Carnahan clapped his hands together in anticipation. “Well, shall we get started?”***
At least the inside of the tomb was cooler.
Fractionally.
It was still hot. Endlessly and inescapably
hot, of course. And there was somehow an uncomfortable humidity in the rock-cut corridor. But it was just a
few degrees cooler than outside, and, with her eyes practically seared from the sun glinting so brutally off the sand in the morning light, the tomb was an improvement.
They entered down a sharply sloped decline into a hole cut into rock that looked as sun-bleached as the sand surrounding it. Thick cables ran beneath their feet, and as Lois entered the main corridor for the first time, she realized that the cables led to floodlights that looked like they were positioned more to highlight the art on the walls than the uneven ground that she was expected not to trip over. Even from underground, she could hear the mild roar from the generators that must have been powering the little light brigade.
As her eyes moved from one light to another, she realized that the entirety of every wall as far as she could see had been carved. Figures and symbols, all detailed, many brightly painted. Huge chunks of the walls had crumbled and fallen away, but the effect was still overwhelming.
She felt Clark stop just over her shoulder.
“Have you ever seen anything like this?” she asked, awed in spite of herself.
“Sort of,” Clark said.
“Sort of?” she repeated, surprised. “Where?”
“China,” he said, looking at the walls. “And Peru.”
“I didn’t know you went to Peru,” she said, hearing something like accusation tinge her voice.
“I went a lot of places after college,” Clark glossed. “But I’ve never seen a tomb exactly like this.”
“Spectacular, isn’t it?!”
They both turned as Carnahan came up behind them.
“It’s a masterpiece,” the archeologist gushed. “Amazing to find it so intact. It shows a full tutorial of the ancient ritual of the Opening of the Mouth.”
“Was it actually a ritual that opened the mouth?” Lois asked, skeptical.
“Oh, no, that would be silly. It was a ritual to reanimate the dead.”
“What?!”
“In the afterlife,” Carnahan said quickly.
She raised an eyebrow, almost certain that the man had phrased it that way just to get a reaction out of her.
Clark chuckled beside her and she elbowed him, her aim finding its home without even looking. He didn’t protest her sharp jab to his ribs, but the sound of his laughter stalled out like a spluttering engine.
Dr. Weeks caught up to them then, looking up from his clipboard. “Alright, let’s split up this morning. Rupert, Bashir, why don’t you take Zaid and move back into chamber nine? Meanwhile, Wahid and I will assess passage twelve to see what other debris can be sifted.”
“Right, boss,” Bashir replied cheerily, turning toward the far end of the chamber. Zaid trailed after him, carrying a bucket and a cloth-lined tray.
“Best follow me,” Carnahan said to them before following, too.
Lois glanced back at Dr. Weeks before stepping over a thick knot of cables to follow the others along the corridor. It got darker as they went, as the lights became more sparsely spaced. The uneven floor was covered in pebbles and rocks, and the ceiling seemed to slope downward. As they neared the end of the corridor, the rocks in her path became larger and more frequent.
She stepped into an open room that was somehow even darker than the previous chamber. It looked like it had been the site of the kind of cave-in that Dr. Weeks had warned them about, littered with boulders and debris. In some places, the rocks were piled up as high as her waist. In others, it looked like they were all the way up to the ceiling.
She squinted as her eyes adjusted to the lower light in the larger room. Some of the rock piles weren’t piles at all. They were huge, ornately carved columns that stretched the height of the room.
Looking upward, she tripped over a rock jutting out of the sand, and stumbled a few feet forward. She couldn’t seem to keep her balance on this trip. If it wasn’t sand, then it was rocks.
“You ok?”
Catching her balance, she looked up to see that Clark had turned back to check on her.
“Fine,” she said, continuing forward and moving past him.
