They got to work immediately, hauling the box and files over to a little cluster of desks in the middle of the room. The lights hummed overhead and even the tall shelves seemed to lean in for a closer look as Alex carefully peeled back the dry old tape holding the top of the box shut. It came off with only the faintest whisper of protest.

Next to him, Todtman and Ren split the files containing the hefty dissertation and finished papers in half. That seemed like a good place to start for the two more academically minded members of the group. Alex was happy to do the dirty work.

He peered inside the old box and pawed through the top layer with his hands. In jumbled piles and half-spilled files, in ziplock baggies and Tupperware tubs lay his mother’s fieldwork. There were notes and photos and bits of carved stone and pottery pulled from the Egyptian ground.

Alex wished he knew what he was looking for. Could she have come here? Snuck a note for him into the box? Or would he have to be on the lookout for something less obvious? He began pulling stuff out and arranging it on top of the nearest desk, trying to make some sense of the jumbled mess.

Unlike the neatly typed pages Todtman and Ren were poring over, the papers Alex found were often handwritten: notes and dates and circles and underlines. “BIG DISCOVERY!” was written in fat, dull pencil at the top of one page. The rest of the page was taken up with numbers — coordinates, maybe, or measurements? Alex wasn’t sure, but he set that one aside, anyway.

He picked up the largest of the Tupperware containers and peered through the opaque plastic at the ancient pottery shards inside.

Alex’s head swam as he went through the old material. He tried to focus and be rational instead of emotional. More than once he asked himself: What would Ren do? She was sitting just a few feet away, of course, but was far too absorbed power-skimming the old dissertation to talk.

He glanced over and saw the title page, set carefully aside on the top corner of Ren’s desk: BURIED SECRETS: THE LOST — AND FORBIDDEN — ASPECTS OF MIDDLE KINGDOM FUNERARY RITES. Now that sounded like his mom.

But his attempts at an even-keeled approach capsized among the messy piles. Going through the materials in the box felt too personal for that. Even in grad school, his mom’s distinctive handwriting had already taken shape. The precise, sharp-edged capital A’s Alex knew so well shared the page with little loop-de-loop e’s and the guesswork mystery of her nearly identical g’s and q’s.

Sometimes, it was thrilling. Could this note on hotel stationery be a clue to his mom’s current location? Or this unsent postcard from the temples at Abu Simbel?

And all of it — all of it — felt dangerous. Pushing through these old papers and baggies of little clay statuettes and unlabeled, unexplained stone fragments felt risky, as if somewhere in all of it was a single poisoned pin … Because if they did find something that led them through the decades and straight to her, what then?

He’d had these thoughts before, but they felt closer now, more possible: His mom had always looked out for him, always done what was best — and necessary. If he needed to go to the doctor again, she took him. It didn’t matter if he’d just gotten back or if he begged her to wait. She made the tough calls, and she’d always been right. So what about now?

You are trying to find her, Alshuff had said. And she does not want to be found. He was telling the truth then, too. It was hard to keep ignoring that fact while they were pawing through her old work. Still, as he zipped a plastic bag closed, he wished he could seal those thoughts up with it.

We need to find her, he told himself for the one-hundredth time. We need to find the Spells. The entire world depended on it — She just doesn’t realize how high the stakes are. That had to be it.

Or maybe she knows exactly … He shook his head hard to dislodge the thought. This one was so sharp that it caused the contents of the folder he’d just picked up to spill out. Old photos went everywhere, some on his desk and some on the floor. The others looked over.

“Ooooh,” said Ren. “Pictures.”

Clearly tired of reading, she stood up and headed over. How long had they been at this? Alex wondered. He’d been so wrapped up in the process that he wasn’t exactly sure. He looked down at the scattered snapshots along the desk’s edge. And there she was, looking up at him, the woman who would become his mom. She looked so much younger: her cheeks fuller and her skin red from the sun, but it was unmistakably her.

It was like looking at pictures from a family vacation he hadn’t been invited to. And then he saw a shot of her leaning over to inspect a hole in the ground. Even wearing a loose, untucked shirt, the bulge in her belly was clearly visible. He’d been there after all.

