Maya's POV
The storage facility's back door opens with my old security badge.
I wait for alarms. For guards to come running. For anything.
Silence.
Two days have passed since the gala. Two days of sleeping in Marcus's guest room because I can't go back to my apartment. Two days of watching my name get dragged through every news site and social media platform. Two days of Sebastian's face on TV, looking sad and betrayed while he talks about "the woman he thought he knew."
I'm done watching. Done waiting for someone to believe me. Done hoping the truth will magically fix everything.
The mysterious woman's warning echoes in my head: It's a trap. They need you to touch that artifact again.
Good. Let them try whatever they're planning. I have nothing left to lose.
The storage facility is dark except for emergency lights. My footsteps echo on the concrete floor as I move between rows of shelves holding pieces of history—pottery, statues, scrolls, things that should matter but don't. Not compared to what they took from me.
I find the climate-controlled room at the back. Through the window, I see it.
The Temporal Ankh sits inside a locked glass case, golden and impossible under a single spotlight. The symbols carved into its surface seem to move in the dim light, shifting and rearranging themselves like they're alive.
My discovery. My proof that an entire civilization existed before recorded history. And Sebastian gets to claim it.
The door to the room is locked, but I'm past caring about rules. I grab a fire extinguisher from the wall—heavy metal, good for breaking things—and slam it against the door handle. Once. Twice. Three times.
The lock breaks.
I kick the door open and walk straight to the glass case. My reflection stares back at me—hair messy, dark circles under my eyes, looking like a criminal because that's what they made me.
"You were worth it," I whisper to the ankh. "Even if no one believes me, you were worth everything."
I lift the fire extinguisher over my head and bring it down hard on the glass.
The case explodes. Alarms immediately start screaming—loud, piercing shrieks that seem to come from everywhere at once. Red lights flash on the walls.
I don't run. I reach through the broken glass, and a sharp edge slices deep into my palm. Blood wells up, hot and fast.
My fingers close around the ankh.
It's heavier than I remember. Warm, like it's been sitting in sunlight instead of a dark room. The symbols carved into its surface press against my bleeding palm.
"Maya Hartwell!" A voice booms through a speaker. "Step away from the artifact and put your hands up!"
I don't move. I can't. Because something's happening.
The symbols on the ankh start to glow—faint at first, like embers, then brighter. Gold light spreads from where my blood touches the metal, racing along the carved lines like fire following a trail of gasoline.
"This isn't possible," I breathe.
The light gets brighter. Hotter. The air around me starts to hum with a sound I feel in my bones more than hear. Reality itself seems to vibrate.
Through the window, I see security guards running toward the room. Three of them, maybe four. They're shouting, but I can't hear words anymore. Just the humming. Just my heartbeat.
Just the voice that suddenly whispers inside my head in a language I shouldn't understand but somehow do:
Welcome home, daughter of stars.
The ankh burns in my hand. Not painful—the opposite. Like it's been waiting for me. Like it knows me.
One of the guards reaches the door. "Drop the artifact now!"
The humming gets louder. The golden light spreads from the ankh to my hand, climbing up my arm like living fire. I try to let go, but my fingers won't open. The ankh won't release me.
Or I won't release it.
"I said drop it!" The guard pulls out his gun.
That's when the world breaks.
The light explodes outward in a wave that throws the guards backward. The floor beneath my feet cracks. The air tears open—literally tears, like fabric ripping—and through the gap I see something impossible.
Sand. Golden sand stretching forever under a sky with two suns.
"No," I gasp. "No, this isn't—this can't—"
But the tear in reality gets wider. Wind that smells like desert and spices and something ancient rushes through, so strong it knocks me to my knees. I'm still holding the ankh. Can't let go. Don't want to let go.
The guards are screaming. One of them is on his radio: "We need backup! Something's happening with the artifact—some kind of explosion—"
The humming becomes a roar. The symbols on the ankh blaze so bright I can't look directly at them. My blood has soaked into the metal completely, and now it feels like the ankh is in my veins, part of me, changing something fundamental about who I am.
The voice in my head speaks again: The bridge is open. Come home. Come save us. Come fulfill what your blood has always promised.
"I don't understand!" I scream over the noise.
But understanding doesn't matter. The tear in reality yawns wider, and I can see more now—not just sand, but structures in the distance. Buildings that shouldn't exist. Technology that shouldn't be possible. A city that looks like it was built by aliens or gods or both.
The pull is irresistible. Like gravity, but stronger. Like the universe itself is grabbing me and dragging me toward that impossible desert.
I try to drop the ankh one last time. My fingers finally open.
But it's too late.
The golden light wraps around me completely, and I feel my body start to come apart. Not painfully—it's like being turned into pure energy, scattered into a million pieces and reassembled somewhere else.
"Marcus," I try to say, thinking of my friend who believed me. "I'm sorry—"
The storage facility disappears.
The guards, the alarms, the broken glass—gone.
I'm falling through the tear in reality, through colors that don't exist and sounds that aren't sounds. Time stretches and compresses. I see my life flash past—my parents' funeral, my first day of college, the moment I found the ankh in that Egyptian temple, Sebastian's proposal, Patricia's cold eyes at the gala.
All of it leading to this moment.
All of it planned by someone or something I don't understand yet.
Then the falling stops.
I slam into solid ground hard enough to knock the air from my lungs. Sand fills my mouth. The ankh is still clutched in my bloody hand, but the glow is fading now, dying like a candle flame.
I push myself up, coughing and gasping. The air is wrong—too hot, too dry, too clean. Like it's never known pollution or factories or cars.
I'm kneeling in sand that stretches in every direction under a sky that's too blue and a sun that's too bright. No buildings. No roads. No signs of the twenty-first century anywhere.
"Where—" I start to ask.
That's when I hear it.
Thunder. But not from a storm.
Horses.
I spin around, still on my knees, and see them cresting a sand dune—riders in bronze armor on horses that move impossibly fast. Twelve of them, maybe fifteen, riding in formation like a military unit.
At their head is a man with a sword and eyes like dark fire.
He sees me, and his expression goes from surprise to cold calculation in a heartbeat.
The riders charge down the dune, sand spraying from the horses' hooves. I try to stand, but my legs won't work. Everything that just happened—the breaking, the light, the falling through reality—has left me weak and shaking.
The man reaches me first. He jumps from his horse with liquid grace, sword already drawn and pointed at my throat before I can even think about running.
"Don't move," he commands in a language that sounds like Arabic mixed with something older, something from before recorded history.
I shouldn't understand him. But I do. Perfectly.
His soldiers surround me, weapons drawn. They're staring at me like I'm a monster or a miracle.
The man's eyes drop to the ankh in my hand. His jaw tightens.
"The Star-Marked Woman," one soldier whispers, his voice full of awe and fear.
The man's sword doesn't waver. "Secure her. If she resists, knock her unconscious."
"Wait," I gasp. "I don't know what's happening. I don't know where I am—"
"You're in the Kemet Empire," the man says coldly. "And you're under arrest for unauthorized possession of a sacred artifact and illegal entry into protected territory."
He reaches down and grabs my wrist—the one holding the ankh. His grip is iron strong.
"You're coming with us. And if you try anything, anything at all, I'll make sure you regret surviving the journey here."
His dark eyes bore into mine, and I see something there that terrifies me more than the sword or the impossible situation:
He's been expecting me.