The others had disappeared through a jagged crevice in the rock ahead, as if a doorway had once stood there but collapsed, and a new pathway had been forged through the rubble. She moved through the crevice to find the others standing in a hallway that was lit for another twenty feet or so before a wall of crumbled rock blocked the path.
“Shall we try to finish off the far wall in nine today?” Carnahan was suggesting, as Clark followed her in.
“Yes, sounds good!” Bashir agreed.
Together, they turned to the left and entered another room, Zaid following.
When Lois entered the room, she realized that it had been nearly fully excavated, unlike most of the spaces they had moved through so far. Cables ran underfoot as a wealth of floodlights illuminated this room. The lights were all pointed toward the back wall and ceiling, the entirety of which was covered in colorful art and dark black pictograms, much like the room they’d first entered. And it looked like a good portion of the writing had been carved into the wall before it was painted. Some figures were nearly half the height of the whole wall. It was hard to tell exactly, since the lights were all amber-colored, but it looked like the walls all had a deep and rich ocher base color beneath everything else.
“How did they do all of this?” Lois asked, eyes roving across the fully muraled walls, finding herself slightly awed at the scope.
“They had tools, many like ours today,” Carnahan said.
“Yes, but their brushes were often made from plants, and
not like ours,” Bashir mentioned, taking a tray that Zaid had placed beside him, and crouching down near the small pile of rocks lining the wall. Zaid put his bucket next to the tray and crouched, as well, to watch as Bashir studied a rock and then decided to toss it into the bucket.
“That’s right,” Carnahan went on, using what looked like a paintbrush to clear dust away from a section of the back wall. “Many of the tools were similar, but made from ancient equivalents. After they carved this room, they plastered over the walls here to create a level canvas. They didn’t have modern plaster, but they had gypsum and Nile mud, which had similar properties when mixed together. Then the artists would lay out a grid to ensure the proportions were the same across the entire room. They’d chisel in any carvings they planned, and then finally they’d paint. Sometimes they’d even add a kind of ancient resin over it to preserve the artwork.”
“But wouldn’t it have been dark in here?” Clark asked, looking at the ceiling.
Lois looked up, but she didn’t see anything.
“Clever,” Carnahan replied, wagging his finger at Clark. “You won’t find any soot on the ceilings from oil lamps.”
“So how did they do it?” Clark asked.
“Mirrors,” Bashir said with a smile. “They would position mirrors to send the sun all the way into the tomb. As long as you could create an angle for the light, you could send the light anywhere. We found one of the broken mirrors on the far side of room three when we first came in.”
“That’s incredible,” Clark said.
“That sounds like a lot of work,” said Lois.
“It was,” Bashir agreed. “But our ancestor engineers were very smart. And by the time they built this tomb, using mirrors like this was already common. There is also evidence that they may have used clarified oils in their lamps when they wanted to paint after dark. Perhaps we will find some of their lamps as we uncover more.” He winked and turned back to the rubble at his feet.
The archaeologists both turned to the wall at the end of the room, and somehow became absorbed by it.
A few quiet minutes later, Lois decided that the work here was agonizingly tedious.
After Carnahan moved across a section of the wall with a soft brush, he would photograph it, and then take out his notebook and write down the pictograms on the wall, as well as a rough translation. Meanwhile, Bashir sat, facing the wall, and would pick up stones that all looked exactly the same to her. He’d put some into the bucket and others he would replace, photograph, and then move into the tray. Once in the tray, Zaid would brush the dust gently from them before tagging each and making notes. Lois, antsy from just standing in one enclosed room for so long, transferred her weight from one foot to the other. She couldn’t fathom how any of them could be still for that amount of time.
“Bashir?”
Lois had never been so grateful for an interruption. She watched as Bashir looked up toward where Carnahan was squinting at the wall.
“Do you happen to recognize this symbol, below the three storks?”
Bashir got up and made his way over, brow crinkling as he looked at the pictogram Carnahan was pointing to.
“Is that a tract below the loaf?” Bashir asked.
