Eighteen
E llie climbed to the top of the grand temple stairway, dragging Neil along with her. The highest tier of the enormous structure would once have housed its most sacred precincts. Back then, a grand colonnade would have fronted the level, interspersed with statues of the pharaoh and her gods. That facade was nothing but tumbled rubble now, footings and fragments that lined the edge of the floor like a row of jagged teeth.
Beyond the broken columns lay a private open-air courtyard. Chapels and annexes branched off from it, including one carved directly into the face of the cliff, which rose from the back of the courtyard to a dizzying height overhead.
Ellie puzzled over the most likely place where she might find the sun disk mentioned in the inscription from the jewelry box. Could it be something painted on the remaining walls that lined the courtyard? Or might it be hidden in one of the chapels?
The truth was that it could be anywhere.
Instinctively, she turned to Neil for input—but he was looking back over his shoulder at the processional way and the distant glimmer of the Nile. The carriage she had seen earlier had reached the base of the temple, promising the imminent invasion of more tourists. Ellie suppressed a sigh.
“Ist das ein sch?ner Ort für ein Picknick?” one of the Germans from the hotel announced as he skipped up the steps to the courtyard.
Ellie did not want to search for ancient clues while being watched by a pair of Deutschlanders munching on pickles.
“How about this way?” She tugged Neil through the opening in the cliff.
The heat outside had been rising with the day, but in the shadowy confines of the carved chapel, Ellie was instantly cooler. The space was also quiet. The chatter of the tourists fell away as they moved deeper inside.
She tingled with excitement as she breathed in the smell of stone and dust. In this protected space, more of the temple’s original artwork had survived the centuries. The blue-tinted wings of a ba-bird extended over lines of hieroglyphs and graceful figures draped in royal finery.
“It’s a shrine to Amun.” She spotted the name of one of the pre-eminent deities of Thebes above an empty niche cut into the wall.
“That’s Hatshepsut and her father, Thutmose I, making offerings to the gods,” Neil pointed out from behind her, wiping his mouth after taking a pull from his canteen.
Ellie turned to look. The woman who had made herself king was crowned with the uraeus cobra of a pharaoh. A false beard extended in a column from her chin. Her skin was a ruddy ocher, and she was depicted bare-chested, wearing a man’s white kilt.
She studied the image as Neil stood beside her. The silence between them began to feel awkward.
This was the first moment Ellie had been alone with her brother since she had ambushed him in his tomb in Saqqara, and the weight of everything they had not yet talked about hung over her.
Part of Ellie loathed the idea of bringing up her relationship with Adam when so much remained unsettled between them, but she owed Neil better than that. He was her brother, after all, and Adam was his best friend. She ought to at least try to clear the air between them on the subject, and she couldn’t know when she might get a better opportunity to do it—which meant that she had best stiffen up and get on with it.
She drew in a breath. “I suppose I ought to…”
“So about you and…” Neil began at the same time.
They both stopped, exchanging an awkward look.
“Of course,” Ellie continued hurriedly, “the whole situation was entirely unexpected…”
“And as your older brother,” Neil pressed on simultaneously, “I feel a certain obligation…”
“I mean, we were halfway through the wilderness before I even realized!” Ellie protested.
“But you’re a grown woman,” Neil said stoutly. “It’s hardly my place to…”
He trailed off, and they both stared at each other.
“Good chat,” Ellie concluded.
“Yes,” Neil agreed, adjusting his spectacles as he turned back to the image of the pharaoh.
Ellie cleared her throat, pushing her attention to the mural as well.
She had always found Hatshepsut desperately intriguing. She wasn’t the only woman to hold the role of pharaoh, but the list was exceedingly short. Hatshepsut had claimed the throne for herself against all precedent and proceeded to rule over Egypt through a period of great prosperity. The notion that Ellie was actually looking upon that ancient ruler’s face—or even a stylized representation of it—struck her powerfully.
“It’s impressive this wasn’t destroyed,” Neil noted.
“What do you mean?”
“Thutmose III, her successor, had most representations of Hatshepsut defaced.” Neil frowned. “Didn’t you know?”
Ellie hadn’t. The realization made her cheeks flush. “But why?”
“It was probably meant as some sort of divine punishment,” Neil replied distractedly, leaning in to study a cartouche.
“Punishment,” Ellie echoed. “For being pharaoh… and a woman.”
