Shaduf faced them, his eyes glistening. “That is why so many good people shed their blood, not only for freedom, but for the hope of a new world.”

Seeing the shine in the old man’s eyes, Jake felt ashamed for his momentary lapse in faith. These people had been waiting for so long. He could not fail them.

“But who wrote that?” Marika asked. “How do we even know it’s talking about us?”

“Maybe it was just some crazy scribbling,” Pindor agreed.

Bach’uuk looked to Jake for an answer, some final judgment before they risked entering the storm because of the words of a dead fortune-teller.

But what do I know about any of this?

Jake stared at the cartouche. In his mind’s eye, he translated the hieroglyphic letters, eight in all, written in two lines.

He shook his head. It was just as Shaduf had stated. It was the Prophecy of Lupi Pini. It meant nothing to him. He began to turn away when he noticed that the hieroglyphic figures—the lion, the quail, the reeds—were all facing left. That nagged him for some reason. He turned back to study the cartouche more closely, scratching his head. The direction in which hieroglyphs face often indicate the way in which they should be read. But even that changed over time. In the New Kingdom of Egypt, hieroglyphs were read from top to bottom; but in the Old Kingdom, it was the reverse.

If this prophecy had been carved centuries ago, maybe the name was supposed to be read the opposite way: bottom to top. He flipped the words in his head.

Jake mumbled the name aloud, his voice trembling, “Pini Lupi.”

Marika wrinkled her brow, sensing his growing distress. “What?”

His breathing became heavier, as if the air had been sucked out of his lungs. “It’s been read wrong all this time,” he said, and faced the others. “The ancient Egyptian alphabet didn’t have letters for E and O. So modern writers would often replace those letters with the hieroglyphs for I and U.”

“I don’t understand,” Pindor said. “What does that mean?”

It meant everything.

In his head, Jake scratched out the wrong letters and scrawled in the right ones: turning Is into Es and the single U back into an O.

Once done, he whispered the true name of the prophet who had carved these words. “Pene Lope.”

He now understood why seeing the hieroglyphics had struck him so deeply, so emotionally. It had nothing to do with Kady. For as long as he could remember, he had poured over his mother’s old field notebooks filled with drawing, sketches, and illustrations. Deep inside, a part of him must have recognized her familiar style, her strokes, the way she drew. It took his brain longer to catch up.

“Penelope,” Jake stammered. “That’s my mother’s name. She wrote this message.”