It had taken hours, but Yasmin was finally packed.

‘Got your passport?’ her mum asked.

Yasmin tapped the jeans pocket that held her phone and passport.

‘All I need now is my journal,’ Yasmin said. She’d left it in the rooftop garden that morning. ‘I will just be a minute.’

Yasmin bounded up the stairs, her heart pounding. As scary as the confrontation with Jackal had been, she hadn’t mentioned her troubles in her conversation with the other DARE winners. The others all seemed to be safe and she didn’t want to worry them unnecessarily. Her family had been cleaning up the shop, sweeping up broken merchandise, and Mahmoud had been grumbling about cleaning the paint off the security camera. Her uncles had gone home to their families. Things were returning to normal, and she wanted to put it all out of her mind so she could look forward to her trip to Athens. She brought up the seven mysterious symbols on her phone again, and noticed the clock was still ticking down.

Yasmin looked out across the rooftops and at the pyramids rising up against the sand and sky. She nodded as if to say goodbye. Out there everything would be as it usually was on a busy Sunday afternoon. Visitors would be swarmed by touts selling trinkets. Tourists would be riding camels and imagining themselves back in the days of Tutankhamen. Families would be posing for comical selfies in which they ‘held’ the monuments between their fingers.

She glanced back at her phone.

Yasmin laughed nervously. The ticking clock seemed like a premonition, though she didn’t know of what. But her smile flatlined when she glanced back at the desert.

Something was wrong. Very wrong.

High above the pyramids a silver object streaked down towards the earth.

A shooting star? Maybe a mirage of some sort?

Yasmin tried to blink it away. But the silver streak didn’t disappear. And desert illusions didn’t make the sound of rolling thunder that now reached her ears. She squinted.

The streak was a military fighter plane, racing down from the heavens. Its sweptback wings shone while the jet engines roared and left a vapour trail against the blue sky.

Yasmin wondered what was going on. If this was some sort of training exercise, she’d never seen anything like it. In a heartbeat, terror overtook her—the jet looked like it was on a collision course with the Great Pyramid!

She gasped.

But at the last moment, the plane veered away wildly.

‘Oh, thank—’ Yasmin started to say.

Except now she saw the plane had fired a missile a second before it swooped clear.

Krrrraaaawhoooosh!

The rocket left a tunnel of smoke in the sky as it hurtled towards the Great Pyramid.

Yasmin told herself she had to be dreaming. That this wasn’t happening.

But it was.

‘Oh, no,’ she whispered helplessly. ‘Please, no!’

She screamed as the missile slammed into the peak of the Great Pyramid with a brilliant red-and-white flash. Chunks of stone sprayed as a smoky fireball punched high into the sky. Debris avalanched down the ancient monument’s steep slopes. Almost a kilometre away, Yasmin’s building shuddered under the impact of the shockwave. Moments later Giza was engulfed by a terrible roar that seemed to swallow up every other sound. Yasmin fell to her knees, sobbing. Spewing fire and smoke, the Great Pyramid looked like a volcano. The explosive howl subsided, replaced by sirens and screams, rising from all around.

Yasmin was dimly aware of a second explosion out near the horizon and saw what looked like a white parachute drifting down to the desert sands.

Yasmin hauled herself to her feet. The peak of Egypt’s pride, the famous, heavy stones that had been in place for nearly five thousand years, had been reduced to rubble. But while the damage was terrible, Yasmin knew there would be thousands of tourists and locals around its base and in the path of the falling rocks. ‘All those people,’ Yasmin whispered. Unable to bear looking upon the devastation any longer, she lowered her gaze. Again, her eyes came to rest on the phone in her hand.

Despite her shock, Yasmin dimly registered that the timer had not just hit zero but had reset and was counting down all over again. She couldn’t bring herself to wonder what it could mean.

‘What happened?’ Mr Adib asked breathlessly, bolting across the roof to her side, stopping by his daughter to take in the sight of the smoking pyramid. ‘Are you OK?’

Tears rolling down her cheeks, Yasmin nodded numbly and reached out to grasp her father’s arm. ‘A p-plane—fired a missile into the pyramid and then crashed in the desert.’

Mahmoud skidded to a stop next to them and gasped. ‘Was it an accident?’

Yasmin shook her head. ‘I don’t think so.’

They stood in shocked silence.

‘Look,’ her brother said, holding up his phone for Mr Adib to see. ‘It’s already on the internet.’

The men’s eyes filled with tears as they watched footage of the attack uploaded from a tourist’s phone. But Yasmin didn’t need to relive the horror. She sat heavily, head in her hands, on the edge of the lounge. After a few moments, her mind went back to the mysterious symbols on her phone.

Two symbols now took on a sinister meaning.

‘Khufu, plane … Zeus … lightning bolt,’ she murmured. ‘I-I don’t believe it …’

And yet, there it was—the hieroglyph of the pharaoh whose pyramid had just been attacked, beside what Zander had said was a bolt from the heavens!

Yasmin tried to tell herself she was just in shock. There was no way text messages could’ve predicted the disaster. Surely the timer couldn’t have counted down to the attack. It had to be a coincidence. It just wasn’t possible.

But deep in her heart, Yasmin felt the truth. Somehow, the First Sign had pointed to this horrific act.

Yasmin jumped up as black helicopters swooped low over the Giza rooftops and more fighter jets streaked through the sky.

‘What’s happening?’ Mahmoud yelled. ‘Is it a war?’

Yasmin thought it was even worse than that. To her this felt like it might be the beginning of the end of the world.

‘Everyone, downstairs!’ Mr Adib shouted at the top of his lungs. ‘Now!’