Neil cast her an uncomfortable look.
Ellie gazed at the noble, powerful features on the wall, her heart aching with a tumbled mix of emotion she wasn’t quite sure how to name.
“There’s nothing here,” her brother declared.
He was right. As intriguing as the chapel was, it lacked any promising sun disks. Ellie turned to go, even though part of her itched to linger and study every aspect of the artwork.
Outside, the glare of midday blinded her. She shielded her eyes with the brim of her hat until they adjusted.
The upper level of the temple was a sprawl of low ruins. The Germans had spread a blanket out in the center of the sacred courtyard and were snacking on sandwiches.
Where should they look next?
“That message was left in the jewelry box by someone who wanted Neferneferuaten’s story to survive,” Ellie mused aloud. “They would have put it somewhere they thought it would remain safe indefinitely.”
Neil waved a hand over the ruins. “Three-quarters of the superstructure of this temple has been destroyed. Even if they’d put it in a location they thought would be permanent, there’s no guarantee it’s actually still here.”
“The people of the th Dynasty would have seen plenty of ruined monuments at places like Saqqara, where relics of the Old Kingdom were already crumbling,” Ellie countered, thinking furiously. “Whoever left that message would know to hide what we’re looking for somewhere that wasn’t going to fall down.”
“We already checked the chapel in the cliff,” Neil reminded her. “And there aren’t any burial shafts here contemporary with Horemheb’s time. Look, I’m as intrigued as you are by the notion of finding another Atenist relic, but you’ve got to at least consider the possibility that this is a dead end.”
Ellie tried not to let his skepticism sting, even though the task of finding what they were looking for felt immense when faced with the sprawl of the temple.
“Hatshepsut wasn’t an Atenist,” Ellie pushed back. “Whoever hid this next clue must have brought it here over a hundred years after her death. If you were hiding an Atenist clue in this temple, where would you have put it?”
Neil frowned, his eyes going a bit distant. “Well—in the sun chapel, I suppose.”
Ellie stared at him in surprise. “What sun chapel?”
“That one over there.” Neil pointed across the courtyard to a narrow opening that framed a set of descending stairs. A flicker of movement at its base caught Ellie’s eye as a skinny, sand-hued cat darted inside.
Ellie didn’t recall seeing anything about a sun chapel in her readings about Hatshepsut’s funerary temple—and Ellie was very good at recalling what she had read. “Was that in one of the excavation reports?”
Neil blinked at her as though coming out of a daydream. “Where else would I have found it?”
The question sounded slightly more bewildered than rhetorical. Ellie frowned thoughtfully at her brother.
“What?” he asked, surreptitiously adjusting his spectacles again.
“Nothing.” Ellie turned her attention back to their mission. “A sun chapel would be situated in an open-air courtyard to catch the light of the rising dawn each day. If there’s no ceiling, it can’t fall down.”
“Let’s go have a look, then,” Neil concluded tiredly.
The doorway only appeared narrow from a distance because it was so very tall. Ellie craned her neck back to look up at it as they passed through, filled with a sense of quiet awe at its monumental scale.
A set of stairs descended a half-story to a space that would once have been a covered vestibule. Bas relief art on the walls had been scoured clean of all but a few remnants of old paint, but Ellie could still make out a few lines of hieroglyphs and the kilted figure of the pharaoh.
Her face had been chipped away.
Another doorway framed by half-ruined walls opened from the vestibule to the sun chapel. As Ellie had expected, the space was open to the sky. Even though the walls that framed it were partially fallen into rubble, they were still high enough to reach well above Ellie’s head, making the space a private secret closed away from the rest of the temple.
The Ancient Egyptians had worshiped the sun in many forms, stretching back thousands of years. Ellie shouldn’t be surprised to find a space dedicated to that practice inside Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple—though she still wondered how Neil had known about it.
The open-air chapel would have been built several generations before Akhenaten transformed the sun cult into a faith in the Aten as the sole god of Egypt and creator of all life—but it still felt plausible that an Atenist might have found this an appropriate place to conceal a clue to the secret history of the mysterious pharaoh Neferneferuaten.
The sun altar itself dominated the small courtyard. The square platform, roughly four feet in height, was where the ancient priests would have stood when making prayers and offerings to the rising sun.
Ellie circled it, carefully studying the stones as Neil frowned at some of the surviving fragments of artwork on the courtyard walls.
