The deck of the HMS Nemesis was spotless.
Colonel Henry Shrapnel stood by the railing, watching the green lightning tear the sky apart. He wore his leather mask. The glass eye-holes reflected the flashes like empty sockets.
In his gloved hand, he held a jagged shard of black stone.
A piece of the Rosetta Stone. Stolen from the French convoy in 1801.
It was warm. Vibrating.
"Beautiful," Shrapnel whispered.
The stone pulsed. Thump-thump. Like a second heart.
"Sir," the captain of the Nemesis approached. He looked nervous. "The water temperature is rising. And the men... they report hearing voices in the hull."
"Voices?" Shrapnel asked, not turning around.
"Whispers, sir. In a language they don't know."
"Coptic," Shrapnel said. "Or maybe pre-Dynastic. It doesn't matter."
He pointed the shard at the horizon.
"Follow the lightning, Captain. The French ship is our key. They have the rest of the stone. When they get close, the gate will open."
"But the storm..."
"It isn't a storm," Shrapnel snapped. "It's a welcome mat."
He squeezed the stone until the sharp edges cut his glove.
"I can feel it," he hissed. "The Sun Engine. It can knit flesh. It can cure this..."
He touched his mask. Underneath, his face was a ruin of radiation burns.
"Full sail," Shrapnel ordered. "I want to be there when they knock."
The Osiris was alone in the Dead Zone.
The water here was wrong. It was thick, viscous. Like oil mixed with gelatin. The bow of the ship didn't cut through it; it tore it.
Charles looked over the side.
"Look at the fish," Champollion whispered.
They floated on the surface. Bloated. Pale.
But they weren't rotting.
Some of them were fused together—two heads on one body. Others had grown strange, translucent limbs. One large tuna drifted by with what looked like human molars in its mouth.
"Mutation," Charles said. "Rapid cellular rewriting."
"The radiation leak from the Engine," Champollion said. "It's been leaking into the Nile Delta for thousands of years. But now... something woke it up."
"Help!"
A scream from the stern.
A sailor had leaned too far over to look at the mutations. He slipped on the oily deck.
SPLASH.
He hit the water.
"Man overboard!" Ney shouted. He grabbed a rope. "Throw him a line!"
The sailor thrashed in the black sludge. "It burns! It burns!"
Then he stopped screaming.
He looked down.
Something massive moved beneath him. A shadow. Not a shark. Something with too many limbs.
The water bubbled.
Sloop.
There was no splash. No violence. The sailor was simply pulled under. Instantly.
The surface of the water smoothed over.
"God save us," Chouan muttered, crossing himself. "The Kraken?"
"No," Charles said. "The ecosystem. It's hungry."
He turned away from the rail.
"Eyes forward. Don't look at the water."
"Land ho!" the lookout cried. His voice cracked with relief.
Charles raised his telescope.
Through the green haze, he saw it.
Alexandria.
But not the city of maps. The harbor was gone. The buildings were ruins, half-buried in sand.
And towering over it all was the Pharos.
The Lighthouse of Alexandria. One of the Seven Wonders of the World. Supposedly destroyed by an earthquake in the 14th century.
It was standing.
The massive stone tower rose five hundred feet into the air. The top was shattered, but the core remained.
And from the core, a beam of light shot straight up.
It wasn't fire. It was a coherent beam of pale green energy. It pierced the clouds, creating the lightning storm.
Pulse. Pulse. Pause. Pulse.
"It's blinking," Ney said.
"It's a code," Charles said. "Binary."
He counted the pulses.
1-0-1. Open. Open. Open.
"It knows we're here," Charles said. "The Rosetta Stone in the hold... it's a transponder. We just pinged the server."
"We need to land," Champollion said urgently. "Before the British arrive."
"Steer for the beach!" Chouan ordered. "Run her aground!"
The Osiris plowed through the oily surf.
CRUNCH.
The keel hit the sandbar. The ship lurched to a halt, listing to port.
