“How did you know how to get down to us?” asked Annie. “I can't stand feeling so confused.”

“I found a second shaft in real life,” he told her. “Well, 1899 life. Just this morning. Except forty-five hundred years from now, if I remember Khufu's dates correctly. I paced it off exactly, and of course the same markers are here, because this came first. So Time flung me down on the sand, and I regained consciousness, and had the astounding privilege of seeing Pharaoh in a royal procession, and the shocking reality of seeing two human sacrifices, and just as the second sacrifice was lowered in her basket, I recognized her.”

Annie buried her face in his throat.

He said, “I'm not sure if you were sent to save me or if I was sent to save you. Had I stayed in my time, I would have been in terrible difficulties.”

“Had you stayed in your time,” said Annie, “I would have been dead. Was it you the other day in the museum? Did you buy me lunch?”

He was puzzled. “Lunch?” he said confusedly. “What museum?”

“I forgot. It hasn't happened yet. But I'm sure it's you.”

She had the oddest sense of wanting to get back and check on him in the museum. First, we'd better get out of our tomb, she thought, sitting up abruptly.

“Tell me how it worked for you,” he said, sitting up with her. He slid his hand under the mass of her silky hair and rubbed her spine.

“Your photographs,” said Annie. “You had told me you were going to Egypt to be an archaeologist, do you remember? I never found out a single thing about what happened to you. You vanished. But I happened to pick up the Sunday New York Times, which my parents don't often buy and I almost never touch. And I felt you through the print. You were in a museum article. So I went to the museum to find you. I have only four days, which is the first problem. You see, my parents just got married, Strat. It was a lovely ceremony, and they're having a very short honeymoon so I thought we could have a very short reunion or ask Time to stretch it or bring you back with me or stay here with you.”

Strat decided not to ask why her parents had just gotten married. It seemed late, what with their daughter in her teens. But who was he, whose father was on wife number four, to quibble about the marriages of parents? “The ceremony I just watched was also lovely,” he teased. “You made a beautiful sacrifice.”

“Thank you,” said Annie. “I threw Pharaoh's gold on the floor over there. I think, but I'm not sure, that Renifer's actual father and her actual boyfriend handed her over to Pharaoh to be sacrificed. Those two men enjoyed every minute of shoving Renifer underground.”