It didn’t take her long to fully explore the space. The sun chapel was really just a rectangular box, open to the air and entirely lacking in distinctive features. Besides the altar, there were only two little nooks in the walls that once held votive statues. They were now empty except for the sandy-colored cat, which had hopped up into one of them to lick at a paw.
“I don’t see any disks,” Ellie admitted.
“This space wasn’t as heavily decorated as other areas of the temple,” Neil replied a little distractedly, still studying the walls.
“But it has to be here,” Ellie insisted. “This is the only place that makes sense.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Peanut.” Neil pulled his attention from the stones and gave a little shrug. “It’s just a courtyard and a rebuilt altar.”
“Rebuilt?” Ellie echoed, confused. She looked back to the stone platform that dominated the center of the space. Its perfectly squared blocks all looked unbroken and original—which she would not have expected with a structure that had been recently restored. “By whom? Mr. Naville?”
“Not Naville,” Neil returned with a hint of exasperation as he poked his head into one of the votive nooks. “The priests.”
Ellie stared once more at the box of neatly quarried limestone. “Neil, how do you know this was rebuilt by the ancient priests?”
“Just look at it,” Neil ordered with a dismissive wave of his hand.
“I am ,” Ellie insisted—and then she saw it.
The altar was built of a finer sort of limestone with a light, even grade… but the color of the blocks was slightly different on part of the staircase. It looked as though one type of stone had been layered over the top of another—as if the original stairs had been lengthened and increased in height to accommodate a larger altar.
The difference was almost indistinguishable unless you were up close and looking for it… which Neil hadn’t been, as he was standing on the opposite side of the platform.
Ellie fought back a wave of frustration and admiration. This was just the sort of thing that had always driven her batty about her brother. Neil was handy with facts and figures—but Ellie could out-memorize him any day of the week. His startling leaps of intuition were what took his scholarship to the next level and made it feel nearly impossible to compete with him. They came out of nowhere, though Neil always managed to rattle off some explanation for how he’d arrived at them when pressed on the matter.
Yet those explanations had never felt quite right to Ellie. They were always just a little short of what they ought to be to explain how he came to his conclusions.
Were she a more superstitious sort of person, Ellie might have called it uncanny.
She pushed her attention back to the sun altar—because Neil’s revelation, however he arrived at it, raised an intriguing possibility.
“Ancient builders wouldn’t have wanted to waste high quality limestone by making these facing blocks any thicker than needed,” she mused aloud. “I would bet my left foot that they’re only panels, supported by struts laid over the structure of the older, smaller altar, with rubble filled in for added stability.”
Ellie buzzed with excitement at the discovery—but Neil didn’t seem to hear her. He gazed at her from the other side of the altar, his shoulders slumped into lines of dismay.
“Peanut…” he began.
He looked so forlorn that for once his use of Ellie’s wretched nickname failed to infuriate her.
“What is it?” she demanded instead. “What’s wrong?”
Neil looked down at his shoes and drew in a breath. “It has recently come to my attention that I have not been as good a brother to you as I ought to have been,” he confessed awkwardly.
“What do you mean?” Ellie pressed, confused.
“Only that you are so dashed good at this!” Neil burst out, pacing. “When you were sitting under my desk, stealing my textbooks to read—well, I encouraged it, didn’t I? Because you were so terribly clever. But I was treating it all like a game, and then I realized that you were serious. And why wouldn’t you be?” He threw up his hands. “You have the knowledge, the skills, the drive, the intelligence—but I…”
His words choked off.
“What?” Ellie set her hands on her hips.
Her brother stared at her helplessly. His hair was mussed and his eyeglasses were a little crooked. “I hoped you would give it up.” He closed his eyes. “Because I didn’t see how you could do this—how it could possibly happen. And I didn’t think you could ever be happy if you had your mind set on a life that was impossible!”
Ellie felt as though the ground beneath her trembled, threatening to give way. Any response she might have made to him caught in her throat.
“But I know you have just as much right to it as I do!” Neil protested, throwing out his arms. “That the rest of the world is mad when they say a woman can’t do this sort of work! I just went along with it because I couldn’t see how I could change it. And I still can’t! I haven’t the foggiest idea where I could even start! But I… I…”
He trailed off, his eyes pleading.
“…feel like you ought to have tried,” Ellie filled in softly.
