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"Enough!" Kayvon cuts in. "Whatever it is, we aren't going to get anywhere by arguing."

He looks at Anthony. "I don't know what happened on that dig, but it happened; it is over. Move on, accept that Mary is good at what she does even if she has quirks you don't like.

Then he turns to me. "And we still don't know what actually happened or how they vanquished the Druj. And even if their Mary did sacrifice herself, I'm not letting anyone sacrifice you."

He holds my gaze until he's certain I believe him, then he stands. "Now if you'll excuse me, I am going to find a bathroom and let this information percolate. Try not to murder each other before I get back."

Before Kayvon makes it out the door, he pauses to look at Anthony. "And everyone makes mistakes. Can't you see she's beaten herself up enough?"

With that, he's gone, leaving me with a surprisingly reluctant-looking Anthony. He stays tucked in the corner, eyes downcast and narrowed like a child who can't accept he's just been scolded. I go back to looking through some printouts when I hear him stir.

"I wanna be clear, I'm not mad at you or anything." I turn and see his face is still buried in his laptop. "I wouldn't have invited you on the dig if I didn't like you, or if I thought you were bad at this."

"Then why do you keep ignoring my emails?" I ask.

"Honestly, it is like I said. What you did on the dig. Plowing ahead like that on your own. I have no clue why you would do something that stupid." He writes something down before continuing. "You know there's an order to how we do this; we have to be careful, be diligent, follow procedure, guarantee provenance. We aren’t grave robbers just barging in."

I think back to that night under the starlit sky: the strange compulsion that pulled me from my tent and pushed me into the tomb, the rope bindings of the curse and the heavy stone doors giving way like bits of flimsy. I knew in that moment it was wrong, not because of magic, but because of me. Ever since, I’ve known it was my fault, though I still don’t know why I had to be the one to do it.

I could blame a curse for everything that came after, but that night, I was just so curious, so eager from being on my first real dig where I wasn’t just observing but really leading, and I couldn't help myself. And then, every night since, the stars haven't felt quite right, until they felt wrong.

"Yeah, I know."

"You know my great-great-grandfather was an Egyptologist," Anthony says, but he doesn't say it like a brag. "Giovanni Battista Belzoni. Strong man turned amateur archeologist."

The name suddenly crystallizes in my head, one I'm intimately familiar with as an avid student of Egyptian history, and yet I never realized that he and Anthony might be related. "Your ancestor was Giovanni Belzoni? The guy who excavated the tomb of Seti the First?"

He nods, but he takes no pride in it. Slowly, I remember more about the man, and I understand why he doesn't. Anthony practically narrates my thoughts as they come to me. "For all he's supposedly discovered, no one in our field can think of my work without thinking of him. The most notorious tomb robber Egypt has ever known. The guy who vandalized the Pyramid of Khafre."

My gaze becomes distant as I try to understand the man in front of me in this new light. "Why are you telling me this?"

He finally lifts his head to look at me. "Because when I invite you on a dig, and you go barging into a tomb, it doesn't look like archaeology; it looks like I'm responsible for running a dig the way Giovanni did. Ancestry is a messy thing. We always carry around the sins of the past, even if we don't know it. That's why I got so stingy with what we brought back. Damage control."

I sit in the silence of the explanation for a long moment. "I'm not sure I like that logic, but I guess I get it."

I turn back to him and ask, "What did Kayvon tell you that got you to change your mind about helping us?"

Anthony smirks. "I guess he appealed to my sense of pride."

"What does that mean?"

The moment is cut short as Kayvon pokes his head back in. "Is there even a bathroom on this floor?"

"Not a men's room; you have to go down a level," Anthony replies.

Kayvon narrows his eyes. "And you couldn't just tell me that?"

"I didn't like your tone. Besides, I was a little—" Anthony pauses, eyes narrowing as they go back to the screen. "Distracted..."

We both go to look over his shoulder. He uses his pen to point to the stone lid of the sarcophagus, trying to indicate something we can't quite make out. "How did I miss that? I think there's something written inside the lid. Where did we find that fifth jar?"

My eyes go wide at the realization. "In the sarcophagus. That's why it was so weird. Canopic jars were never buried in a sarcophagus. Whoever was worried someone would find the jar must have left another inscription in the sarcophagus!"

"So we just need to go see the lid," Kayvon mutters. "Where is it?"

"Across the street," Anthony and I say in unison.

We leave Anthony to continue his research while I take Kayvon to relieve himself before we continue to our next destination. Along the way, I ask him, "What did you tell Tony to change his mind?"