Dr. Archer Palombo’s booming voice could be heard before we even entered the tent. Memories warmed my heart when Dr. Palombo’s large frame came into view. He and his family were a common fixture at my parents’ house all throughout my childhood. The Scholls and the Palombos used to be tight. We celebrated everything together, from birthdays to tenure milestones. That is, before the divorce. Archer’s wife, Milena, was a close friend of my mother, and to preserve their friendship, Milena distanced herself from anything involving my dad. Which meant no more loud and busy end-of-the-year parties with the Palombos.
Walking up and down the length of a long and narrow table, Dr. Palombo reminded me of a father hawk looking over his beloved hatchlings—the four volunteers he had in his care. They were busy working through their allocated bags of finds. Among the volunteers was Rufus, Dr. Palombo’s youngest son, and, at thirteen years of age, likely the youngest person on this dig site. Rufus was the first to notice me.
“Alif!” He jumped out of his seat, nearly tipping over his water basin as he came in for a hug. Some of the muddied liquid sloshed on the table, prompting the other volunteers to give Rufus evil looks. He was like an overeager puppy, full of energy and enthusiasm.
Clad in his camp-issued khakis and white shirt, Dr. Palombo still carried a touch of his eccentric style. A red silky scarf traveled around his neck and a black dusty fedora sat crooked on his head. The hat was worn ironically, of course. Real archaeologists were not huge fans of Indiana Jones–type fedoras, but most had a healthy sense of humor. Dr. Palombo’s expression changed from annoyance to a huge smile when he spotted me.
“You made it!” he exclaimed. “And here’s Ms. Minh Quoc, gorgeous as always! You’re all grown up! Amazing!”
Minh grinned at him; hers was a rare, disarming smile. I introduced Luke to Dr. Palombo and Rufus, explaining that we’d all gone to school together. “Luke’s waiting for his acceptance into Dunstan Law,” I added.
“Well, here’s one sure thing—the world needs more lawyers.” There was not a hint of teasing in Dr. Palombo’s voice, but he did give me a mischievous wink when Luke looked away.
After Dr. Palombo crushed me in a bear hug, he repeated the gesture with Minh and Luke. “And what about our lovely Minh? Are you here because you’re thinking of following in the footsteps of our own brave, dear Dr. Andreas Scholl?”
Minh looked away and mumbled something about doing a gap year. The ugly truth was that even if she did receive her first-choice university offer, there was no guarantee she could afford to go. Therefore, she was seriously considering a gap year to work. Her family was never well-off, and this trip to Dubai was only possible thanks to some help from my dad and Luke’s family, but we were sworn to secrecy on this. We didn’t want to embarrass Minh, so the official story was that she was a recipient of some grant from a generous sponsor. I was just glad she didn’t go digging into this explanation. It wouldn’t take her long to uncover that Tucker Oil didn’t really exist.
To Dr. Palombo Minh said, “I’m considering a career as a car mechanic, like my granddad.” This was the first I’d heard of it, but I let it go.
Luke was not so subtle. “Going to break some gender barriers, huh, Minh?” he asked.
Minh shivered from a nonexistent draft. “At least I’m going to do something original with my life. Unlike some third-generation wannabe lawyer.”
Dr. Palombo changed the topic, looking my way. “Andreas was really torn he couldn’t be here when you arrived, Alif. But he’s been busier than expected.” He urged Rufus to come back to his seat at the labeling table before taking me and my friends aside.
“What’s with all the foreign-student volunteers?” I asked Dr. Palombo when we were out of hearing range of the table-bound group. “I mean, it’s a lot more international grad students than usual. Where are all the locals?”
“Well … there were some unforeseen circumstances affecting the logistics of the dig and Andreas had to issue a call for more grad students to come out here. Most of our local student force, and quite a few Londoners as well, pulled out right after we finished with all the heavy-duty excavation and extraction work.”
“What happened?” Minh asked.
Dr. Palombo sighed, staring into space, gathering his thoughts or being caught in a memory. “This place is nun. Apparently.”
“What, like bad luck?” My knowledge of Arabic was eclectic at best, random vocab fluttering in my brain like spooked butterflies ever since we landed in Dubai. But the word Dr. Palombo used? I knew that one. Nun was the fourteenth letter of the Arabic alphabet. Other languages, like Hebrew and Aramaic, also used the same or a similar pictogram for nun. The pictogram itself looked like a zigzag, but more likely was meant to symbolize a snake—hence its evil or “bad luck” connotation.
