Strat had known they would not die in the tomb of Hetepheres, because when it was uncovered in 1899, it contained no bones. But out here, in the vicious true desert, the one that reached all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, here they could die. No one would know, either. Not in Khufu's time, not in Strat's and not in Annie's.
The footing was terrible.
From a great distance, he had been able to make out tiny paths twisting up those towering cliffs, probably followed by wild goats and greedy robbers. Up close, there were a hundred possible ledges or routes, and no way to tell which actually went somewhere. But in his heart, Strat knew that nothing out here went somewhere. They were headed toward nothing. No town, no oasis, no road, no water.
The sandstorm was no longer a single column. It now covered an entire width of desert. Like a blustery sheet of sand or a hurricane all in a row, its hope was to fill lungs, blind eyes, deafen ears, bury bones.
They came to a bluff, and had to scramble up it, but their feet sank. They circled it, tripping and stumbling on rocks and rubble. They plunged once more into sand; sand; sand. The wind hurled sand into Annie's eyes, and she cried out, and clung to Strat, wiping at her eyes with her free hand. “It will kill us,” she shouted. “We have to go back!”
But they had nothing to go back to. When Strat turned, even the Pyramid of Pharaoh had been obliterated. “Tuck your face beneath my shirt, Annie,” he ordered her, “and we will grip each other tightly and hope not to be torn apart by the strength of the wind.”
They would be buried where they stood. For a moment he bowed his head over Annie's grit-filled black hair and accepted his defeat. But only for a moment. “No!” he shouted. “I will not be beaten again!”
Strat recognized this shred of his father in him: the refusal to admit defeat. Well, then he had one good thing from Hiram Stratton, Sr., and he would take it.
“Annie,” he commanded, “step through Time.”
The pain in his heart was so fierce he could not tell whether it was dying of sorrow or of sand. “You go first, Annie. I cannot live a second time in fear that I abandoned you or that you suffered without me. Go. Quickly.”
But just as Renifer had refused to leave her tomb, so Annie refused to leave hers. “No, Strat. I love you. Now when Time has finally brought us together, you think I'm leaving? Forget it! Whatever happens, it will happen to both of us.”
“Annie, all that can happen to us is death. We have no water, we have no transportation, you don't even have shoes. We cannot live here, only die here. We must cross through Time again.”
“But Time won't let us go together and I want to be together. When this storm ends, we'll steal a camel,” said Annie. “We'll be our own little wagon train to Morocco. Then we'll build a boat and row across the Atlantic to New York. Although there won't be much around in Manhattan, forty-five hundred years ago.” She giggled.
“Stop playing games,” said Strat, although this was why he adored her. She could always laugh. Perhaps it was her century; a time when girls seemed to have so much more than the girls in his time. “Anyway, there are no camels in ancient Egypt. If you want to steal a camel, you have to come to 1899 with me.”
He expected to hear one of her peculiar words, from the vocabulary of her amazing decade: Okay or Deal.
But Annie's hair swirled across his face in a black cloud, her eyes opened wide, and screaming, she filtered away from him. It was as quick as the death of Pankh. She was in his arms and then his arms were empty.
Strat tried to follow her, stumbling through the sand, falling over rocks, tumbling off the cliff they had so desperately climbed. He felt himself surrounded by all the troops of Pharaoh, reaching and grasping, and then in the sand, he was alone again, retching and gasping. He eluded them, neither dying nor living, just staggering on, calling her name.
And eventually, he was defeated. Sand filled his shirt and hair, his shoes and the hem of his trousers. His determination not to be beaten had been beaten.
Many things were stronger than one man's heart.