ALEXANDRIA, EGYPT
2018 CE
Rabbit Ward crashed into the protective glass cylinder as the time machine jerked him back to the present. Reflexively, he looked over his shoulder for pharaoh’s soldiers, but they were gone, left behind in the desert two thousand years ago. He’d pushed it too close this time. A moment later and he would have spent the rest of his life in Roman-occupied Egypt.
She’d gotten him again.
“Welcome back, Rabbit. You look terrible.”
The cylinder depressurized with a hiss, rose from its recess in the floor, and retracted into the ceiling.
The snark belonged to Ian March, the team’s technical lead. He grinned at Rabbit from behind the raised semicircle of control consoles. Rabbit returned the smile and saluted him with his middle finger.
“In your dreams.” Ian laughed and resumed his work with the two junior techs who ran the equipment with him.
Rabbit straightened as the cramp in his side subsided and scrubbed his short hair with one hand. It was as clean as it had been when he left twenty days ago. The first rule of time travel: nothing returns to the present that didn’t start there. That included the grime that had caked his body in 48 BCE when he sprinted into the circle of stones he left to mark his spot. He envisioned a Rabbit-shaped cloud of dirt and undigested food slopping to the ground in the remote palm grove. Must have scared the hell out of his pursuers.
The Egyptian national time dilator in Alexandria looked like something from a sci-fi film, but it was functionally identical to more utilitarian models. Everything on the platform went back in time. Everything that made it back to the same patch of ground twenty days later came back home. Everything else was superficial. But what the hell, time machines were incredibly expensive to own and operate. If Egypt wanted to trick theirs out in stainless steel and glass, who was Rabbit to judge?
A physician stepped onto the platform and began to examine him. Rabbit complied without concern. Apart from fatigue and a few bruises, he knew he was fine. While Rabbit’s appearance wouldn’t turn any heads (he was middle weight, middle height, ethnically hard to pin down, all of which helped him blend in across eras) he had the kind of practical, workhorse body that seemed to be designed to take abuse. And it had taken far worse over the years.
He stuck out his tongue for the doctor’s inspection as a fashionably dressed woman approached from behind the control console.
“How did it go?”
“It was … interesting.” Rabbit raised his arms at the silent behest of the doctor.
“I like interesting men. I like interesting books. But, honey, I am far less fond of interesting time travel. What happened?” Neither her quip nor her Tennessee twang could hide the anxiety in her voice. Patty-Jo West, PJ to her friends, had been the collections curator for the National History Museum in DC for three decades. She had been Rabbit’s boss and friend for two of those. He had seen her through two divorces and the untimely death of her eldest daughter. He knew her tone as well as anyone.
Rabbit lowered his arms and turned his head to let the doctor look in his ears. “Maybe we should discuss this on the way to the excavation.”
* * *
Two hours later, PJ and Rabbit were sitting in the back of a white SUV, traveling south on Wadi Al Natrun-El Alamein Road. The sun shone brightly outside, but the tan interior was a steady sixty-eight degrees. Through the window, the farmlands at the outskirts of the Nile Valley were giving way to desert.
Rabbit glanced at the driver. He appeared to be fixated on the road, which was exactly what it would look like if he were eavesdropping.
PJ saw his glance. “Medo, honey, would you put on some music?”
With a nod, the driver flipped on the radio. Egyptian pop filled the cabin. PJ turned to Rabbit. “Well?”
“She was there again,” he said softly.
PJ scowled. “How do you know?”
“She practically introduced herself.”
“Looking for these, handsome?” a woman’s voice called through the din of the fire consuming the roof of the Alexandrian book repository over their heads. The inferno Caesar had started had driven everyone else from the library. They were alone.
Rabbit wheeled around, his heart sinking at the sound of Modern English.
The petite woman facing him was dressed in Hellenic white and blue, her dark brown hair braided and arranged around her head like a crown. Despite the cinders drifting in through the open door, she was smiling broadly and looked as though she couldn’t think of anywhere she would rather be.
