Thank you for reading!

The museum was silent except for the hiss of the torches. Evelyn was certain she had heard something from in here. She stopped in the doorway, but saw no movement. "Hello?"

She detached a torch from the wall and began making her way through the room. Despite the silence and stillness, she was certain someone was in the room with her. Or something.

"Abdul? Mohammed?" But the assistants who worked in the museum were clearly not in here, or they would have appeared when their names were called, yawning and pretending not to have been asleep on the job.

Yes, that was definitely a noise from the open sarcophagus, she thought, flinching at its suddenness before approaching gingerly and looking over the high side.

Suddenly the skeleton within sat up, hissing, and Evelyn shrieked before she recognized the two legs that suddenly appeared and the laugh that accompanied them. Her brother Jonathan. Up to his usual tricks.

"Have you no respect for the dead?" she demanded, as he continued giggling, one arm thrown round the skeleton's shoulders.

"Of course I do! But sometimes, I'd rather like to join them."

Rolling her eyes at his dramatics, Evelyn put her torch in a nearby bracket and reached in to help Jonathan out. "Well, I wish you would do it sooner rather than later before you ruin my career the way you've ruined yours." He was waving at the skeleton and she smacked him on the cheek before pulling at him. "Now get out!"

"My dear, sweet baby sister, I'll have you know …" His voice wavered as he nearly toppled over trying to climb out. "That at this precise moment, my career is on a high note."

"High note, ha! Oh, Jonathan, please, I'm really not in the mood for you. I've just made a bit of a mess in the library, and … and the Bembridge Scholars have rejected my application form again." It hurt to admit, even to him. "They say I don't have enough experience in the field." And how she was to get it, if no one would hire her without it, Evelyn didn't know. She sank down onto the feet of a statue in despair.

In a rare moment of seriousness, Jonathan came to her, kneeling down and taking her hands. "You'll always have me, old mum."

She couldn't help smiling at him. Much of a wastrel as he was, her brother was also quite charming, and there had never been one moment of their lives together when she had doubted his love for her.

He chucked her under the chin. "Besides, I have just the thing to cheer you up."

Well, Evelyn knew what that meant. She started protesting even as he was digging whatever item he was trying to pawn off as an artifact this time out of the sarcophagus. "Oh, Jonathan, not another worthless trinket. If I have to take one more piece of junk to the curator to try and … sell for you …" Her words trailed off as she studied the object balanced on Jonathan's palm.

It was a small box, legitimately old, and with markings that were as ancient in syntax as it looked. If it was a fake, it was a very good one. Evelyn took it from him. "Where did you get this?"

"On a dig down in … uh, Thebes."

Lies, almost certainly, but at the moment, that didn't matter.

"My whole life, I've never found anything, Evie. Please tell me I've found something!"

Evelyn's sensitive fingers had found two hidden springs on the sides of the box. She pressed them, and it sprang open, revealing a piece of parchment folded inside. And on the parchment, a map. "Jonathan."

"Yes?"

"I think you've found something." She held the map, feeling the age of the parchment in its texture and weight, and gasped. It couldn't be what she thought it was, could it? But it looked real … it felt real … "Jonathan."

He hung eagerly over her shoulder.

"It's …" Evelyn stopped herself before she could admit her suspicions. Too soon for that. "Come on!" Still holding the parchment gently on her fingertips, she got up and hurried to her desk in the library, to do her due diligence before she took it into the curator's office.

"Oh, what do you want?" the curator groaned when he saw them coming. "I have no money in the budget for another fake artifact."

"I believe this one is the real thing." Evelyn handed him the map, pointing to the corner of it. "You see the cartouche there? It's the official royal seal of Seti I, I'm sure of it."

The curator studied the map. His very silence confirmed to Evelyn that what she suspected was true—the map was real. But all he said was a harried, "Perhaps."

"Two questions: Who the hell was Seti I, and was he rich?" Jonathan asked.

"He was the second pharaoh of the 19th dynasty, said to be the wealthiest pharaoh of them all."

"Good. That's good. I like this fellow," Jonathan declared. "I like him very much."

"I've already dated the map; it's almost three thousand years old." She leaned over the curator's shoulder, pointing. "And if you look at the hieratic just here … well." Evelyn straightened, sure of her scholarship. "It's Hamunaptra."

"Don't be ridiculous. We're scholars, not treasure hunters. Hamunaptra's a myth, told by ancient Arab storytellers to amuse Greek and Roman tourists."

"Yes, yes, I know all the silly blather about the city being protected by the curse of a mummy nonsense, but—my research has led me to believe that the city itself may have actually existed." And Evelyn stood by her research skills. They were second to none.

"Are we talking about the Hamunaptra?" Jonathan asked.

"Yes. The City of the Dead. Where the earliest pharaohs were said to have hidden the wealth of Egypt."

"Yes. Yes. In a big underground treasure chamber."

The curator snorted.

Jonathan turned to him. "Oh, come on, everybody knows this story. The entire necropolis was rigged to sink into the sand at Pharaoh's command and the flip of a switch and the whole place would disappear beneath the sand dunes, taking the treasure with it."

"As the Americans would say, it's all fairytales and hokum—Oh, my goodnes!" the curator cried out, as the parchment caught fire. He'd held it too close to the flames of the candles on his desk. He let it go and it floated to the floor, Evelyn and Jonathan diving after it, trying to pat out the flames without doing any further damage to the parchment.

They picked it up carefully, and Jonathan cried out in dismay, "You've burnt it! You've burnt off the part with the lost city!"

"It's for the best, I'm sure," the curator said calmly. "Many men have wasted their lives in the foolish pursuit of Hamunaptra. None of them have found it. Most have never returned."

Across the remains of the map, Evelyn's eyes met Jonathan's, and for once, they were in complete agreement. Many men may have gone after Hamunaptra and never found it—but none of them had been Carnahans.