Free Living in Threes by Judith Tarr Page A

are as common as sand in Egypt. The one I was logging had the same inscription as mine, but so did half the scarabs in the country.
    It was just me being all jet-lagged and weird. I couldn’t keep the scarab, of course, and I didn’t ask. I labeled and logged it and put it in the box with a dozen others like it.
    Well, not exactly like it. The others were nice enough, and some were nicer. That particular one just felt right when I touched it. So right it freaked me out.
    “What happens to all these things?” I asked Gwyn. “Do they end up in a museum?”
    She looked up from the tablet, stretched and sighed. “Too much of what everyone finds gets studied and noted, then the Department of Antiquities takes it away. Mostly it disappears into boxes in the museum in Cairo. If it’s a tomb with a mummy in it, the mummy goes back in the tomb with a few of the grave goods. Sometimes, if an expedition is really lucky, the site gets its own museum. That’s what we’re hoping for here. We’ve been getting grants, and your aunt has brought in some rich donors. We almost have enough to get started.”
    “That’s kind of a big deal, isn’t it?”
    “Kind of,” she said.
    I don’t think she was laughing at me. I bent back down to my potsherds.
    The heat mounted; even in the shade, it got so we could barely breathe. Gwyn had to shut the tablet down before it fried its innards.
    That was like a signal. The work outside stopped. We gathered our bits and pieces together and locked them in boxes and helped load them in the Land Rovers. Whatever was left to do would wait until tomorrow, with guards to make sure it didn’t get stolen before then.
    The light outside, just at noon, was blinding even through Florida-strength sunglasses. I’d thought it was hot in the tent. It was a blast furnace in the sun.
    When I took a breath, the inside of my nose burned. My eyes felt all crackly. My clothes were hotter than I was.
    “A hundred and twelve degrees,” Aunt Jessie said as she started up the Land Rover. “We’re having a cold snap. It was a hundred and twenty-six last week.”
    All I could manage was a kind of strangled moan. The Land Rover had air conditioning, thank God, or should I say thank Horus? What they say about dry heat in the desert—they aren’t kidding. I wasn’t even sweating. Any sweat I could squeeze out evaporated before I could feel it.
    Jonathan handed me a bottle of lukewarm water. Gwyn had been making me drink every fifteen minutes by the clock, and I’d been taking pee breaks at just about that speed, but I was parched.
    The water tasted like plastic, but underneath it I could swear I tasted the thin and sour but weirdly solid taste of ancient Egyptian beer.



Chapter 11
    The Land Rover bumped and grumbled down the road to the ferry. I still had the water bottle in my hand, half full, and people were talking around me about heat and lunch and digging in the sand. Inside of me was this whole other world.
    Luxor House was cool and dim and made me want to tumble straight into sleep, but I was starved. We ate lunch in the corner of the dining hall closest to the kitchen, gulping down gallons of iced tea and diving into platters of sandwiches and big bowls of salad and pitas and hummus.
    The rest of the hall had a weird little echo, as if all the people who would have been in it during the regular season were still there. It wasn’t anything like the echo in my head.
    Aunt Jessie and Amira and the others were talking about the tunnels they were excavating under the temple, going back and forth on how big it all really was, how old it was, and who had built it. Apparently today they’d found an inscription that had Jonathan and Hamid in a lather, but Aunt Jessie, as usual, wasn’t quite ready to commit.
    “You know it is!” Jonathan insisted. He was a stocky guy, but quick and surprisingly light on his feet, and when he got excited he bounced. The first time I saw him do it, I had to fight not to