She had her hand on a stack of scrolls piled on a clerk’s desk. “Daedalus of Athens? That’s your pseudonym? Really? It’s like you want me to find you.”
“What do you want?”
“Half.”
“Fine,” he said.
“Don’t be so hasty. I don’t mean half of your piddling payment; I mean half the space in that fancy container.” She pointed to the crate hanging at his side. Rabbit reflexively laid a hand on the masterwork glass scroll case he had commissioned for the job.
A cloud of smoke passed between them. Fire kindled to life on the clerk’s desk next to her. She waved the scrolls over the flames.
“The choice is yours.”
Rabbit jerked his sword from its sheath, its steel edge glinting dully in the smoke. “I could leave you here.”
“You won’t though.”
He wiped sooty sweat from his brow, hesitated, then jammed the blade back into its sheath. “Dammit. Fine. Ptolemy threw his whole force at the Sun Gate. We’re clear to the west. I have a horse waiting outside the walls.”
“I know.” She grinned and produced a set of saddlebags from a nearby chair. “I parked mine next to yours.”
“PJ, she knew my whole plan down to the location of the dig. That’s why I didn’t want to tell you in the facility.”
PJ rifled through her stylish little handbag and pulled out a lipstick. “Once is a coincidence.” She applied some fresh crimson and smacked her lips. “Twice is a conspiracy.”
“That’s what I thought. Do you suspect somebody on the team?”
“Honey, I suspect everybody.” She glared at the lipstick as if it had insulted her, tossed it back into her purse, and sighed. “I’ll have to start an official inquest. I’m damn disappointed, Rabbit.” She cracked that last phrase like a whip. The driver looked in the rearview mirror.
“I know,” Rabbit replied.
“These people are like family.”
“I know.”
She rolled her eyes. “Well, you’re awfully sanguine about it.”
“I haven’t slept in two days. Maybe it’ll catch up to me.” As she harrumphed at this, his attention was drawn to a gathering of vehicles on the side of the road ahead. “That it?”
PJ nodded.
“What’s the story?” Rabbit asked.
“Oh, you know, a new filling station planned a few miles south of St. Moses Monastery found something out of the ordinary while digging for the fuel tanks.”
Rabbit yawned. “Funny how often that happens.”
The SUV crossed the opposing lane and crunched to a halt on the sandy side of the road. Rabbit stepped out into the heat of the afternoon while the driver opened PJ’s door for her.
“Thank you, honey,” she said and followed that with something in Masri that made the driver smile as he climbed back into the SUV.
PJ and Rabbit walked over to the large white tent that sheltered the excavation from the weather. A uniformed guard stood at the entry. He wore a pistol on his hip, but he smiled at them as they approached and held open the tent flap to admit them.
“Doctors.”
“Well, thank you, honey. What’s your name?”
“Nasir, ma’am.”
“Thank you, Nasir. Don’t stand directly in the sun, now. Do you need a water or anything?”
“No ma’am,” he said and smiled.
She led Rabbit inside. PJ would remember the man’s name and use it every time she saw him going forward. It was a talent Rabbit admired.
The moment they entered the shade of the tent, Elliott Hemmings, an archaeologist from New Zealand, rushed to intercept them.
“PJ, it wasn’t my fault.”
“What wasn’t?” growled Rabbit.
Hemmings shot him a quick scowl but addressed PJ. “I came straight here from the hotel the moment the report came through from the diggers, but the excavation crew said someone had already been here from the museum to collect what they found.”
Rabbit bristled. “You were in Alexandria? When you knew they were digging today? Dammit!”
The Kiwi’s cheeks flared red. “It would look pretty suspicious if I showed up ten minutes after they reported…”
“Apparently that didn’t occur to the person who did your job! Let me guess—American woman, dark hair, about this tall?” Rabbit said, holding his hand at his chin.
Hemmings looked surprised. “How did you know that?”
Rabbit marched toward the hole in the ground.