“Loaf? The bottom edge looks rounded; it’s an egg.”
Bashir gestured to Carnahan’s brush, and Carnahan handed it over. Painstakingly slowly, Bashir brushed away at the smudges around the hieroglyphic.
“It is very hard to tell. I think you must confirm if it is connected to the viper above it.”
“Is that not a cobra?”
Bashir gently touched his brush to the top of the little snake’s head and a bit of the plaster crumbled away. Both men gasped and squinted to see the damage.
“Zaid, bring another light,” instructed Carnahan, not taking his eyes from the wall.
Behind them, Zaid began to adjust the cables in the room, sliding another floodlight through the sand toward them.
“Did you photograph this?” Bashir asked worriedly.
“Yes, of course,” assured Carnahan.
Both men leaned in again, the area now brighter with the help of Zaid’s additional lighting.
“If there was debris corroding the plaster there, it could be why it crumbled; that could be a viper after all,” Carnahan assessed.
“You are the expert. It may be a cobra. But either way, I do not recognize it,” Bashir eventually said.
“Nor I,” replied Carnahan with a sigh. “I’ll head back to the tents and grab a reference book, see if I can find it.”
Bashir nodded in agreement and moved back to his pile of rocks.
“I’ll be right back,” Carnahan said to Lois and Clark before he headed out of the room and back the way they’d come.
“So, is Dr. Carnahan the language expert?” she asked.
“Oh, yes,” Bashir said cheerfully, picking up a little sherd of rock. “Middle Egyptian Hieroglyphics and also hieratic.”
“What’s the difference?” she asked.
“The pharaohs thought that hieroglyphics were sacred carvings, literally the ‘words of the gods,’” he explained, gesturing slowly toward the rows of images in front of him, as if painting down the wall himself. Then he looked over his shoulder at them with a cheeky smile. “Hieratic is what you would use to write your shopping list.”
Clark chuckled in amusement.
“Can you read it, too?” she asked.
“Not as well as Rupert,” Bashir said, discarding the little jagged rock he’d been examining.
“But you can?” she pushed.
“Hieroglypics, Hieratic, German, French, a little bit of Italian," he listed off, his focus on yet another rock.
“You speak…” she counted, factoring in English and Arabic, “seven languages?”
“And I read some ancient Greek,” Bashir said as her jaw dropped. He shrugged. “The whole world writes about Ancient Egypt. Most of them in their own language.”
“How long have you been with the Project?” Clark asked.
“Five years,” Bashir answered proudly. “Dr. Weeks came here in 1987. I joined in 1989, when they found more of the rooms and decided that there would be something for me to do.”
Bashir had been with the Project longer than she’d been at the Planet.
“What do you do?” she asked, gesturing to the pile of rubble at his feet. “I mean, is your focus language, too?”
“Artifacts, you might say.”
“Artifacts,” she repeated.
“Yes, well–” He reached for a chipped piece of rock and held it up. “See this? Modern pottery: a broken jar or bowl. Trash. Probably washed down here in the flooding.” He tossed the sherd into the bucket, which was now nearly full. Then he looked back at the pile and carefully selected another of the rocks. “But this? This is also a sherd; yet, this was carved, and not by modern tools. This is old, very old. This could have been a base from a canopic jar. It could have held the intestines of a pharaoh. My job is conservator–to preserve the artifacts."
Her mouth curved downward in a moue of distaste, as she got caught on one detail. “You’re saying
that could have been a
jar of intestines?”
“Or a jar of liver or lungs or stomach,” Bashir answered academically.
She knew her face was betraying the disgust she found in Bashir’s ‘artifacts’. “But why those? Wouldn't the heart or brain have been more important?”
“They thought the brain was unimportant. They removed it, but it was not placed with the possessions of the dead.”
“Why not?” asked Clark.
Bashir shrugged. “They did not think that it did much work. They thought the dead would not need it in the afterlife. They threw it away.”
