“If I can’t save my son? Then I’ll know for sure there’s no God.” Nevada looked at him and offered a smile that could’ve been cut into her face with a razor. “You know how I love being right.”
Jacques seemed to have nothing to say to that. He looked over the instrument panel again. “We’re almost there. You should wake her.”
“She’ll be up soon enough.” Nevada dug into her pants pocket, coming up with something that she tossed into Jacques’s lap too quick for Candice to see. “Here.”
“ Quoi —?”
“Little something I took off Farouq al-Jabbar. It should be enough to convince the State Department that he was taken out. I hear the bounty’s something like four hundred thou. That should keep you in snails for a while.”
“In five years?” Jacques asked. “When they get around to paying?”
“I might not be around in five years,” Nevada said simply. “And without me doing all the hard work around here, there’s no way you’re going to be able to keep flying. Besides, what else are they going to spend the money on? Healthcare?”
Jacques chuckled. “Very well. I will see what can be done.”
“By the way, earlier, when you said Rosa Parks was just a big whiner who was too lazy to get out of her seat…”
“What? I did not say this—” Jacques looked up and saw Candice. “Oh, very funny.”
Candice held out an envelope. “Here. My parents live in London. In case I don’t… well, you know.”
Jacques took it. “It would be my honor. But don’t worry. Easy here doesn’t let go of people that easily.”
Nevada hung an arm over the back of her seat as she turned to look at Candice. “Tunes okay? I thought we could all mellow out a little before we get there. I can change ’em if you want.”
“No, I like this song.”
“Me too.” Nevada nodded.
Candice dropped down into one of the back seats. “Is that a parachute?”
“Good eye, Cushing,” Nevada said, closing it up again.
“What are you doing with a parachute?”
“Checking the reserve chute. You should do it every few months, just to be sure.”
“But you’re only doing that to be safe, right? We’re not going to need them? I mean, the plane isn’t falling apart?” Candice asked, watching Nevada unplug her iPod and wrap it in its aux cord.
“No, the plane isn’t falling apart. It’s doing just fine.” Nevada tucked the iPod into a pocket.
“So we won’t need the parachutes.”
Nevada got up. “You should probably try this on, to make sure it fits.”
“Of course it’s going to fit, I’m not—” Candice found herself pulled up out of her seat and swooshed out of the flight deck. In the more open space of the crew compartment, Nevada helped her into the parachute’s shoulder straps. “See, it fits. Can I take it off?”
“In a few minutes,” Nevada assured her, belting the rig’s harnesses around Candice’s chest and thighs. “Once we’re on the ground.”
“You mean the plane. When we’re in the plane and the plane is on the ground.”
Nevada snapped her fingers. “You need a helmet! Jacques, where are the helmets?”
“We lost them back in Bora Gora.”
Nevada faced Candice again. “Why would you need a helmet? In case you fall on your head? Don’t worry about it, forget it, probably just a liability thing.”
“Three minutes to the drop zone!” Jacques called back.
“I am not dropping in any zone!” Candice insisted. “We are landing the plane, yeah, and I am walking off it like a sane person!”
Nevada was putting on her own parachute. “And I would love that, I really would, but here’s the thing: there’s no airports near the Ennedi Plateau. The closest one is in N’Djamena, which is six hundred miles away, so to get to the coordinates, we’d have to get a car, and drive there, and then we’d need camels, and there’d be hiking—trust me, I Googled all of this. Much simpler just to…” Nevada clapped her hands together. “Drop down right on top of it. Just right down. Boom. Done.”
“And then how the bloody hell do we get out of the place?” Candice demanded, although her brain felt like it was swelling with all the other concerns that she needed to voice.
“Don’t worry about that. It’s all taken care of. We’ll have plenty of time to find the tomb, we’ll be able to leave first thing, and trust me, the skydiving is not that bad. You’ll be falling at a hundred and twenty-two miles an hour; it’ll be over before you know it.”
“When I splatter on the ground like a…like a bug getting hit with a newspaper!”