Hemmings called after him, “Maybe you’re working with her!”
Rabbit heard PJ’s honey voice calming the archaeologist behind him as he looked into the six-foot hole scooped up by the excavator. It had taken Rabbit and the thief hours to dig it. At the bottom of the hole was a slab of sandstone he had placed over the magnificent scroll case to protect the glass and tip off the diggers that something was worth slowing down for. He had commissioned the slab as well; some meaningless Greek phrases were etched into the stone. Just enough to send up red flags to anyone who happened upon it in antiquities-happy modern Egypt.
He jumped into the hole, bringing a trickle of sand with him that slipped into his low boots. Hemmings’s whining objection trailed after him, but Rabbit ignored it.
Standing on the slab, he could see where someone had dug out beneath it. He slipped his hand into the cavity under the rock. It was empty.
* * *
Rabbit was taciturn on the drive back to Alexandria. The stone slab could be sold off to some foolish collector. A community of people followed Rabbit and his peers and gladly bought up any items they used to do their jobs. The sale would cover the costs of the dig but fall far short of the expedition expenses.
“The jump, props, costumes, airfare, lodging…” PJ was tearing herself up about the loss.
“I’ll explain it to the museum secretary,” offered Rabbit.
“Marty is the least of my worries. It’s the sponsors I have to explain it to.”
“I can—”
She cut him off. “No, you can’t. You have many skills, Dr. Ward, but diplomacy isn’t one of them.”
A horn blare caught their attention. The SUV slowed to a stop amid a sudden snarl of traffic. PJ craned her neck to look out the front windshield, then settled back into her seat in irritation. “Another protest. We’ll be here a while.”
Someone passed the side of the car waving a red flag and chanting. Rabbit looked behind them. Protesters appeared to be passing around the car on all sides. PJ had pulled out her phone. “What is this about?”
The driver, Medo, looked in the rearview mirror and replied in excellent English, “Your president declared unilateral American support for Israel.”
She read from her phone, “… recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. It’s clumsy, but I wouldn’t call it unilateral support.”
Medo gestured to the crowd growing denser around them. “Does it matter?”
PJ scanned more stories. Rabbit scanned the crowd. The chants weren’t in unison, the signs were scrawled with marker. This wasn’t the protest of an organization; it had all the hallmarks of a social media feeding frenzy. If the police didn’t come quickly, the crowd would turn their attention on …
A rock hit the car’s windshield. Medo swore loudly in Masri.
“Do you have a scarf?” Rabbit hissed.
“A what?” PJ asked, looking around them, suddenly realizing their precarious position.
Rabbit grabbed the colorful edge of cloth poking out of her pocket. The square of flower-printed silk snapped open, and Rabbit wrapped it over her head. “We have to get out of here.”
He popped open the first two buttons on his shirt and pulled it up over his head. The last thing they needed was to be singled out in all this anger.
Ignoring Medo’s protests, Rabbit slipped out of the car and hauled PJ after him. The trickle of protesters was turning into a river, the chants getting louder and more coordinated by the moment. Rabbit steered PJ to the sidewalk through the shoving, shouting crowd and onto a calmer side street. Glass shattered behind them. PJ lowered her scarf as she straightened up to see what was going on. Rabbit put it back in place and took her hand. “Keep moving.”
Ten minutes later, the disheveled pair trudged up the steps of the Alexandria National Museum. The National was their partner in the scroll expedition; the staff had worked with PJ and Rabbit off and on for years. Rabbit had never been so relieved to see the Italianate mansion.
Inside, the National staff fretted over their state. Two kind employees took them to the administrative office, made them tea, and settled PJ in a chair. Her breathing settled, but her makeup was smeared, and her hair was wild. A porter approached them.
“Doctor, a package was delivered for you.”
“A package? From whom?” asked PJ.
“Respectfully, it is addressed to Dr. Ward.”
