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“Perhaps notthatcurious,” Abdullah mused. “Ricardo, what do you think is on the other side of this wall?”
“Her burial chamber,” Tío Ricardo said. “I see where you’re going with this, sahbi. You’re wondering if Caesar was left out on purpose because he wouldn’t have been buried with Cleopatra.”
“Who else would have been?” I asked, my mind reeling. It never occurred to me that she might have been buried with anyone else. Could the tiles be hinting at who else was with her?
“She begged Octavian not to be parted from Antonius,” Whit said. “Would he have honored her request?”
“Unlikely,” Tío Ricardo said slowly. “Cleopatra was a thorn in his side. Why would he have relented?”
“To appease Egyptians,” Abdullah said. “Their pharaoh had just been conquered. She was beloved by her people, and was the only Greek ruler to have bothered to learn Egyptian. They would have wanted her last wish to have been respected.”
I stepped forward and instinctively pushed down on a turquoise tile etched with a drawing of the sun. It depressed fully, becoming flush with the wall. The same thrill of discovery roared in my fingertips. We were becoming good friends. Then I tried the other marked tiles. Each of them worked like buttons also.
Whit snapped his fingers. “Just like the column.”
“We found Selene and Helios upstairs in the room. It’s how we knew to examine the pillar,” I told Abdullah. I was still having a hard time looking in my uncle’s direction. Every time I did, I saw traces of my mother. The sister he’d betrayed.
I shouldn’t be helping them but I couldn’t leave either. My mother would want to know everything that happened, and I wouldn’t fail her again.
“I think we ought to try pressing the stamped tiles in different orders,” Whit said. “There are only eight such tiles, excluding Marcus Antonius. He wasn’t represented on the column.”
We all agreed, each of us taking two tiles.
“On the count of three,” Tío Ricardo said. “Starting with you, Whitford.”
“WaaHid, itnein, talaata,” Abdullah said.
Whit pressed his tiles, I followed, then Tío Ricardo, and last, Abdullah.
Nothing happened. We exhausted every sequence we could think of until one last obvious one remained.
“Dios mío,” Tío Ricardo said. “Perhaps Marcusisburied with her.”
We included the soldier’s tiles in our sequence but it still yielded no results.
My uncle growled in frustration.
Abdullah made a sound of surprise and bent down, pointing to a small tile near the ground stamped with an image of a falcon. “It’sHorus.”
“The son of Caesar and Cleopatra—Caesarion!” said Tío Ricardo. “He was sometimes associated with Isis’s own child.”
“Cleopatra, Caesarion, and Marcus Antonius,” Abdullah said. “That’s who is on the other side of this wall. We only press those tiles.”
My uncle nodded, resigned. But after pressing them in various orders, the wall still didn’t budge.
“What about pressing the tiles all at once?” I suggested. “Because they’re buried together?”
Abdullah nodded his approval, and my heart warmed. “All together. At the count of three.”
“WaaHid, itnein, talaata,” Whit said.
We pressed the tiles and a loud click followed the long groan of undisturbed stone moving for the first time in two millennia. The outline of a door appeared, the edges following the square shape of the tiles. Abdullah gave a final push and the panel swung forward. Air burst forth, swirling around us in a warm embrace. The candles flickered but held through the onslaught.
I looked at Abdullah, but he wasn’t fazed by what had happened. He seemed to have expected it. Perhaps it was a typical occurrence when opening a room for the first time in over two thousand years.
Tío Ricardo went and retrieved the torch and handed it to Abdullah, who went through first, followed by my uncle. Whit gestured for me to go next.
With a deep inhale, I walked into the tomb.