Ren reached over and grabbed the photo, along with a handful of others. “The dates are written on the back,” she said. “We should put them back in order. Because somebody dropped them.”

Time slipped by unnoticed down in the sunless, shadow-cornered archive. Once the box was empty, Alex stared down at the piles he’d made on the table. He’d hoped he’d see something that would jog his memory, some secret clue that only he would know. But there’d been no lightning bolts of recognition, no revelations. He’d ended up sorting the carefully labeled pages and pictures and pieces by place. He’d made big stacks for Alexandria, Cairo, Luxor, and the Valley of the Kings — places they had already been — and another pile for Abu Simbel to the south. Then there were smaller stacks: Edfu, Minyahur, Aswan.

Was his mom in one of these places? He’d heard her mention many of them — but then, she was an Egyptologist. Cairo came up all the time at work. She’d once brought him a King Tut T-shirt from the Valley of the Kings. Was that a clue, or just a T-shirt?

He looked down at the less-familiar piles. Aswan sounded familiar, and he was pretty sure he’d heard his mom mention Minyahur. He chased the memory but it sped away like an NYC taxi.

Todtman and Ren came over to see his work.

“Find anything?” said Ren.

“I’m not sure,” he admitted, unable to keep the disappointment out of his voice.

“Ren,” Todtman said. “Perhaps if you used the ibis? With all this information in front of us, it could carry us the last step.”

Alex watched Ren’s expression carefully, but she had a pretty good poker face herself. He hoped she could help, but he knew her amulet was tricky. It flashed fast-forwarded images into her mind. Sometimes they were clues, and sometimes they were warnings — and sometimes she couldn’t tell the difference. Still, what choice did they have now?

“Okay,” she said.

She took one last look at the piles. Then she took a deep breath, reached up for her amulet, and closed her eyes. A moment later, she gasped and opened them.

“What did you see?” Alex said.

She turned to him, blinking to refocus on the world around her. “Nothing,” she said.

Alex frowned, annoyed. He knew Ren didn’t like to be wrong, but if she wasn’t sure, they could help her puzzle out the images. “Come on,” he said. “You can tell us.”

She looked him in the eyes. “No, really, there was nothing. I asked it which of these piles was right, and I just got, like, a blank.”

“Has that ever happened before?” said Todtman.

Ren shook her head. “Never. Sometimes I don’t understand what it shows me, but it has always shown me something.”

Todtman nodded. “Maggie’s location could be masked somehow, protected.” He sized up the stacks of papers and pictures. “Okay,” he said. “There will be no shortcuts. We need to go through everything again. We must ask ourselves: Where would she go, when everyone was looking for her? Where would she feel safest? Let’s forget about the places we have already been for now and concentrate on what is new.”

He leaned forward and pushed the large piles for Cairo, Alexandria, Luxor, and the Valley of the Kings farther back.

Alex looked at the remaining piles: Abu Simbel, Edfu, Minyahur, Aswan. He’d heard of the famous tombs at Abu Simbel and knew his mom had mentioned Edfu and Minyahur. A memory flashed by, yellow and gray, but he still couldn’t pin it down. And why did Aswan sound so familiar? He reached for that stack, but Ren got it first. He sat down by the Minyahur pile instead, and began going through the pictures.

He picked up a photo of his mom sitting in the sand in front of a campfire with a big metal cup in her hand. It was early evening and a teakettle was set up above the fire. He looked at her face. She was relaxing after a long day. He lingered over it a little too long and Todtman leaned over to see what he’d found.

“It’s nothing,” said Alex, slightly embarrassed, “just a shot from camp.”

Todtman looked more closely. “It’s funny, I never saw your mother drink tea.”

“Mostly she drank coffee,” Alex said. “For the caffeine. She was so busy all the time. But every once in a while, she drank tea. There’s this one old brand she likes. I forget the name, but it has a purple flower on the label. Sometimes … at home … she …”

He could barely get the words out. He was chasing that elusive memory: yellow and gray …

He was sick that day, and her arms were full …

Of what? When? Why?