The admin handed a long rectangular cardboard box to Rabbit. The label simply read:
Dr. Robert Ward
c/o the Alexandria National Museum
Confused, he pulled out a penknife, slit the packing tape across the top, and folded back the flaps.
“Well, thank god for small mercies,” PJ breathed.
The scroll case lay nestled in a bed of Styrofoam packing in the box. Rabbit lifted it out, holding his breath. He wasn’t willing to relax until he saw what was inside.
The outer sheath of copper was green and pitted from two thousand years in the sand. It almost matched the glass tube inside.
Rabbit gently rotated the lid back and forth to release it from the tube. The interleaved layers gave way with resistance, and the lid separated with a gentle pop.
“It’s beautiful,” PJ said.
“The old man does good work,” he agreed, thinking of Meriiti, the venerable first-century glassmaker from whom Rabbit had commissioned the piece. The twelve thin leaves of glass that ringed the mouth of the scroll case slotted together so perfectly with the corresponding leaves on the lid that a speck of dust would have interfered with their closure.
He held the green glass tube up to the light. Roll upon roll of buff parchment lay within. Rabbit sagged with relief. The thief had kept her word and given him his scrolls after all. Up to that point, he hadn’t admitted to himself how nervous he really was. You couldn’t lose very often in his line of work before they found someone to replace you. The stakes were just too high.
A flash of pink in the center of the scroll case caught his attention. He reached for the interior.
“Rabbit, don’t touch them!” PJ warned.
Rabbit delicately slid a small square of fresh pink paper out with his index finger. It read, in flowing script:
A favor for a favor. Stop in to see Dr. Ashish Agrawal at the British Museum on your way home. You’re welcome.
LONDON, UK
2018 CE
The Victorians were mad about Egypt, of course. Unwrapping mummies was the in-vogue dinner party activity of the period. I’d like to think it ceased because British society realized how grotesquely they were treating the deceased, but it’s more likely they just got bored of it. Let’s take the stairs…”
On the layover in London, Rabbit begrudgingly followed the thief’s tip and stopped to visit Dr. Ashish Agrawal at the British Museum. Over their handshake, the young archaeologist started talking about mummies. He led a bemused Rabbit through the museum and down into the working levels of the facility on an unbroken stream of words. Rabbit hadn’t even introduced himself.
“Animal mummification is less well known but much more common. Millions of animal mummies have been discovered over the years, and a lot of them ended up in England as souvenirs as well. With the decline of Egyptomania, a lot of inheritors donated their family embarrassments to the museum where they just choked the stores.” Agrawal’s voice danced through pitch changes like a bell choir, ringing through the long, quiet hall.
The archaeologist opened a heavy door, and British punk music spilled out of the brightly lit lab. A handful of young scientists working in the lab ignored them as Agrawal ushered him to a workstation with dual oversized monitors. A dusty balsa wood box sat on the counter beside the computer.
“We have a ton of them, just lying in boxes. Most of them haven’t been touched since they were first cataloged. At any rate, I was trolling the reserves looking for a sample to try out the micro-CT scanner, and this one was sticking halfway out of its cubby. It was like it was calling to me and—”
Rabbit raised his hand like a school kid, cutting off Agrawal mid-sentence.
“Yes?”
“Why am I here?”
Agrawal knitted his brow. “Your assistant said you would be interested in my findings.”
“My assistant. Right.” Rabbit pictured the woman waving goodbye as he stood peeing in the sand. “Only she didn’t give me a lot of information. I’ve been meaning to fire her. Maybe you could help me out with some context.”
“Of course.” He nodded. “You see, it’s the bandages that are of interest. Animal mummies vary greatly in quality. Some of them were used as offerings in temples, others were cheap fakes filled with sticks. In human mummies, the wrappings were made of linen. But linen was expensive, so many of the animal equivalents were wrapped in whatever was at hand: old clothing, used parchment, papyrus. Some of those wrappings contain writing which can be read using a micro-CT scanner.”
Copyright © 2025 by Andrew Ludington
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