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the Cairo Museum of Antiquities
Cairo, Egypt
1923

The back room of the Cairo Museum of Antiquities is Adrien's favorite place in the entire world. Here, he knows exactly who he is, and how the items must be organized; he knows what needs to happen every day, and what to do with every item that comes into his trained hands.

Which makes the wreckage of his careful organization all the more devastating.

Adrien stands in the middle of the room, his hands in the pockets of his trousers, and turns in a slow, slow circle as he takes in the years of work he's just ruined with one careless act. The room looks bigger now that all of the massive shelves made of dark wood have fallen down like so many drunken puzzle pieces, laying at crazy, precarious angles, their contents tumbling out of the shelves to mix together on the floor. There's dust hanging golden in the air, shaken loose from the artifacts and books that he doesn't use as often as some of the others, but there's also a new, more woodsy note to it; Adrien knows, without having to check, that some of the scrolls have been damaged and infinitesimal fragments of papyrus, both ancient and simply old, have bloomed into the air. That's what he's smelling.

What the hell is he going to do?

Adrien jerks one trembling hand through his hair, his stomach somewhere around his knees, and tries to get himself to figure out where to start fixing this absolute disaster. But he can't think. All he can do is take in this nightmare and panic and shake like a child.

"Adrien."

He closes his eyes as his stomach twists into a tight knot of dismay and panic and fear. Then Adrien turns, slowly, to look at the door. His father is standing there, his hand resting lazily on the door handle, his eyes very cold as he looks around the room.

"Explain," Gabriel orders. "Now."

Adrien swallows and obeys, confessing his sins in a carefully steady voice, his hand in his pocket slowly, slowly clenching into a fist. His father's expression grows colder and more severe with every word that comes out of Adrien's mouth.

There's a heavy silence when Adrien's done that weighs on him. He digs his nails into the side of his thumb to keep from saying something stupid, like offering an apology. His father does not find apologies useful.

"I don't want to see you until you've straightened out this mess," Gabriel says in the end, his furious eyes flaying Adrien wide open to expose his weak underbelly. "I don't care how long it takes. Do you understand me?"

"Yes, Father," Adrien says quietly.

The click of the door closing behind his father is loud in the silence, and Adrien sighs long and slow. At least that part's over with, he tells himself, but that doesn't make him feel better.

He sits down at the reading table in the middle of the room, slouching deliberately in the chair since there's no one here to remark on his posture, and looks at the mess.

In the end, Adrien does the only thing he can think of: he sends a runner with a message to Nino.

———

Nino lets himself into the back room and his eyes grow wide with shock as he looks at the wreckage of Adrien's tidy catalogue. "What happened? Are you all right?" he says, striding over to Adrien.

Adrien laughs weakly. His father hadn't even bothered to ask, he realizes belatedly. "I'm fine. Just... stupid."

Nino drops his hand on Adrien's shoulder and squeezes as he looks around the room again. "I could have told you that," he says with sly humor. "Do you want to start with the shelves?"

Between the two of them it's relatively easy to lift each heavy set of shelves upright, which lets Adrien better assess the damage – awful – and what he'll have to do to restore everything to its proper place – months of work, he thinks, sighing, running his hand through his hair to rest at the back of his neck. At least. If he's lucky, it'll be months. It might be years. He summons some of the museum workers to come and start carefully sorting through the collection, separating scrolls from papyri from artefacts. It's late afternoon now, and his stomach is rumbling unhappily.

"Come on," Nino says, taking Adrien by the scruff of his neck like a kitten and steering him out of the room. "You're going to faint away like a damsel in distress if you don't get something in your stomach. You're buying, by the way."

Over koshari and kofta, they talk about other things: the cabaret they'd gone to last night, Nino's had a letter from his brother saying that he's left school to join an aerodynamics laboratory, and Adrien reluctantly tells Nino more about the accident. He'd been balancing on a chair, and stretched too far, and then –

"It was a glorious racket," Adrien says, laughing very ruefully indeed. "I wish you could have heard it."

"But then I would have had to be there for your father thrashing you," Nino says, his mouth twisting sympathetically. "And I don't think anyone wanted that."

"True," Adrien agrees, and says nothing more.

He doesn't have to. Nino understands.