Dr. Palombo nodded gravely. “It’s like we’re on the set of some ridiculous Hollywood movie! We’re certain we know how the rumor started though. There was a minor accident here on the second day of the excavation, and two men—a local named Amir we hired to operate the excavator and one of my own students, Matthew—got injured and had to be taken to a hospital. Amir told us that Matthew caused the accident when he became sort of ‘entranced’ and released the harness too soon … When we finally managed to speak with Matthew in the hospital, he told us he saw a stone-walled city rise out of the sand far out in the desert. This city was surrounded by a flock of white birds—like a halo. This is pretty much verbatim. After that, neither Amir nor Matthew wanted to return to the excavation site. And now we’re having trouble retaining students at the dig. Some people are … uncomfortable.”
“Superstitious bunch, aren’t they, these locals?” Luke swallowed whatever he was going to say next when I glared at him.
I said, “It sounds like this Matthew was the one who started the rumor.”
“Doesn’t matter now,” Dr. Palombo said. “The damage is done. We just have to work with what we’ve got. We’ll make do.” He went back to the table and started setting up our workstations. The three of us got seated and were given some easy tasks to do first.
There’s a certain art to the processing of finds. When I was a kid, Dad would set me up with a plastic basin and give me little trinkets to wash. I would sink each object—unassuming pebbles, arrowheads, ceramic fragments—under water and brush off the dirt with gentle strokes, careful not to damage the object’s surface. Not much has changed since then. Washing, marking, and sorting are still the three pillars of finds processing. And we already had ten days’ worth of stuff in need of cleaning and labeling. Here were the rules to follow: Work with one bag of finds at a time, and always, always comply with the filing system’s rules. If you don’t, you might mislabel things, and that’s going to cause trouble later on. Each bag of finds we were given had a site code—a two-letter abbreviation for the site itself and the last digits of the year of excavation. Dad’s site was split into three sectors, each coded clockwise. I picked up an unopened bag labeled ceramics. I took it to my station, on my way grabbing an empty tray. I poured some water into the tray …
When I checked my watch again, it was nearly lunchtime. I stood up to stretch my legs and let the momentum carry me out of the tent. Minh followed me outside. Together we covered a small distance to where Luke was smoking in a shadowed spot overlooking the desert. Droplets of sweat were streaming down his face, which must have washed away his sunblock. I wondered where Luke’s baseball cap was. I could already see red patches on his forehead where his skin was starting to burn.
“How can you smoke in this heat?” I asked, but Luke had no chance to give me his snarky response because a commotion drew our attention. A crowd was forming at the far right of the dig camp, down where the outer tents met the desert proper. From afar, a familiar blotch of red stood out in the thickening sea of white, gray, and beige—Dr. Palombo’s scarf. Before I fully registered what I was doing, my legs were carrying me toward the chaos.
“Some excitement, at last!” Luke commented as he fought to keep up with me. Leaving Minh behind, the two of us got to the outer edge of the gathering crowd first. Standing on tiptoe, a girl with cropped red hair was saying something to her friend that ended with “a French tourist!”
I joined her example and stretched higher, trying to see above the crowd. To my right, a young man with a shaved head, turning pink under the merciless sun, was murmuring to Ada, who we had met yesterday, “Dehydrated and completely out of it.”
To which Ada replied in a low, heavily accented voice, “Maybe our defectors weren’t wrong after all. Maybe this place is bad luck.”
I saw him then, the reason for this gathering. They carried him away on a makeshift cot. A white man, possibly in his late forties, though it was hard to tell exactly. His face had suffered some awful sunburns, and his hair was bleached white.
Dr. Palombo, one of the people carrying the cot, noticed me in the crowd and called over his shoulder by way of explanation, “He wandered in from the desert … Alif, why don’t you go back to the admin tent and wait for your father there? He’s due to come back any second now.”
I was about to take off when the man lying semiconscious in the cot opened his eyes wide and grabbed my hand. “Dup Shimati awaits. She grows restless.”
He passed out again.
Frozen in my spot, I watched as they carried him into the med tent.
“What was that about? Dup Shimati?” Minh asked, her tongue awkward on the foreign words.
I hadn’t seen when she caught up with us.
“I have no idea,” I told her.
In the spot where the man had touched it, my hand was cold amid the heat.