As the crystal touched the battery, the phone suddenly vibrated and rang in Jake’s hand.

Loud and bright.

They all froze.

Jake tried to pull the crystal off the battery to silence the phone, but it was stuck as tight as a barnacle to a rusty ship. The phone continued to ring—then suddenly cut off as someone answered.

A tiny whisper rose from the phone’s speakers. Somehow the two technologies had merged, fused into a new whole.

“Who is this?” a familiar voice asked.

“Papa!” Marika gasped out.

Jake lifted the phone to his ear. “Magister Balam,” he said, picturing Mari’s father, with his wild mane of gray hair and boundless energy. “Can you hear me?”

A pause, then confusion rang in Balam’s voice. “Jacob? Jacob Ransom. Is that you?”

“Yes, yes! I’m here with Mari! Along with Pindor, Bach’uuk, and my sister.”

A gasp of relief reached across the airwaves. “Is she … are you all safe?”

Jake didn’t know how to answer that without terrifying the man, so he sidestepped the question. “We’re on Pangaea. But we don’t know where. We’re in some desert. Ruled by a Lost Tribe of Egyptians.”

Instead of calming Balam, Jake’s words made the man’s voice tremble with worry. “Another Lost Tribe? How could that be?”

“I don’t know, but they came here many ages ago. A great storm circles the desert, trapping everyone here. Including us now.”

There was a long pause. For a moment, Jake feared that the connection had been lost. Then Balam spoke again. Worry had turned to fear. “This storm you speak of … is it made of sand?”

“That’s right. A huge sandstorm.”

“But that can’t be, Jacob. What you describe matches an ancient legend I heard long ago, of a lost Egyptian city destroyed by a monster.”

“That’s right!” Jake blurted out loudly, too shocked to keep quiet. “The city is Ankh Tawy!”

“Impossible. The place is only legend, told by Magister Zahur’s people.”

Jake remembered the dour, black-robed Magister. Zahur was Egyptian, like Nefertiti’s people. Had some traveler returned to Egypt from Pangaea with the story of the fall of Ankh Tawy?

The waver in Balam’s voice hardened to urgency. “If you speak the truth, you must all get out of there! You are in great danger!”

“Why?”

“Because there is an ending to the story told by Zahur’s people.”

Jake didn’t like the sound of that. “What ending?”

“Everyone in that doomed city … they were all turned to stone.”

Before Jake could ask more, pounding rattled the door behind him. The constant snick-snick of sharpening knives had ended. The ringing phone must have drawn the dungeon master away from his duty. Or had Jake been speaking too loudly?

He quickly pulled the phone away from his ear, shielding it from sight behind his body. He turned to find the scarred face of the dungeon master at the window. Fat lips grimaced, exposing those filed teeth again. The ogre’s sweating face, shining with suspicion, searched all around the cell.