Lois scoffed. She lived by her brain. Her wit and logic had guided her through trials and tight spots, even getting out of situations she’d been put into because her emotional, willing heart had failed her.
“But the heart…” Bashir continued, warming to his theme. “The heart was not removed from the body.”
“Didn’t they think it was important?” Clark asked, sounding almost scandalized.
“They thought it was the
most important,” Bashir explained grandly. “The heart, and not the brain, was the organ of reasoning. Our ancestors connected it to the pulse: one early medical treatise even said that ‘speaks in the vessels of all the members’.”
Her own pulse had begun beating harder as he’d spoken, thinking of where her heart had led her. It had made a fool of her over Superman and then led her to the altar with Lex Luthor. Just as her brain was about to go down its usual self-flagellating spiral about that, it snagged on a well-worn memory. While she’d been walking toward Lex, her heart had insisted on Clark.
“Every action was ‘done according to the orders of the heart that has conceived them’,” Bashir went on, oblivious to her straying thoughts. “And so, the heart was seen as the seat of the mind and the vessel of the soul. The soul, your heart, would be required in the afterlife, where it would testify to your goodness in life. Your heart led you to your dreams in life and then it led you to the Field of Reeds in your death. You could not live, or die, without your heart.”
Her heart was still insisting on Clark, she realized, feeling her pulse drum louder at the thought.
Bashir, in true academic form, rounded off his historical anecdote with a broader context. “The ancestors teach us to ask, ‘where is your heart leading you’?”
She pushed her hair back behind her ear, surreptitiously sneaking a glance at Clark.
But she found him already looking at her with a more intense gaze than she would have expected.
A second later, he was looking back at Bashir and she wondered if the expression she’d seen in his eyes had been a trick of the dim light in the chamber, especially where they stood, further back from the illuminated wall.
Finished with his history lesson, Bashir moved to place the sherd into the tray. Halfway there, he paused, examining it more closely.
“Actually, this
could have been…” he trailed off, then handed it to Zaid. “Tag this, and then I’ll take it back to the tent for a better look.”
Zaid photographed it, tagged it and recorded it.
Bashir dropped it into the cloth-lined tray and then took the entire thing, heading toward the entrance. “Could be an exciting find! I’ll be back very soon!”
Lois could suddenly see how this team could have only done a handful of rooms in over five years.
“Excuse me,” said Zaid, lifting the bucket of Bashir’s discarded rubble and heading out into the main hall, leaving them to their own devices. They listened to his footsteps fade.
Lois huffed out a long sigh.
“Having fun?” Clark asked teasingly.
“This is like watching paint dry!” she complained, making him chuckle.
She started pacing, walking in a circle around the tomb, just to expel some energy.
“It didn’t take as long to
build this place as it’s taking them to
record it!”
Clark chortled again. “Dr. Bashir said that it’s the most thorough project he’s ever been on.”
“Well, it’s the most boring
assignment I’ve ever been on!”
The lights abruptly went out, plunging her into a void of nothingness.
It was pitch black, blacker than anywhere she’d ever seen before, including the sewers in Metropolis, where the ambient light of the city managed to creep in everywhere.
Along with the eternal night of the tombs, a stark silence also crept in. Before, there had been a seemingly distant rumble and the low hum of electricity, and Lois realized how loud the lights and whatever had powered them had been. The space had felt like an ancient art exhibit before; now it felt like the disturbed catacomb that it really was.
In the darkness, a whisper of a breeze ran across her skin, and she turned toward it.
It felt like something moved past her in the dark.
Or someone.
She knew it wasn’t a mummy, newly returned from the dead, of course.
But it still spooked her.
“Clark?” she called out.
“I’m here,” his voice came from several feet away.
He wasn’t where she’d thought he was. She turned toward him, reaching out, and shuffling her feet forward.
“Where?”
“Right here,” he said, sounding closer than he was before.