"Abandon ship!" Ney roared. "Get the weapons! Get the gear!"
The crew scrambled over the side, splashing into the shallow water. It was knee-deep.
"Don't touch the water with your bare skin!" Champollion warned.
They waded ashore. The sand was black. Vitrified glass.
"Where is the entrance?" Ney asked, looking at the massive lighthouse.
"Not the tower," Champollion said. "The Library."
He pointed to a mound of rubble half a mile inland. Pillars jutted out of the sand like ribs.
"The Great Library wasn't just for books," Champollion panted as they ran. "It was the control center."
BOOM.
A cannonball slammed into the sand fifty yards behind them.
Charles turned.
The HMS Nemesis had broken through the fog. She was anchoring just offshore. Longboats were already in the water, filled with redcoats.
And leading them, standing in the first boat, was the man in the mask.
"Shrapnel," Charles said.
"They have more men," Ney assessed. "Two hundred at least."
He stopped running. He checked his pistols.
"Go," Ney said.
"Marshal?"
"I'll hold the beach," Ney said. He grinned. It was a wild, reckless grin. "I've always wanted to fight an army on the pyramids. A lighthouse will have to do."
He turned to the sailors.
"Form line! We hold them here!"
"You can't hold them forever," Charles said.
"I just need to hold them for an hour," Ney said. "Find the machine, boy. And turn it off. Or turn it on. Just win."
He shoved Charles toward the ruins.
"Run!"
Charles ran.
He didn't look back as the first volley of musketry erupted on the beach. He heard Ney roaring orders. He heard the scream of men dying on the black sand.
He ran with Champollion and Chouan toward the Library.
The entrance was buried. Only the top of a massive stone arch was visible.
Hieroglyphs were carved into the lintel. They glowed with the same green light.
"It's sealed," Chouan said, kicking the stone.
"No," Champollion said. "It's waiting."
He pulled a scroll from his bag. The translation he had made in the Louvre.
He touched the symbols in a specific order.
Sun. Snake. Beetle. Sun.
A deep, grinding sound vibrated through the ground. Dust fell from the arch.
The stone block slid aside.
Darkness. And a smell of ozone and stale air.
"Inside," Charles ordered.
They slipped into the dark just as a bullet chipped the stone next to Charles's head.
Shrapnel was on the beach. He was firing a long-range rifle.
Charles looked back. The masked man was reloading. He wasn't running. He was walking. Calmly. Like death.
Charles stepped inside. The stone door slid shut behind them.
THUD.
Silence.
They lit a torch.
They weren't in a library.
The walls were lined with metal. Bronze? No. Something smoother. Gold alloy.
Thousands of niches lined the walls. But instead of scrolls, they held cylinders. Crystal cylinders filled with dark liquid.
"This isn't a library," Charles whispered.
"It's a silo," Champollion said.
They walked forward.
In the center of the vast circular room stood a statue.
Anubis. The Jackal God.
But it wasn't stone.
It was metal. Articulated. Gears visible through gaps in the armor.
Its eyes were lenses.
And they were dark.
"It's deactivated," Chouan said, reaching out to touch it.
"Don't!" Charles shouted.
Too late.
Chouan's finger brushed the metal.
CLICK.
A hum started. Low at first, then rising to a whine.
The crystal cylinders on the walls lit up. Green light flooded the room.
The Anubis statue moved.
Its head snapped down to look at them. The lenses glowed red.
A voice—mechanical, grinding—echoed from the statue's chest.
It spoke in Coptic.
Champollion turned pale.
"What did it say?" Charles asked, raising his revolver.
"It asked for the password," Champollion whispered.
"And if we don't have it?"
The statue took a step forward. The floor shook.
It raised a staff tipped with a spinning blade.
"Then it processes us," Champollion said.
Charles thumbed the hammer of his gun.
"I hate riddles," he said.
He aimed at the red eye.
"Let's see if it bleeds."