His words stirred up a storm—a whirling tumult of frustration, disappointment, sadness, and rage. Or perhaps the storm had been there for years, only Ellie had always held it at bay—staving it off with discipline and stubbornness, principle and determination.
She felt it all now in the face of her brother’s words. The brother she hadn’t been born with. The brother who had appeared in her life far enough along that Ellie could remember what it had been like not to have one.
Neil had dropped into the empty landscape of her childhood like a miracle. Once she had been alone, and then Neil had come, who was clever, and kind, and deeply passionate about the same history that captured Ellie’s own imagination and set it afire. She had believed that the pair of them shared a camaraderie—two scholars under the same roof who could serve as partners and companions in their explorations of the lost mysteries of the past.
That had changed. The change had hurt. Ellie had managed to lock that hurt away inside of her, but now it rose from the secret place where she had hidden it.
“When you went to Cambridge,” she began. “You… you left… and when you came back, you were…”
She swallowed painfully, fighting for the words.
He had gone to university, and when he returned home for his first holiday, Ellie had found a new distance between them. She had stumbled into it like an invisible wall set in her path. They hadn’t been comrades anymore. Neil played the part of the serious scholar, and Ellie was simply his pesky little sister. When she attempted to draw him into discussions about a new excavation report or a linguistic anomaly, at first it would be as though she had lit a spark. Neil’s interest would catch, and he would pepper her with questions, throwing back his thoughts and ideas… until something shifted. His expression would shutter, the enthusiastic light falling from his eyes. It’s nice you’re keeping up with your reading , he would say distantly, and then turn back to his work as though he had just been caught doing something he shouldn’t have been.
It had only been Neil moving on, stepping further into the realm of growing up—but Ellie had never been able to understand why it felt like in doing so, he had left her behind.
“You were going to get hurt if you kept at it,” Neil said quietly. “And I… I didn’t know how to…”
Ellie’s hands were shaking. She tucked them under her arms to keep them still. She was very afraid that if she let herself truly think about what Neil was saying, she might start to cry, and she didn’t want to do that—not here, not now.
She was so angry—and so wretchedly sad. The sadness piled onto her quiet fear and worry about the conundrum of her relationship with Adam Bates, and it was simply too much—a dam that threatened to break right there in the middle of the sun court at Deir al-Bahari, where at any moment one of the tourists from the hotel might wander in to see them.
“I can’t do this right now.” Ellie raised a hand to her face, furiously shoving away a tear that had somehow started streaking down her cheek.
Neil’s face drew into deeper lines of dismay. “I’m making it worse, aren’t I? I’m just buggering things up again. I… I’m…”
He caught himself at the desperate look on her face and bit back whatever he was going to say next. Instead, he paced across the courtyard to the vestibule and drew in a breath.
When he turned, he pushed his spectacles back into place. “So do you think the sun disk might be somewhere on the altar?” he asked deliberately.
He was giving her a way out—an escape from the painful maelstrom of hurt and memory he had stumbled them into. Ellie accepted it, fighting back the rest of the tears that threatened to spill out.
“It’s a logical place for it,” she agreed carefully. “And it’s the only space here that has a ‘behind’ for any sun disk we might find—though of course, we can’t know for certain at what point in the past the altar was expanded.”
She shot Neil a look as though daring him to contradict that by blurting out a date he couldn’t possibly have read about.
“The work might conceivably have been done before Akhenaten’s time,” he said more carefully instead.
Ellie studied the regular blocks of the altar. Neil did the same, running his fingers lightly and carefully over the stones to feel for anything his eyes might miss.
He shot an awkward and slightly guilty look over at her. “Peanut—all of that other business aside, there is… well, something else I really ought to tell you.”
Ellie only half heard him as she studied the stones on the east side of the altar, which would face the rising sun. “Oh?”
“You have to understand, your arrival in Mutnedjmet’s tomb took me entirely off guard,” Neil hurriedly explained. “And then all of a sudden, we were barreling into the burial chamber, which I’d expressly promised the Athenaeum I wouldn’t do, and it just seemed to me that I couldn’t possibly run off without… without trying in some way to explain things…”
A cat jumped up onto the stones in front of her. Ellie startled at the sudden movement.
It was the sandy-hued stray. It laid down on the altar, flopped over, and stretched out, exposing its pale belly to the sunlight.
