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There are no rules out here in the desert. At least, if there are any, Meela doesn’t abide by them.
Under the sand, there are things buried there that call out to her. She can feel them singing when the sun goes down and she’s forced to lie wide awake in her tent, listening intently to those voiceless intonations that belong to many a millennium ago. She blinks, and blinks again; she can taste dust and her eyes feel like they’ve been dry for years. Turning over on her side, she reaches into the dark, searching for something to keep her mind off the feeling of someone’s—or something’s—eyes sliding up and down her spine.
Meela Nais only cares about the end result. When the ruins have been excavated and the secrets have been uncovered, then the singing in her blood stops, then the dead cease calling her name as the crescent moon cuts a place out of the dark and stars for itself in the night sky.
And then she hears it: not a voice, but a story. One she’s heard before. One that’s more myth than anything else out here under the scorching sun: the rumored mistress (future wife, concubine—the stories all said the same thing with different words as far as Meela was concerned) of the Seti I, who killed him along with her secret lover, a priest, and then killed herself so that she could be resurrected by said priest.
People say different things about her, about this fabled woman of old, but Meela can look inside herself—peer at her heart—and find something irregularly empathetic searing a hole through solid bone. All versions of the myth say that the woman wanted to be free, even if no one can see or agree to that perspective, and it makes Meela burn.
And that’s how it starts.
The search takes up years and resources, but she was born into wealth, and through that she is able to obtain a substantial amount of power with a team of loyal workers and consultants—some of which knew her when she was just a girl.
Then there’s Evelyn.
Evelyn Carnahan is not so young that she does not understand the treacherous nature of the world she stepped into when she came into the desert, but there’s something about her that lacks a certain understanding—or, perhaps, it’s that gleam of wonder in her eye when she looks upon the world and sees only knowledge, only stories come to life. Whatever it is, Meela finds it irritating, but ultimately she dismisses the woman on account of the fact that she’s just a rumor of an archaeologist in the land of myths of the dead.
She and Evelyn have met a handful of times, both of them fairly polite, but still coy, still burning under the surface to be first, and Meela decides not to worry about her one bit, because it isn’t worth her time.
Meela makes a mistake: she underestimates Carnahan.
When she comes across a site that is said to point the way to the concubine of Seti I, she is dismayed when she finds that Evelyn got there first. There aren’t many people with her, just a few men who listen as she directs them left and right, up and down, and Meela watches from a distance as Evelyn bends down and brushes the ages from a reflective plate meant to light up a windowless room, and, for a moment, the world is silent around her.
Evelyn isn’t the competitive sort—not really. When Meela approaches, Evelyn looks up and squints into the fading light of day, her eyes falling on Meela, and Meela can feel her eyes on her skin, a warm, sliding feeling that’s soft like the skin of her underarm and just as nonthreatening. But Carnahan’s hands are white-knuckled on the disc she’s holding up, propped up against her knee.
The man with the holstered guns who frowns at who Meela presumes is Evelyn’s brother has a clear message, even if Evelyn does all the talking: go somewhere else.
Night is falling fast, though, so Evelyn—Evie, her brother whines when his camel nearly tramples him—invites them to share their camp for the night. Well, it isn’t so much an invitation as it is a mutual understanding that neither group should ride through the night without some sleep.
The men—Johnathan and O’Connell—keep an eye on Meela’s company, but she doesn’t care for them or their distrusting gazes; she, instead, walks up to Evie with the night silent around her and sits herself on the blanket next to her. Evie is pouring over some old text, one that Meela feels she vaguely recognizes but can’t very well recall—and then she sees it.
“Where did you get that?”
Evie looks up and blinks. “I found it.”
Meela arches a brow.
“It was just—sitting in an old attic, in Cairo,” Evie says, her eyes sparkling in the dark, her lips parted as she inhales and begins to retell the tale of how she stumbled across the myth of the concubine who killed the pharaoh some years ago and only just now began to find clues that might indicate that the woman can still be found.
Evie Carnahan has found more about the woman in a few months than Meela has in over a few years. Something wicked in her burns and twists; she smiles in the crackling firelight as a plan begins to form in her mind.
They talk for another few hours until everyone else has retired to their tents. They’re alone, under the stars, and Meela is itching to snatch the book of messy scrawls and hieroglyphics away from this starry-eyed woman, and it would be easy, she thinks, to slip the knife she keeps on her out and press it to Evie’s throat, apply pressure until her hands released the book.
But there’s an easier way: Meela keeps finding that her eyes stray to Evie’s mouth more often than not. And so she leans forward, cupping her jaw, and presses a tentative kiss to the corner of her mouth. She swears she feels Evie stop breathing for a moment, and then Evie is pulling away, and something in Meela wants to shrink and growl at such an action, but then Evie nestles closer until they’re sharing the sides of their bodies with the other. The fire dies down and Evie’s hands are clammy, but Meela doesn’t mind. She doesn’t mind one bit.
When Evie drops off to sleep, Meela takes the book. Soon after, she and her company depart in the night, silent like ghosts.
The book takes them to the ruins of some sort of shrine, or temple, or village three weeks later, and Meela can hear ghosts calling to her as she crests the hill—
—only to see Evie brushing sand off stone with a touch so tender that the world goes silent around Meela, again.
Evie looks up, shielding her eyes from the sun with her hand, and then, even at this distance, Meela can see that she’s smiling.
Meela’s heart thumps in her chest; she smiles back, and begins the descent down the hill towards her.
There aren’t any rules out here, Meela knows, but if there’s one that seems to stand, it’s that the dead won’t call to her if Evie’s standing on the other side, a dark figure against the blue sky—and Meela finds that’s just fine with her.