"Well, it was convenient for me," Nino says, leaning back to dig something out of his pocket. "I wanted to show you this." He drops a heavy bronze box on the table between them, pushing it closer with one finger.

There are hieroglyphs on every flat surface except the top, which is joined together like a puzzle box. They're the first thing that Adrien notices, every time, and the lust that rises in his heart is completely unreasonable, but he has to have this. Whatever it is. Even if it's a fake – but the bronze has the patina of age, wear on the corners and light scratches over the rest of the surface that only come of being buried in Egypt's ocean of sand. Adrien reaches out to touch the box with awed, reverent hands, but then he catches sight of his fingers, covered in grease from the koftas.

"Damn it," Adrien hisses, glaring at Nino as he snatches his hand back and grabs a napkin to scrub the grease off of his fingers. "You could have shown me this before lunch."

"You were a little distracted," Nino says, lacing his hands together over his stomach with an easy grin. "And I wanted your full attention. Is it worth anything?"

Adrien turns the box around, studying the hieroglyphs with greedy, intent eyes. By the order of the gods in their person of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt Seti first of his name...

A royal cartouche, from the pharaoh whose reign ended mysteriously sometime in the later half of his reign – and Adrien's fingers are telling him that there's more to this box than meets the eye. He swallows and twists the top half, and then the bottom half, and the tiny leaves on the top of the box snap open to offer Adrien a folded up bit of parchment, like a gift.

Is it worth anything, Nino asks, as though this isn't priceless.

"Where did you get this?" Adrien demands, looking up at Nino with feverish eyes. Nino just raises an eyebrow in return, and Adrien barely restrains himself from rolling his eyes. "Yes, yes, I'll pay you anything you care to name, it's priceless. Where did you find this?"

Nino smiles, though there's a grim edge to it. "That's a long story. Walk with me?"

———

They go across the district after that, the box a heavy weight in Adrien's pocket, and Nino explains himself on the way as they push through the thick afternoon crowd. "You know I grew up in Paris," he says over his shoulder, raising his voice to be heard over the clamor. "When I went to school, there were three of us who were outsiders: me, Alya, and Marinette. We stuck together all through school and afterward we kept in touch for a while, but then Alya joined the Legion and Marinette followed her. I lost track of them after that. And then last night I got a message from Marinette, with a package – with that box – and a message begging for help," Nino says, his eyes troubled.

"What kind of help?" Adrien asks warily.

Nino gestures ahead of them, and Adrien looks up to find the Cairo jail rearing tall and menacing ahead of them. "This kind of trouble," Nino says, his eyes very serious. "So I really hope you meant it when you said you'd pay anything."

Adrien groans, but he had meant it, and he still does, so he follows as Nino talks his way through two layers of security. Adrien bribes the third guard, and then they're shown into an open courtyard with cells placed in a ring around the outside edge. The effect is like the courtyard is enclosed, like he's in the jail cell and everyone else is outside of it, and Adrien has to swallow the gorge that rises in his throat.

I can leave at any time, he tells himself. It helps – a bit.

The guard introduces them to the warden, a small, round, no-nonsense little man. "You wanted to see Cheng," he snaps, looking from Nino to Adrien with narrowed eyes. "Are you sure? She's a fighter. She's tried to escape several times. I can't guarantee your safety if she tries to use your presence as a distraction."

"Dupain-Cheng. Something tells me we'll be fine," Nino says with a lopsided smirk. "Adrien?"

He's not quite as confident as Nino is, but Adrien sighs and begins the delicate dance of bribing the warden without offending him, which is a skill that he's very good at after three years of procuring artefacts for the museum. Fifteen minutes later, they're shaking hands in the European style, and then the warden turns and makes a short, sharp gesture at the guards in one of the outer cells. They nod and turn to open the door –

The Egypt sun is setting in front of him, blazing brightly in his eyes, which makes the inside of the inner cell too dark to see clearly. So the woman that's shoved out of the door, writhing and struggling with every inch of her body, is a surprise.

The first surprise is that she's so small. She might hit Adrien's shoulder, but no more. She's all power, compact muscle and lean flexibility, twisting in directions Adrien didn't think possible to kick one of the guards in the knee and elbow the other in the stomach at the same time, even though they're holding her wrists behind her back. Her hair is a loose black cloud around her face, but Adrien catches a glimpse of calculating, determined blue eyes that hits him in the solar plexus.

