The scribe directed her to a hole in the ground hidden inside a large tent. Steps hewn into the bedrock descended into darkness.

“How safe will it be?” She was all too aware of the grave robbing that took place in the kingdom; sometimes mere months after a tomb had been sealed.

“The most secure there has ever been,” he said proudly. “The workers are brought here blindfolded. On the surface they work only at night, and underground none have visibility of the overall plan. When we finish only I shall know where and how to enter, and what is inside.”

She looked him up and down. This small man and old friend had already devoted most of his working life to this task and she held him in the highest regard. That he was the only one apart from the king and queen to know the full details of what lay beneath their feet was a great comfort to her.

He shuffled over to his portable work-bench and picked up a small wooden tablet and a lump of charcoal with his right hand, an oil lamp with his left. Together they went down the steps, the empty tent above them beginning to fill with the golden hue of dawn.

“Suten Anu,” Nefertiti’s soft voice barely echoed in the narrow tunnel, “what you have built here is important, but what it conceals even more so.” She stopped before the end of the steps and turned to him. For a moment he looked her in the eyes but quickly looked down. “No,” she continued, lifting his chin with her hand. “I want you to see me when I tell you this.”

He let his eyes draw uncomfortably-level with hers.

“What lies within must not be found,” she pleaded with him. “Not by our people, or by the kingdoms we barely keep at bay. It must be held secret and safe for thousands of years, and what you have built must protect it.”

It was difficult to hold her gaze and he found himself once more looking to the floor. He tried hard not to think of the scroll hidden away inside his workbench.

“Suten Anu,” she pulled his chin up again. “The secret of what lies beneath us must die with you. Can you guarantee me that?”

He clutched his tablet and charcoal tighter still and fixed her penetrating gaze as best he could.

“Yes,” he lied.

Chapter 1

The sun broke through the slow-moving clouds and bounced off the glass side of the Faculty of Humanities building before plunging into the depths of the dark, cool water of an ornamental pond. The sound of birdsong broke the silence of the square, and a couple passing by stopped to hold each other in a loving embrace. Overhead, the vapour-trail of a passenger plane connected the two banks of grey cloud, through which the deep blue summer sky could be seen.

Moments later the sunlight retreated from the water, past the glass side of the building and up into the sky as the clouds connected once more.  The loving couple broke their hold on each other and moved on.  The optimistic chaffinch sang in bursts for several minutes before silence returned.

Gail Turner rushed past without noticing any of this because she was, as usual, late.  The glass doors of the building slid open as she approached, recognising the tiny chip embedded in her forearm.  The chip ID system could, technically, record her every movement around the campus, although it was effectively rarely used for anything other than opening doors and logging on to computers.

The security guard looked up in surprise as she burst into the long connecting corridor which led to the main foyer.  Recognising the short, dark-haired woman, he shook his head and returned his gaze to the small tablet computer propped up on the desk in front of him.  Gail crossed the foyer and took the steps to the second floor two by two, ignoring the lift.  She knew that she would be the last person there, so she didn’t have time to wait while the machine made its way down to the ground floor to pick her up.

Being late for a lecture during the first year of your degree was par for the course, in your second year excusable, and in your third and final year probably a bad idea. But being late at the end of your master’s degree, for a study group that only had three other members and was supposed to help lay the foundation for the PhD she intended to begin that year, was bad even by Gail’s standards.

She pushed the door inwards softly and slid inside.

“Sorry,” she said quietly as she closed the door behind her.

The two other students looked up in amusement and she got a reprimand from Mr David Hunt, in the form of a quick shake of the head and an almost inaudible tut, which was about as severe as reprimands went where David was concerned.  It was in his office that the study group was being held, and Ellie Pyke had to make space by shifting a huge pile of manuscripts and ring-binders from the chair beside her.  Gail sat down, rescued her tablet from the mess of her handbag, flipped open its cover and sat back in her chair before looking at them all expectantly.

David gave her a wry smile.

“Anyway, as I was saying before Mrs Turner decided to pop in: Burynshik has really forced us to recontextualise pretty much every other site in Europe and central Asia, from the late Palaeolithic to the early Mesolithic.”

Gail leaned forwards and tucked her tablet against her chest. She may have been late, and she may not have done all the reading she should have, but there really was nothing like a David Hunt monologue to really capture the imagination.

What always amazed Gail was that despite her interest in the subject, no matter how fascinating the prospect of uncovering artefacts that had been lost to the world for hundreds or thousands of years, she would always end up late to most things.  As one of the more mature students, being thirty-two while most others were in their early to mid-twenties, her excuse to David, should the subject ever come up, was that she had a family to look after and a house to clean.

This wasn’t true of course; not that she didn’t have a family, taking George out of the equation would have broken his heart, but rather that as children weren’t even on the radar and George mostly worked from home, there was honestly little for her to do other than study.

“I can’t believe that no one knows where that structure came from” a voice said beside her.

“Sorry?” Gail looked up over her coffee cup on the table. The study group over, they had gone to the Faculty’s small café for one of their usual mid-morning chats. “Oh, sorry Ellie, I was thinking about my research proposal.” Ellie’s face was a mixture of sympathy and amusement. Gail slumped down on the table and stared at her coffee, which was cooling down nicely.  “It’s useless. One minute I think I’ve got it, and then before you know it I lose interest and give up,” she sighed. “I don’t know, I just look at the way David talks about his research and I get it, you know?”

Ellie nodded. “He does make it sound interesting, for sure.”

“It’s not sounding interesting, it is interesting. That’s what I want, something big, something different,” she looked out of the window at the clouds moving across the sky; it looked like rain. “I give up, it’s useless. I’m useless.”

“That’s true, you are,” Ellie agreed. “You have a degree in politics, which you aced by the way, you used to work for a Member of Parliament, then you did a second degree in archaeology, now you’re just finishing your master’s degree, and you’re about to submit a research proposal to do a PhD,” she counted everything out on her fingers. “You see? Absolutely useless, I mean, what have you been doing with yourself?”

One of the reasons Gail loved Ellie was for her sarcasm. And she was right; her career path had been a little odd, starting in politics and ending up here in the Faculty of Humanities café over a decade later worrying about her PhD thesis. It was always the first question that came up when people found out what she did: how did you end up moving from politics to archaeology? And every time her answer was the same.