He heard Ren rummaging through the papers, but he didn’t dare look over. He was so close …

“Alex?” said Todtman.

“Sometimes she would drink it to relax at home.” And as soon as Alex said “home,” he remembered. They’d been heading home. He could see it clearly.

“I remember now,” he said, and the others leaned in a little closer.

“Remember what?” said Todtman.

“It was a rainy day.” His voice was far away, lost in the memory. “Mom left work early to take me to the doctor — again — and she’d brought a big stack of work home with her. We were waiting to cross Third Ave., and a taxi went by too close to the curb.”

“Did you get splashed?” said Ren. “I hate that.”

“Yeah, exactly,” said Alex. “We got blasted with a big puddle of garbage-water, like the kind where you can see the oil floating on the surface.”

“Nasty,” said Ren.

“So nasty,” said Alex. “And Mom got the worst of it. I remember looking over and seeing her just hugging the soaked files to her raincoat with a look on her face like I give up.”

“It sounds like a very bad day,” said Todtman. “But I’m afraid I’m not following.”

“Yeah,” agreed Ren. “What’s your point?”

“It’s what she said next. It was kind of under her breath but I was listening so carefully that I heard it. She looked down at her stained coat and soaked files and said: ‘Time to go to Minyahur.’ Then we went home and she had a big mug of hot tea.”

“Wait!” said Ren. “I saw something in the pictures.”

She began pawing her way backward through the Minyahur pile, and then: “Here it is.” She held up another snapshot of his mom. “Look at the label,” she said triumphantly.

Alex looked at the picture. It was the same campsite, even the same teakettle, but his mom was standing now, holding up a small alabaster bowl. It must have been the team’s prize discovery that day. But Alex wasn’t looking at the bowl. He was staring at a small metal container by his mom’s boots. It was a tin of loose tea, with a purple flower on its label.

“Let me see the photo,” he said.

They all crowded around as he looked at it closely. He liked it because she was smiling. She was holding the bowl high, raised toward whoever was taking the picture.

“She looks happy,” said Ren.

“She looks completely comfortable,” said Alex. “Like she did at home sometimes.”

Todtman eyed the empty expanse of desert behind the campsite. “It’s a good location,” he said. “Remote and hidden, but familiar to her.”

Alex thought about it. When life in the city had gotten to her, when just for a moment it had all been too much, the place she wanted to go was a little desert village named Minyahur. It was her place to get away from it all. And was there any better phrase for what she was doing now, pursued by both enemies and friends?

Getting away from it all, thought Alex.

But not anymore.

A crazy mix of emotions bubbled and swirled inside Alex: excitement and anxiety and loyalty and loss. But the one that bubbled highest was love. “I think this is where we need to go,” he said.

Ren turned to Todtman: “You said we were looking for the place she’d feel safest.” She pointed to the photo. “This fits the description to a tea.”

Todtman ignored the pun. “Yes,” he said briskly. “Let’s pack this up, and we can leave immediately.”

Alex slipped the photo into his back pocket, and they began stuffing the material back into the box. Ren picked up the stack she’d been going through. “Aswan,” she said. “Isn’t that where the Temple of Dendur is from?”

“Oh yeah,” said Alex. The huge, glass-walled room housing the old stone temple was his favorite place in the whole Metropolitan Museum of Art. “That’s why that sounded so familiar.” He allowed himself a quick smile. For just a fleeting moment, things seemed to make sense. But his smile faded as quickly as it had appeared.

“What is that smell?” said Ren. “I think a rat died down here or something.”

She reached up and pinched her nostrils, then looked over at Alex for confirmation. His expression wasn’t one of disgust, though. It was one of fear.

“That’s no rat,” he said. “I know that smell.”

The same words echoed through the maze of shelves behind them. “That’s no rat. I know that smell.” The voice was an exact match for Alex’s, save for a slight buzzing.

The friends wheeled around and saw a nightmare striding toward them. It wasn’t the first fly that had followed them that day.

But it was the largest by a good six feet.