She felt his hand slide into hers just as she was taking another large, shuffling step forward. She hadn’t realized he was quite
that close, and she tried to stop suddenly, but, now off-balance, only succeeded in slamming right into him.
He released her hand, steadying her upper arm instead. His other arm came up around her waist in a familiar way, as she landed full against his chest.
They stood that way for a moment, him holding her up as she slid her feet under her and found her balance.
It had been a long time since Clark had held her like this, arms wrapped tightly and securely around her. They’d always been physical in their communication, starting with her swatting his arm or shoving him out of her way when he’d first arrived at the Planet. That had easily developed into an almost palpable affection as they’d gotten closer; his hand to her lower back, her head on his shoulder, walking side by side with her arm threaded through his. But lately, his touch had been more like the moment she’d tripped on the last step off the plane onto the tarmac; perfunctory, short, and only there when necessary.
After her engagement, Clark had pulled back—literally. At the time, she’d just thought he was annoyed with her, or maybe even re-establishing their boundaries in deference to her as a soon-to-be-married woman. But after her wedding, she realized it was more than that. He seemed reluctant to get close to her again, and their easy physical affection hadn’t come back along with the Planet and their working partnership-–and the majority of her sanity.
She realized in that moment that her still unsteady relationship with Clark had been a major reason she hadn’t been able to find her balance back in Metropolis. Even though he was almost always right beside her, somehow, he wasn’t fully there with her anymore.
She missed him.
And immediately after that realization came another: after she’d just tripped into him, she had melted into his embrace, head pillowed on his chest, exhaling gently, tears hot in her eyes, and relaxing for the first time in what felt like months.
And she was still silently standing in his arms, barely holding it together and practically burrowing into his chest.
“Lois?” he questioned, his voice low and even intimate, but sounding totally unsure.
“Yeah, uh, I got it,” she said quickly, straightening and taking a step back. “Uh, thanks.”
“No problem,” he said.
She bit her lip as his hands fell away from her.
It wasn’t what she wanted.
And she didn’t know what to do with that.
Or how to fix it.
***
They made their way down the main hall, Clark in the lead, holding her hand as she trailed a step behind him. He was moving surprisingly quickly.
“How can you see anything?”
He didn’t reply immediately, and his voice sounded odd when he did. “I can’t really see well, but I’ve always had pretty good vision in the dark. Must be from growing up on a farm. It’s dark out there at night.”
“I guess so,” she said, even though that didn’t make a lot of sense to her.
They heard some shuffling up ahead.
“Who’s there?” she called out.
“Ms. Lane?”
“Is that Dr. Weeks?” Clark called back.
“Yes!”
“What are you doing on this side?” Lois asked. “Didn’t you go the other way?”
Dr. Weeks’ voice came back through the darkness. “We came back to find your team. We have a flashlight.”
And indeed, she could see a beam lightly skimming the darkness just up ahead.
“Keep coming down the main corridor until you’re back to three!”
“Three?” Lois called back.
“Chamber three: the room with all the columns.”
“We’ll be right there,” shouted Clark.
“Well, that’s convenient,” Lois said in a low voice.
“What is?” her partner asked.
“That they all got rid of us right before the blackout!”
“What do you mean?”
“First Carnahan left. Then Bashir. Then the foreman. Even Weeks is in another room than he started out in! Why is no one where they’re supposed to be?!”
“You think it was coordinated?” His voice wasn’t skeptical, but nor was it convinced.
“I think it’s suspicious timing that someone took advantage of.”
“I don’t know, Lois. That seems a little…”
“Do you really think that when we get out there, this blackout is going to be because of some simple and harmless accident?”
“Probably not,” he grudgingly agreed.
“Of course not!” she exclaimed, as if he’d confirmed her theory. “And because everyone ditched us all the way down here alone, we can’t even rule out anyone as a suspect!”