Nevada blinked at her. “I’d really rather you use the parachute. That’s what it’s there for.”
“One minute!” Jacques yelled back.
Nevada indicated a metal loop on Candice’s chest. “This is the ripcord. Deploys the parachute. When I pull mine, you pull yours.”
“I am not pulling anything!”
“I thought you didn’t want to die, God .” Nevada tapped a lever on the side of Candice’s belt. “If the parachute doesn’t work, pull that. It’s the breakaway handle and it’ll get rid of the main chute. This!” Nevada pointed at another metal ring on Candice’s left-hand side. “Reserve ripcord. Pull that after you pull the breakaway handle. It’ll deploy your secondary chute, which, you know, just as good.”
“You couldn’t have explained all of this a few hours ago!” Candice demanded.
Nevada grimaced. “I didn’t want you to freak out. Didn’t you have a nice, relaxing flight thinking we were going to land?”
“I did!”
“And now, okay, sure, you’re having a pretty bad five minutes. Excuse me—” Nevada pushed past Candice, walking to the entry hatch. “But it’s almost over! All you have to do now is walk through a door. It’s easy as falling off a log.”
“ The log is fifteen thousand feet in the air! ”
“So, don’t look down, ya big baby.” She muscled the entry hatch open.
Wind howled into the cabin, slapping against Candice with a cold fervor. She immediately hugged herself against the chill, but it was nothing next to the view through the open door. She could see the curvature of the Earth, clouds on level with her body, the maze-like ridges of the Ennedi Plateau’s sandstone rock formations—twisted and scoured by the desert into gnarled fingers with an unsteady grip on the air. They could’ve been reaching for her. Candice threw herself back from the hatch as far as she could.
“Fuck that! No! No! No! I’m not going! I’m staying with Jacques!”
“Ah-ho!” Jacques cried from the pilot’s seat. “The French joie de vivre strikes again!”
“You’re not helping,” Nevada told him.
“There are some goggles in the… where we kept the thing?”
“What thing?” Nevada demanded.
“The red thing,” Jacques said.
“Now you’re helping,” Nevada said, stooping under one of the bunks. “Could you circle around please?” She came up with two sets of goggles, lowering her voice to speak to Candice again. “It’s cool, it’s not like jet fuel is expensive. That’s an urban myth.”
Candice didn’t hear her, startling as Nevada swept the goggles over her face. “You’re going to throw me out of the plane, aren’t you?”
“What?” Nevada asked as she put her own goggles on. “What are you talking about?”
Candice backed away from her. “You’re going to throw me out of the plane!” she repeated, sounding more sure of herself. “You are! And you’re probably going to quote some stupid movie while you do it, like— ‘Get off my plane!’”
“Okay, Air Force One was a very fun thriller with a seminal performance by Harrison Ford, so let’s keep things in perspective here.” Nevada took a step toward Candice. Like a startled cat, Candice jumped away from her.
“You’re doing it right now!” Candice insisted. “You are just about to throw me off the plane!�
��
“Candice…” Nevada spread her arms wide. “I wouldn’t do something like that to you.”
She stepped closer to Candice, who pointed violently at her. “Stop walking!”
“I’m not allowed to walk now?”
“Not when you’re going to throw me off the plane!”
“I just told you I wasn’t going to throw you off the damn plane!”
“Okay!” Candice raised her voice. “Now you said it and the way you said it just shows me how much you’re going to throw me off the plane!”
“Well, now I want to throw you off the plane because you’re being a little bitch about it.”
“Did you hear that?” Candice’s pointed finger ricocheted between Nevada and Jacques. “Did you hear her say it? She said it!”
“I can’t hear anything,” Jacques said. “We’re at fifteen thousand feet and the door is open.”
“A likely story!” Candice gave Nevada a fixed stare. “You are not throwing me off the bloody plane!” she growled, and immediately turned to march out the door and be swept away by the fall.
Nevada stared after her, making a minute adjustment of her goggles. She was speechless, though in the sudden roaring emptiness of the wind-tossed conversation, it was hard to tell.