When Ellie did not immediately reach out to rub its tummy—knowing cats well enough to recognize she could well subject herself to a mauling if she tried—the cat rolled back over and settled in for a nap, blinking at her.
Something about the slab of limestone directly under the bored-looking animal caught Ellie’s eye.
“Am I mad,” she said, “or does this look like a hand?”
She set her finger delicately to the corner of the block, where a slight divot in the limestone appeared, on closer inspection, to take the shape of a cupped palm and gently curved fingers.
“I… what?” Neil leaned over the altar to give the spot a closer look. “I say—I believe it does!”
Ellie moved her finger along the surface of the altar around the cat, which remained entirely nonplussed. The limestone was washed with midday sunlight, which made it hard to pick out irregularities that might be more easily seen in the gentler wash of morning or dusk, but now that Ellie knew what she was looking for, more shapes leapt out at her.
“There’s another one!” she declared with a spark of excitement. Her finger moved left. “And a third!”
The little marks were very subtle. From a distance, they would seem like natural chips or faults in the limestone. It was only up close that one could make out the tiny curve of a thumb and the delicate lines that delineated fingers.
A tickling suspicion prodded at Ellie’s mind.
“Neil—remind me again how Akhenaten depicted the Aten,” she pressed without taking her eyes from the marks.
“As a sun disk surrounded by extended rays.” Neil’s voice was tight. “Each one ending in an upturned hand. There are—ah—ten of them here, by the way.”
His finger swept across the pale surface of the altar, and Ellie saw them—an array of tiny hands, spread out in a perfect arc.
Ellie grabbed the strap of Neil’s canteen where it crossed his chest. Catching the tin container, she splashed a little water into her cupped palm.
“That’s for drinking, not washing your hands!” Neil protested.
Ellie ignored him as she dipped a finger into the water and used it to draw across the stones, painting straight lines from each of the hands to where they met.
The spot was directly under the cat.
She picked the animal up and deposited it onto the ground as it made a halfhearted yowl of protest. Where it had been sitting, she used a little more water to draw the shape of a circle—of a sun disk —and then pointed to it, raising her eyebrow at Neil and waiting.
“It’s… I mean, I suppose it could be…” Neil stammered, still clutching the canteen. “At least, one must admit the possibility that…”
“It’s the Aten,” Ellie concluded firmly.
The water-painted shape sat in the center of the slab one block back from the edge of the altar.
“But it’s just another piece of limestone,” Neil protested.
Ellie studied the block with a critical eye. “We won’t get that out on its own. We should take the block at the edge first and then work our way in.” She flapped an impatient hand at Neil. “I need something I can pry with.”
“Pry?!” Neil echoed.
Ellie glared at him. Neil gave in, patting his pockets wildly. “I have… a pen?” he offered weakly, pulling the writing implement from his jacket.
She felt a little pang of remorse. “I’ll quite ruin it.”
“I don’t have anything else!” Neil protested.
With a sigh, Ellie plucked the pen from his hand. She jabbed the nib into the seam under the slab at the edge of the altar.
“You can’t just go taking apart pieces of sun altars!” Neil protested.
At Ellie’s rueful look, he flushed.
“What I mean to say is, it would be shockingly irresponsible to simply…” Neil trailed off awkwardly. “There are proper procedures for this sort of thing and… Obviously, someone ought to be informed before we…”
As she continued to wait, his shoulders slumped.
Ellie went back to work with the pen, twisting and wrenching it.
Neil groaned beside her. She wasn’t sure if he was more upset that she was attempting to take apart an important th Dynasty monument or that she was utterly destroying his nib.
The block wriggled up a bit, and Ellie worked the pen further into the gap. She left it there and scrambled up onto the top of the altar, taking hold of the edge of the stone. She waved impatiently at the pen, which still stuck out from underneath the slab. “Lend me a hand, would you?”
With a reluctant groan, Neil levered at the pen as Ellie worked to get a better grip. There was a good bit of muttering and complaining—and the limestone block came free.
The piece was about eleven inches square and perhaps one and a half inches thick. Ellie hauled it out and shoved it aside.
She stuck her head over the opening to peer in. Neil did the same, pressing in beside her.
“Rubble,” he concluded.
The jumbled fill was packed into the space between the facing stones and the old altar, which Ellie could pick out here and there beneath.
“But there’s a strut at the edge of the stones, just as I predicted,” Ellie noted. “And we can pull up the proper slab now.”