They emerged from the tunnel to find Dr. Weeks and Wahid standing near their entrance into the room. Their flashlight didn’t do much, but it was a better guide than nothing.
“Where is the rest of your team?” Dr. Weeks asked.
“They had left already,” Clark replied.
“Left?” Dr. Weeks asked with a frown.
“Zaid had just taken a bucket out,” Lois said. “He’d only been gone a few minutes.”
“And the others?”
“Dr. Carnahan went back to his tent to reference a hieroglyph and Dr. Bashir was removing a catalogued artifact,” Clark explained.
“I see,” Dr. Weeks said, still frowning. “Let’s get moving and see what took out the lights.”
Dr. Weeks turned toward the opposite side of the room and picked his way across, Wahid silently following in his footsteps.
Clark turned to follow, but Lois pulled him back.
“See?” she hissed. “Even Weeks thinks this was intentional!”
She couldn’t fully see Clark’s expression, but he didn’t disagree and that was enough for her.
Crossing through the outer rooms had definitely been easier with the floodlights illuminating their path, instead of just offering up their tethered cords as more tripping hazards, but minutes later they were stepping out into the blazing, relentless Egyptian sun.
Zaid was walking up to the entrance, empty bucket dangling from his hand. Catching Wahid’s eye, he said a few words in Arabic that sounded like it was a question.
“Lights went out,” responded Dr. Weeks, before Wahid could. “Make sure all of your men are out of there. It’s hardly safe in the dark.”
“We’ll do a headcount,” Zaid said, then spoke a few more words to Wahid, motioning him away. Wahid grunted before jogging off toward a group of men a few yards away moving buckets around as Zaid headed back into the dark tombs.
In the meantime, Dr. Weeks turned to walk up the side of the dune that the entrance was carved into. Lois immediately followed, Clark still trailing her. Dr. Weeks turned back once he realized he had company.
“Why don’t you head back to the tents?” he suggested. “There’s nothing else to see here until the lights are back on.”
“But we’d love to see what happens next, especially if this is part of your process,” Lois said, passing him.
“This isn’t the story,” Dr. Weeks replied firmly.
“Well, we might be able to help,” she protested.
“The lighting equipment doesn’t need to be investigated,” Dr. Weeks insisted.
“I’m a fair hand at repairing equipment,” Clark offered. “Usually tractors, combines, generators—radios, too. All sorts of things.”
Lois looked at him appreciatively and Dr. Weeks seemed to sag as he gave in.
“Alright, come on,” he said, following a thick cable nearly buried in the sand as he headed up the dune.
They followed, Lois with a spring in her step, even as a light breeze kicked up, kissing her cheeks with grains of sand. As they came around the hill they were climbing, she saw a wooden scaffolding with equipment below it. The generator was a huge metal block, with a thick metal cylinder in front of it and other, smaller metal boxes alongside, all resting on an elevated metal base.
Lois was unimpressed at the machine that may have once been green, but was now largely just rust. Seeing it, she didn’t think there was any mystery as to why it gave out.
Dr. Weeks stopped at one side and started to wrestle a metal panel off. Clark moved around the back and crouched down. She followed him.
“Do you see anything?” she asked.
He had pulled the rectangular housing off another block. “Mostly sand,” he said with a grimace.
“It’s used to that,” Weeks said from his position on the other side. “It runs anyway.”
Clark brushed a little bit of sand away from the innards and then replaced the metal casing he’d taken off, moving on to the next one.
With no immediate information on why the generator had given out, Lois wandered over toward the scaffolding, looking around. The thick cable they’d followed here was really many cables wrapped together. They ran from the main machine up to the top of the scaffold, where multiple smaller cords ran down the opposite side until they were roped together as one again, leading down the hill. She meandered over to the far side and leaned against it, stretching to catch hold of the upper platform.
She looked out over the endless expanse of sand that lay before her, feeling unenthused by the landscape.
