They knocked on Ren’s door at sunrise, and she slid it back immediately, fully dressed, bedhead subdued smartly by a wet comb. “You look awful,” she said to Alex. “Not you, Luke. You just look tall.”

“I was drugged,” said Alex defensively.

She looked at him dubiously. They’d checked on her the night before, but hadn’t gotten past her startled, angry bunkmate. Ren grabbed her pack and left the lady snoring away. “It’s so early,” she said once they were all in the hallway. “Do you really think The Order knows we’re coming?”

Alex and Luke exchanged glances. “They know we’re coming,” they said together.

Ren didn’t ask how they knew, and Alex didn’t really have the heart to freak her out.

The night porter was slumped over, sleeping quietly on a little fold-down seat at the end of the corridor as they snuck by. Outside, the blood-orange Egyptian sun was just breaking free from the grip of the horizon.

They stood huddled in the loud, drafty gap between cars, packs on backs and eyes on the little window in the door. Finally, the train began to slow. It reached a road crossing and lurched abruptly to a full stop. Alex could practically hear the collective groan of a hundred passengers bouncing in their bunks. He quickly used his amulet to open the steel door.

On the road outside, the lights flashed and the signals chimed. A handful of early morning motorists stared as three young visitors climbed down, reaching the pavement moments before the train began to chug onward.

The sun crept higher in the sky as they edged toward the center of town, walking slowly and navigating by smartphone. They were heading toward the Luxor docks, where they could catch a ferry across the river to the Valley of the Kings.

“Man, it’s already really hot,” said Luke, fishing a battered Yankees cap out of his backpack.

“We’re in the desert now,” said Ren, holding up her latest guidebook.

“Doesn’t look like it,” said Luke. “Look at all these trees.”

Ren lowered the book and raised her eyes. Evenly spaced palm trees lined the road, thick-trunked and branchless, with shocks of fronds on top that offered pools of shade in the sea of sunlight.

“We’re on the Nile,” explained Alex.

“No, you’re in denial,” said Luke, and once again Alex couldn’t tell if he was joking.

The buildings got closer together as they walked. The whole city of Luxor looked like something out of an Egyptian history book. Alex knew that for thousands of years, this had been Thebes, the capital city and seat of power for some of Egypt’s greatest pharaohs. Reminders of their reigns were everywhere. The skyline was low and spiked with temple pylons and minarets. They passed ancient temples and weathered statues. There were legitimately old buildings and new ones designed to look that way.

People stared at them openly as they walked. Cairo had offered overcrowded chaos, but Luxor met them with a sketchy ghost-town vibe. Locals were scarce so early in the morning, making the lean, hungry-eyed men creeping sleepily down the streets seem all the more threatening.

Luke, who looked like an adolescent Viking, got the most stares. Alex got the fewest. Half-Egyptian, thanks to a father he’d never known, and dressed simply in jeans and a T-shirt, he almost blended in. As the sun got higher, the streets remained mostly empty.

“Where is everyone?” said Ren.

“Out of work and scared, I bet,” said Alex. “This is a tourist town. With everything that’s going on, you’d have to be crazy to visit now.”

“Guess that makes us crazy,” said Luke. “But it’s still a lot nicer than Cairo.”

“Should be even quieter once we get out to the Valley of the Kings,” said Alex, but even as he formed the words he got the unsettling feeling they might come back to haunt him. Nowhere had been quiet for him lately, not even a sleeper car.

“Yeah, uh, what kind of kings are we talking about?” said Luke as they reached an intersection and waited to cross.

“A lot of the big ones,” said Alex. “Ramses, Thutmose, Hatshepsut — though she was technically a queen.”

“Really?” said Ren.

“Yeah, a female pharaoh, powerful, too,” he said, but they’d lost Luke. Alex glanced over and saw his cousin’s eyes fully glazed. “And Tutankhamun,” he added. “King Tut.”

Luke perked up. “I’ve heard of him. Dude was really young, right? I mean for a king.”

“Yeah, like eighteen when he died,” said Alex.

“Why’d he die so young?” said Luke.

Alex shrugged. “A lot of people think he was murdered. His heart was missing when they found him. And my mom says there was a hole in his head.”

“Yeah,” said Luke, “but people say that about me all the time.”

Across the street, Alex found the street sign he was looking for: SHARIA AL-MAHATTA. “I think this will get us to the ferries,” he said, “but it will take us past the train station, so we have to be careful.”

They needed to get out of town and over to the Valley of the Kings. The train had arrived by now, without them on it. If The Order was waiting for them, they’d probably already figured out the friends had gotten off early — and they’d be searching for them. They walked on, sunlight and open stares bearing down on them; their own eyes alert. They passed Luxor Temple and beyond that, just visible farther up Sharia al-Markaz, Karnak.

The two legendary temple complexes were looming labyrinths of ornately carved stone: thick walls and massive columns, presided over by towering statues of the great pharaohs, some of them thirty feet tall. Alex, a museum kid to the core, normally would have longed to stop — but as Alex’s eyes scanned every inch of the dock along the river, it wasn’t more sights he was looking for.

How many times had his mom talked about these places: this city, and the valley beyond? And now they knew she’d been here, just ten days earlier. Had they just missed her, Alex wondered, or were they about to find her? Maybe she was just beyond them now, in the valley. If she really was hiding, what better place than this forbidding desert that she knew so well? For the one-million-and-first time, he imagined finding her. He would run up and hug her, he knew that, but what would his first words be: “I missed you,” or “Why did you leave me?”

They climbed aboard the waiting ferry and paid their fares. They quickly headed inside the cabin of the fat-bottomed boat, where it was cooler and they were finally out of open view. The ferry had been built for an army of tourists, but it was nearly empty as it pulled away from shore.

“Which way are we headed?” said Luke. “I’m all turned around.”

“West,” said Alex. “The dead were always buried on the western bank, because the sun dies there every night.”

“Great,” said Luke sarcastically. “Dead and buried … Let’s go there.”

As Alex turned to gaze out the window at the swift, dark waters of the Nile, he could feel the copper wings of the scarab hot against his skin. It was the Returner, the symbol of a traveler between the world of the living and the world of the dead. And Alex had been in both worlds.

A smile crept onto his face.

“Yes,” he said. “Let’s.”