“I do not understand women,” Jacques shouted over the wind.
“Oh, like I do?” Nevada asked, and followed Candice out.
The descent—Candice remembered how it felt. Weightless, and yet she’d been more aware of gravity’s pull than she’d ever been in her life. She’d felt motionless but experienced the wind rushing by her as thickly as flowing water.
She fell to her knees, her stomach buckled, and she vomited.
Beside her, Nevada took hold of her hair, keeping it out of the way as Candice’s rebellious digestive system had its acrid way.
“Oh, shit, I touched your hair. Sorry, I know you’re not supposed to do that with black people, right? Because it’s supposed to be lucky? I didn’t mean to take your luck. You can have it back.”
Candice finished evacuating her gullet by spitting vehemently. “I’ve been joined to you at the hip for two weeks. How lucky do you think I am?”
Nevada handed her canteen to Candice, who not so graciously used it to wash the bitter taste out of her mouth. Then she guzzled all that she could to try and settle her stomach.
“You did a great job skydiving,” Nevada said. “Especially for a beginner. You’re like a natural.”
“Let’s just find this fucking thing.” Candice poured a little more water onto her face and then wiped herself off.
They had landed on top of one of the famous rock formations that defined the Ennedi Plateau, a towering mesa of sandstone surrounded by spires, pillars, and arches of rock, protruding from the Sahara sands like the half-buried bones of some gargantuan skeleton. They almost formed a labyrinth, cordoning off the sandy paths below into jagged scars and looping circulations. Candice shook her head. No wonder the desert had inspired the idea of mummification. It certainly made her think of decay.
This wasn’t an isolated outcropping. It was an entire forest of stone, spreading out below her and towering above for as far as the eye could see. Candice tried to imagine finding a dig site in all of this.
Beside her, Nevada was booting up her GPS. “Let’s review what we know. Amanirenas. Warrior queen of the Kushites. She defeats the Romans in battle, takes the Aegis from them.”
“Right,” Candice said, “skull thing. Still not clear on that.”
“Can we wait until the end before we ask questions?” Nevada demanded. She smacked the GPS unit with the heel of her hand to hurry it along. “The Kushites bury the Aegis with Amanirenas. Natural disasters. Pyramid is falling apart. They assume the Aegis is cursed. Give it back to the Roman-Egyptian tag team. They take it to bury it with Cleopatra in a secret tomb, leaving directions in Amanirenas’s tomb. Directions which lead…” Consulting the GPS, she pointed to a mouth of the maze. “There, then…” She did some quick mental calculations, her lips moving wordlessly. It was a pleasant change. “To there, to there, to there , ending up right about…” She pointed to the sands of a clearing thirty feet down on their left. “There.”
Candice squinted. “You mean the featureless expanse of sand and rock that’s completely empty?”
Nevada looked down as well. “You’re right. It does remind me of your social life. Sha- zam !”
Candice prayed that wasn’t meant to be a catchphrase. “If I could point out a small flaw in your planning…”
“Why stop now?”
“What if we don’t immediately find the tomb? We’re in the middle of a desert the size of China with no provisions. What are we going to do for food? What are we going to do for water? What are we going to do for toilet paper ?”
Nevada clapped Candice on the shoulder. “Oh ye of little faith… I had Jacques put together a supply drop with water, rations, tents, everything we need. He dropped it right after we jumped. It should be landing any minute.”
Behind Nevada, a crate streaked down like a comet. It crashed into a stony plateau, its wooden slats instantly disintegrating, its contents scattering across the landscape like the entrails in a gory disembowelment. A sleeping bag exploded against the rock, disgorging its feathery down in a grace note to the otherwise total devastation.
Nevada turned around. “Hunh,” she said. “Parachute must not’ve deployed.”
Candice felt a vein trembling along the orbit of her eye. “Parachutes can just not deploy ?”
“Well, this one sure didn’t.”
Candice’s words leaked out of her like some trailing bile from her recent nausea. “I was just in a parachute!”