Out of the corner of her eye, something glinted back at her.
She tilted her head, squinting to see if whatever it was would shine again.
It did.
Pushing off the scaffolding, she walked out into the desert, her eye trained on the last place she’d seen whatever it was that was glimmering.
There it was again.
She started to move faster just as she heard her partner call out for her questioningly.
“Lois?”
“I’ll be right back,” she called without looking back. She kept her eye on the place she’d last seen the gleam, knowing she was nearing it.
Unsuccessfully trying to jog through sand, she kept her head on a gentle swivel, trying to catch the glint of light again.
The sun reflected it back at her when she was nearly on top of it.
Kneeling down in the sand, she pulled a dirty spark plug halfway out of the sand.
Wind tousling her hair, she ran her hands through the sand where she knelt, but there was nothing else, so she stood, examining the spark plug in her hand.
Looking it over didn’t give away any of its secrets.
Unless…
She glanced back at the silent generator.
Maybe the little spark plug had a secret after all.
She trudged back to the men.
“I think I might have found the problem,” she said, as soon as she was near the scaffolding again.
“Me, too,” said Clark.
At nearly the same moment, Dr. Weeks said, “So did I.”
Still on opposite sides of the generator, Clark stood and Dr. Weeks straightened to look at Clark.
“What did you find?” Dr. Weeks asked.
Clark held up a thin metal rod, wet about a half inch down from one end.
“No coolant.”
Dr. Weeks held up another small rod with a wry smile. “No fuel.”
Clark chuckled.
“I think you may have also lost a spark plug,” Lois suggested, holding it up.
“Let’s find out,” suggested Dr. Weeks, moving toward Clark and pulling the casing off the main engine with a groan of metal.
Both men looked into the engine and paused.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Uh, Lois, did you happen to find the other one while you were out there?” Clark asked.
“Or the catalytic converter?” groaned Dr. Weeks, his hand going to his bucket hat in dismay.
“You’re kidding!” she exclaimed.
Clark shook his head.
“Seems like the generator is cursed,” she said, watching Dr. Weeks carefully.
“Yes, and our ‘curse’ has done a thorough job of it today,” he replied dryly.
He sighed deeply, then crossed toward her and held out his hand for the spark plug.
“You can’t tell me that you sincerely believe all this is because of some mystic, ancient curse?” Lois accused, not handing it over.
“At first we thought it was local children, maybe teenagers, causing mischief,” Dr. Weeks confessed. “But this is too thorough a job to be kids. And they knew when everyone else would be distracted, when it would take us at least a few minutes to get up here from the tombs.” He gestured with his open palm and this time Lois dropped the spark plug into it. Nodding his thanks, he headed back toward the generator.
“So it’s someone on the dig?” she pushed.
“Or someone watching the camp,” Dr. Weeks proposed, tinkering with the engine. “Sites like these are sought after in our field. Sometimes your saboteurs are competitors for next year’s funding.”
“So it could be nearly anyone, someone that we haven’t even met,” Clark clarified.
“Part of why it’s so frustrating,” Dr Weeks agreed. He looked up at them then. “If this is what ends up in your story, it could mean our funding. If you’ve come to print scandals about the security here—”
“That’s not the story we came here to write,” Clark said with empathy.
Dr. Weeks sent him a grateful smile.
“But it sure would make a great story for everyone if we could catch whoever’s doing this,” Lois couldn’t help but suggest.
Both men looked over at her, Clark with a droll expression and Dr. Weeks with unease.
“Do you think you can do that?” the archeologist asked tentatively.
“We haven’t met a story yet that we couldn’t get to the bottom of,” she said, sharing a fond look with Clark.
“I won’t get in your way. But this is not an excuse to endanger the tombs or disrupt the organization of their artifacts,” Dr. Weeks said brusquely.
“The last thing we want to do is cause any harm to the preservation of the history here,” Clark assured him.
