CHARLOTTE DEVEREAUX DIDN’T often think about her death. But when she did, she’d hoped it would be when she was very old and tucked into bed. Or maybe in a comfortable armchair, quietly slipping away over a very good book.
She hadn’t imagined it would be of heatstroke and dehydration after getting lost in the desert trying to find her father.
He’d told her he was going to the top of the dune to get a better view of the dig site—nothing major. But then someone had mentioned that they hadn’t seen Professor Devereaux for a while, so Charlotte had decided to go and see if she could find him.
She’d gone to the top dune where he had last been seen, only to find it empty. As all the dunes around her had been.
She hadn’t been worried initially. Her father did go off on his own so he could think, and he was a very experienced and eminent archaeologist who’d been on many digs in his time. The desert was nothing out of the ordinary for him and the idea of him getting lost was unthinkable.
As her father’s assistant, she wasn’t entirely inexperienced herself when it came to a dig and finding her way around it, and yet somehow, when she’d turned around to go back to the site, it had vanished. Along with her sense of direction.
Again, she hadn’t been worried—her father had talked a lot about how the desert could play tricks on a person’s perception—so she’d strode off confidently the same way she’d come, retracing her steps, expecting to come across the site pretty much straight away.
Except she hadn’t. And after about ten minutes of striding she’d realised that she’d made a mistake. A very grave one.
Of course she hadn’t panicked. Panicking wouldn’t help. It never did. The trick, when you got lost, was to stay calm and stay where you were.
So she had. But then the sun had got so hot—as if it were a hammer and she was the anvil. And she’d known that she was going to have to do something other than stand there otherwise she was going to die. So she’d started moving, going in the direction she’d thought the dig site would be, yet still it hadn’t materialised, and now she was slowly coming to the conclusion that she was lost.
It was a bad thing to be lost in the desert.
A very bad thing.
Charlotte paused and adjusted the black and white scarf she wore wrapped around her head. She hated the thing. It was too heavy and too hot, and gritty due to the sand. It was also usually damp, because she was constantly bathed in sweat, but she wasn’t sweating now and that was also a bad thing. Not sweating was a sign of heatstroke, wasn’t it?
She squinted into the distance, trying to see where she was going. The sun was beating her to a pulp. A number of black dots danced in her vision. That was probably another sign of heatstroke too, because she was now starting to feel dizzy.
This was the end, wasn’t it?
The rolling golden sands were endless, the violent blue of the sky a furnace she couldn’t seem to climb out of. The harsh, gritty sand under her feet was starting to move around like the deck of a ship and there was a roaring in her ears.
The black dots were getting bigger and bigger, looming large, until she realised that, actually, they weren’t dots in her vision. They were people, a whole group of them, dressed in black and riding...horses?
How odd. Shouldn’t they be riding camels?
She took a shaky step towards them, hope flooding through her. Were they some of the assistants from the dig? Had they come to find her? Rescue her?
‘Hey,’ she yelled. Or at least tried to. But the sound escaped as more of a harsh whisper.
The people on horses stopped, and she must be in a bad way because it wasn’t until that moment that she remembered that the assistants didn’t ride horses and they certainly weren’t swathed in black robes, the way these people seemed to be. Neither did they wear... Oh, goodness, they were swords, weren’t they?
Her heartbeat began to speed up, and a chill was sweeping through her despite the intense heat.
Her father, who’d been managing the dig, had warned everyone about how close the site was to the borders of Ashkaraz, and how they had to be careful not to stray too far. Ashkaraz had closed its borders nearly two decades ago and the current regime did not take kindly to intruders.
There were stories of men draped in black, who didn’t carry guns but swords, and of people who’d accidentally strayed over the border and never been seen again.
Rumours about Ashkaraz abounded—about how it was ruled by a tyrant who kept his people living in fear, banning all international travel both out of and into the country. All aid was refused. All diplomats and journalists turned away.
There had been one journalist reputed to have smuggled himself into Ashkaraz a couple of years back, escaping to publish a hysterical article full of terrible stories of a crushed people living under a dictator’s rule. But that was it.
Basically, no one knew what went on inside the country because no one—bar that journalist, and plenty doubted that he’d even been there anyway—had ever been there and come back.
Charlotte hadn’t listened much to the stories, or worried about how close to the borders they were. Mainly because she had been enjoying spending time with her father and was more interested in the archaeology they were doing than in rumours about a closed country.
Now, though, she wished she’d paid more attention. Because if the people approaching her weren’t assistants from the dig, then they were people from somewhere else.
Somewhere frightening.
She squinted harder at the group on horseback. Oh, goodness, was that a...a person, slung over the back of one of their horses? It seemed to be. A person with distinctive pale hair...
Her heart constricted, recognition slamming into her. She’d recognise that hair anywhere, because her hair was exactly the same colour. It was a family trait. Which meant that the person currently slung over the back of that horse was her father.
Fear wound around her, as cold as the sun was hot. He must have got lost, like she had, and they’d picked him up. And now they’d found her too...
A tall figure in the middle of the group swung down off