"Marinette, it's me," Nino calls to her, his voice amused.

Instantly she stops fighting and flips around again to look at Nino, her eyes wide. She winces as the guards twist her arms up behind her harder than seems necessary, but then she grins at Nino anyway, relief all over her face. "You came!" She glances at Adrien then, her eyes wandering down his body in a shockingly forward way that he shouldn't like as much as he does. "And who's the pretty princess?"

Is she talking about him?

"Of course I came, you idiot," Nino says with rough affection. "This is Adrien Agreste. He's from the Cairo Museum, and he wants to ask you – " He glances over at Adrien, his eyebrow raised. "Actually, I have no idea. What did you want to know?"

"Where did you find it?" Adrien asks instantly, moving forward until he's nearly pressed against the bars. He makes no effort to hide his enthusiasm. "I've never seen anything like it."

"My unit was stationed in Libya," Marinette says, a thoughtful expression coming into her eyes as she looks at Adrien.

"You can't be more specific?" Adrien asks, nearly begging. "The box is extraordinary. I need to know everything about it."

"The box?" Marinette echoes, looking like she wants to laugh. "Not – " She glances at the warden, who seems to have no intention of leaving them alone to have a private conversation. But Marinette lowers her voice anyway, causing Adrien to lean closer to be able to hear her properly. "Not the map inside?"

Adrien flushes. Honestly, he'd been so caught up by the beautifully preserved hieroglyphs that he hadn't even opened the parchment inside of the box. "A map?" he asks, intrigued. "Where does it lead?"

Marinette smiles, long and slow, until she's damn near smirking at him. The look makes her unfairly attractive, even disheveled and dirty and detained as she is. She leans forward until her face is no more than an inch from the bars. "Hamunaptra," she whispers, her eyes intent on Adrien's.

Hamunaptra, the City of the Dead, is the most enduring myth in Egyptology. The stories claim fabulous riches, untouched royal tombs, a wealth of history that no one has ever seen before. No one's found a single trace of it – most believe that it doesn't exist.

But not Adrien.

Adrien knows that there are more than a few pharaoh's sons whose tombs have never been found. They could be anywhere, despoiled by tomb robbers or buried forever by the drifting Egyptian sands, but –

They could also be hidden in Hamunaptra.

There's an excitement building itself in his stomach, one that Adrien tries to hide, but he sees it echoed in Marinette's eyes and he knows that he's failed.

"Have you been there?" he asks cautiously. "Did you follow the map?"

"I followed Alya," she says, flashing a wry smile at Nino. "She believed in the map, and she was right. But I lost her in the fighting, and I don't know what happened to her." Marinette presses closer to the bars, her eyes huge and pleading. "You have to get me out of here, please – "

"Her unit deserted their post, to a man, in order to march into Egypt following this lunacy. They then disappeared without a trace," the warden puts in. "I only mention this small detail to explain why Dupain-Cheng is being hanged tomorrow."

"Hanged?!" Nino's head snaps around to glare at the warden.

"Desertion is a capital crime," the warden says, shrugging.

"I'll take you there," Marinette whispers. "I swear. Just get me out of here."

Adrien leans his forehead against the bars, swearing at himself inside his head. "Promise you're not taking me for a ride," he says, looking deep into her eyes, trying to gauge whether she's telling the truth or not.

Marinette leans in, too. "I promise," she whispers, so quietly that Adrien might have missed it if he wasn't paying attention. Then she darts in, snake-quick, and kisses Adrien, her mouth soft and thorough and so warm, and if he's not mistaken, there's a curious and very inquisitive tongue sliding over his lower lip –

The guards yank her away, and Adrien stares after her, shocked and on fire from his mouth all the way down. His brain has nothing to say on the matter, as if it's gone to sleep.

"Get me out of here, princess!" Marinette shouts as they damn near carry her back into the inner cell, fighting the whole way.

Adrien swallows, and pries his hands away from the bars, and scrubs his face until he feels like he can understand words again –

And then he turns to the warden and begins the long and delicate dance of bribing the man, because there's no way in hell that he's going to let that woman die.