“I can’t just give you free reign of the tombs, either, even if I really wanted to. Collapse is a definite risk with all the damage here, and we haven’t tested weight in all of the chambers,” Dr. Weeks said, almost defensively.
“We can handle ourselves. We’ve been in worse scrapes than that before,” Lois said.
“But the Project can’t handle it, if something goes wrong. I won’t allow anything that can jeopardize our funding.”
Clark cut back in. “We’ll be investigating the people here, so we’ll really only need to be inside when the team is inside.”
Dr. Weeks nodded, then stipulated, “And I would prefer that the rest of the team didn’t know you were investigating them.”
“That usually works best for us, too,” Lois tacitly agreed. She neglected to mention that Carnahan already knew they were investigating the team, instead looking around the scaffolding. “Do you see anything else missing?”
Dr. Weeks fitted the casing back over the engine and then headed to the far side of the scaffolding to kick open a large metal storage locker. After a moment, he said, “The tools are all still here. The gas canisters have gone missing.”
“Probably with the gas in them,” she scoffed. “Can we spread out a little? Maybe we can find a footprint.”
“The wind will have taken care of that already,” Dr. Weeks told her.
“How can you be sure unless we look?”
But even Clark was shaking his head. “Even our footprints up the dune are gone already,” he said, gesturing to the clean, soft sand down the little hill.
“Let’s get back down there. Before anything else happens,” Dr. Weeks said, and led them all back down the dune.
She glanced at Clark behind Weeks’ back, and he met her look with a nod.
It looked like they had another ally now.
***
They met Carnahan and Bashir as the two men were headed back into the tomb. Seeing Weeks, the two men veered toward them.
“What’s happened then?” Carnahan asked as soon as they were near.
“The generator is disabled,” Dr. Weeks replied.
“Is it able to be repaired?” Bashir asked, wringing his hands.
“Not with what we have on hand,” Dr. Weeks said. “We’ll have to lose the day, and go back in once the lights are back on.”
“That will put us further behind schedule,” Carnahan pointed out.
“No way around it,” Dr. Weeks said irritably.
Zaid came out of the tomb just then.
“Well?” Dr. Weeks called.
“Clear!” replied Zaid, joining them.
“I need you to take a trip into town today,” Dr. Weeks told him. “Two new spark plugs for the generator, converter, coolant, fuel.”
“You’re joking,” said Carnahan, looking surprised.
“We just brought in new fuel yesterday,” Bashir said, pointing up the hill toward where they’d just come from.
“There isn’t any there now,” Dr. Weeks told them.
Carnahan shot a look toward Lois and Clark, and Lois nodded subtly back.
“I will check on the headcount with Wahid and then we will go,” Zaid said.
Dr. Weeks nodded and Zaid moved off.
“We won’t be able to get back in until he returns,” Dr. Weeks said, gesturing toward Zaid’s retreating back.
“I found a bit of a project for myself with an unfamiliar glyph this morning. I can continue with it,” Carnahan said.
“Fine,” Dr. Weeks agreed. “Get to it.” About to walk away himself, he stopped abruptly. “Oh, Bashir–”
Bashir turned back.
“Perhaps our resident reporters would like to see how you work over an artifact,” Dr. Weeks said, nodding to Lois and Clark before heading back toward the tents.
Bashir’s face lit up, “Yes, yes! Come this way, my friends. I would love to show you how we preserve and identify our latest finds. I think the newest may truly be a canopic jar, which once housed an organ of one of the sons of Ramesses II.”
Lois couldn’t help but pull a face at that.
“We would love to,” Clark agreed for her.
Bashir turned and headed back toward the tent, launching into a lesson on ancient Egyptian mummification ceremonies.
If this was how their afternoon was about to go, Lois felt like she was going to go out of her mind with boredom.
She glanced over at Clark and gave him a long-suffering look.
He winked back at her.
In spite of herself, it made her feel like smiling.
