brian soothes, gripping my hand more tightly. “It’s going to be okay now. I’ve got you.”

I’ve got you.