“So was I,” Nevada reasoned. “And as a wise man once said, two out of three ain’t bad.”
“That’s Meat Loaf. You’re quoting Meat Loaf.”
“You quoted Martin Luther King.”
“What… what is your point ?”
Nevada thought about it. “Okay, I had one for a minute there, but I lost it. You win this round.”
Candice sat down, the rock hard and uncomfortable and overwarm, but she didn’t trust herself to be on her feet. “I’m going to die of thirst with the biggest idiot in the world for company.”
“Candice, please. If anything, you’re probably going to starve to death. We can always get water from that well.”
Candice followed Nevada’s pointing finger down to a circle of limestone blocks, black with depth in the middle, shards of wood surrounding it like picked-clean bones that had once been a pulley system to pull up a bucket or waterskin. But…
“It’s probably dry by now. That design is ancient. Ramses himself could’ve drunk from that.”
Nevada blinked. “You don’t say…”
In a flash, she was off, making her way down the steep incline like a mountain goat. Groaning, Candice followed at a much more cautious pace. By the time she was halfway down, Nevada was approaching the well and unfurling a length of rope from her pack. She took out a glow stick, which she cracked and then dropped down the well. Candice fell on her ass and skidded the last few feet to the sands. She had to windmill her arms to keep from being pitched on her face.
“There’s something down there,” Nevada said. “Some kind of cave. Perfect place to hide something. The well is the only landmark around here, but who’d be stupid enough to climb down a well?”
“You,” Candice said dryly.
“Exactly!” Nevada tied the rope around a boulder, using it as an anchor. She gave several rough tugs to check the knot, then tossed the remaining length to Candice. “Here. Belay.”
“What?”
Nevada picked up the other end of the rope and tied it around her waist. “Lower me down.”
“Okay, stop, no. I’m a serious archaeologist, you’re a grave robber.”
Nevada looked up with her eyes glowing. “You remembered!”
“If there is something of archaeological int
erest down there, I should be the one checking it out.”
“No, you should be up here, out of harm’s way, while I make sure there aren’t any death-traps.” Nevada checked the Scorpion she had slung over her shoulder and the Shadow 2 she had holstered in her gun belt.
“There aren’t any death-traps,” Candice said definitively. “There are never death-traps.”
“What about Meroe? You step on the wrong tile, big-ass stone crushes you. Classic death-trap.”
Candice opened her mouth to protest that that’d been intended as a coronation ceremony, not a way to kill off tomb robbers, but it sounded bad even before she said it. “Okay, so there was one death-trap. That doesn’t make it a thing . If you met an alien, would that make you believe in Santa Claus?”
“Of course you don’t believe in Santa Claus.” Nevada unslung her pack to lighten herself, then took off her Scorpion and leaned it against the well. “Lower me down. If there’s anything down there—besides death-traps—you can take a look too.”
With a sigh, Candice took off her jacket. “Your concern is touching,” she said, wrapping a length of rope around her forearm to get a good grip on it.
As she begrudgingly lowered Nevada down the well, Candice wondered just how sincere Nevada was about any of this. As peeved as she was over being put on the sidelines, she couldn’t think of a reason for Nevada to do it besides some odd, protective feeling. Like how Nevada had put herself between Candice and the lion. She’d even seemed—on second thought—truthful about not throwing Candice off The Flying Carpet .
She probably only needs me alive to translate , Candice thought in an enjoyable fit of bitterness. Or because she wants to get a leg over. Or both. And she was definitely going to throw me out of the plane…
“Hey, Candice?” Nevada called up, her voice echoing weirdly around the dank contours of the shaft. “Are there crocodiles in the Sahara?”
“Yes, actually.” Candice leaned an elbow on the lip of the well. “West African Crocodiles.”
“They aren’t aquatic?”
“They are,” Candice said. “But during the dry season, they stay in caves to keep cool and conserve energy. It’s called aestivation.”
Candice Cushing and the Lost Tomb of Cleopatra Page 7