With a sigh, Neil climbed up to join her, and the pair of them made quick work of yanking out the stone where Ellie had painted the sun disk.
The altar was looking properly ravaged now. Ellie felt a spark of guilt at the sight.
“Well, then?” Neil pressed in to peer at the new space they had opened.
“I don’t know!” Ellie retorted crossly. “I can’t see anything with your head blocking my light!”
“I’m not blocking the light any more than you are!” Neil retorted.
Ellie shoved back on her brother’s shoulders, then shifted her own position. Sunlight spilled down into the dark mouth left by the displaced stone.
The space was not filled with rubble. Instead, it formed a little hollow framed by the struts that supported the limestone, with the surface of the old altar serving as the floor.
Nor was it empty. Ellie reached into it and carefully lifted out a thin slab of baked clay. The object was perhaps six inches square, and its surface was covered in close-packed, stick-like characters.
“That’s a tablet.” Neil’s voice was numb with surprise.
“Stamped with cuneiform.” Ellie traced a delicate finger over the intricate arrangements of triangular-headed wedges and lines.
“A piece of diplomatic correspondence, perhaps?” Neil pressed closer to peer down at it. “Akkadian was the lingua franca during the New Kingdom period for communication between Egypt and other empires.” He grimaced a little ruefully. “I might have a go at translating it if I had my library along, but I’m afraid I’m hopeless if I’m working off the top of my—.”
“ King ,” Ellie read, pointing to one of the symbols on the tablet’s surface.
She shifted her finger over as Neil stared at her. “ Grave ,” she translated, and then stilled. “Though that could also be read as tomb .”
“You know Akkadian?” Neil asked weakly.
“I haven’t yet made a proper study of it,” Ellie replied distantly, still focused on the text. “I only have a handful of words memorized, along with the phonetic characters. I do have a good number of the logograms, though.”
“You know Akkadian.” Neil’s tone sounded as though he ought to add a slightly overwrought and why not?
“ Tomb… horizon… sun… ” Ellie read out carefully, and then brightened. “Tomb at the Horizon of the Sun.”
“Whose tomb?” Neil pressed more urgently, peering over her shoulder.
“That part is in syllabic characters,” Ellie replied. “Let me see… that’s Ne, then Per . Then those two repeat again, and we have Yu… Ha… Ten .” She paused, cheerfully reading it back. “ Ne per ne per yu ha ten. ”
The sound of the syllables ringing through the courtyard in her own voice made her go still.
“But there’s no ‘f’ phoneme in Akkadian.” She suddenly felt breathless. Her hand flashed out, clamping onto her brother’s arm and giving it a shake. “There’s no ‘f,’ Neil!”
She thrust the tablet at him, beginning to pace as the words spilled out.
“Of course, we can’t know for certain what the original Egyptian pronunciation would have been,” she rattled on. “But if an Akkadian writer had used the ‘p’ sign in place of the ‘f’ phoneme from the Egyptian language, then that would make the true name…”
“Neferneferuaten,” Neil blurted, blinking at her in shock. He dropped his eyes wonderingly to the tablet. “It’s talking about the tomb of Neferneferuaten.”
“There has never been any hint of where Neferneferuaten was buried!” Ellie reminded him excitedly. “You told me yourself that the absence of artifacts with his name in private and museum collections strongly indicates that wherever he was entombed, the site was never looted—at least not within recent memory.”
Neil looked helplessly down at the tablet. “Are you saying this might tell us where to find the tomb of Neferneferuaten?”
Their eyes met in a look of startled shared significance, and Ellie pressed herself to Neil’s side, peering down at the text once more.
“That’s king again,” she read, her finger hovering over the cuneiform lines. “And there’s divine . That makes it Neferneferuaten, Beloved of the Divine King ,” she declared triumphantly—and then frowned. “But that’s odd.”
“What is?”
“ Beloved is right here. ? ibtu. ” Ellie pointed to the cluster of lines and wedges. “But tu is the feminine ending.”
Neil stared at her in shock, even as Ellie’s own mind spun with the wild significance of what she had just translated.
“The feminine ending?” he echoed. “But that would imply that…”
The shocking, paradigm-shattering epiphany pouring through her mind was abruptly halted by the sound of a smooth, dangerously familiar voice from behind her.
“How terribly interesting,” Mr. Jacobs said.