Page 71 of Ex Marks the Spot

I grew up believing I’d been cursed by Isaac Newton.

I realize this sounds ridiculous but stay with me.

My mom was a science teacher and loved showing us that science is everywhere. The grocery store. The bathtub. The airport. Great Smoky Mountains National Park. While other kids were listening to superhero stories before bed, Mom was reading Magic School Bus books. I could tell you who Marie Curie was before I knew how to tie my shoes.

In elementary school, she started talking about this guy named Isaac Newton who saw an apple fall from a tree and used that to basically change the world. When I got older, she told me all about his laws of motion and how they applied to everyday life. She was big on that stuff—connecting lessons to things we did on a daily basis so we’d remember them—and it worked.

It was also annoying.

I mean, sometimes a kid just wants to play baseball without hearing about inertia and acceleration and all the other things some dead guy wrote about three hundred years ago. Especially when there were more important things to discuss with his teammates, like whether Eliza Van Allen was wearing a real bra and who had the newest cheat codes toIntergalactic Apocalypse Three.

You know . . . real baseball talk.

So when it was Mom’s turn to work the Gatorade table at practice and she started up on every action having an equal and opposite reaction and that’s how baseballs are hit and blah blah blah, I said, out loud and straight from the diaphragm, “No one gives a shit about Isaac Newton.”

I was thirteen.

And grounded.

And officially in the crosshairs of the Father of Physics himself.

Among the mounds of empirical data I’ve collected over the years, I present the following:

Bobby Gallagher moved away and I finally became the starting pitcher...and then I broke my arm and was out for the rest of the season.

I saved money for almost two years to buy a car...and a week later the transmission died.

I planned a picnic date with my high school girlfriend...and had to ditch everything and drive her to the emergency room when she got stung by a beeand nearly stopped breathing. (She was fine after a dose of epinephrine and some fluids.)

Then there was the time I cooked dinner for a different girlfriend...and we both got food poisoning.

So there you go. Concrete proof of my “every action has an equal and opposite reaction” curse. To be honest, I thought it’d struck again in Dallas because why else would my once-in-a-lifetime chance to win a million dollars rest in the hands of the woman who hated me most? But then things started going well between us, and the possibility of coming in first place didn’t seem so far-fetched anymore.

Which is exactly why I should have seen Isaac Newton coming.

We arrive in the City of a Thousand Minarets just after 10 p.m. Boyd, fresh off a half-dozen hours of sleep, is in a much better mood. Giddy, even, if it’s possible to describe a twenty-nine-year-old man as such.

I can’t say I blame him though.

Cairo is mind-boggling.

There are people everywhere doing all matter of people things—shopping, dining, running errands—even though we’re approaching midnight. Hartley described it as “bustling,” but that’s like calling a tornado “breezy.”

Now we’re looking for a clue box in Khan el-Khalili. Technically, it’s a market in the heart of Cairo, but in reality, it’s more like a sprawling labyrinth of narrow corridors stuffed with cafés, shops, and—you guessed it—more people.

Also, there’s a decent chance we’re already lost.

“Didn’t we just pass this shop?” Treva asks.

Boyd hooks a thumb over his shoulder. “I think that was the other lantern vendor back there.”

“It still feels like we’re going in circles though.”

“I wish we had a map,” Hartley says, craning her neck over the crowd.

“The producers are probably counting on the fact that we don’t.” We’ve only been here for twenty minutes so it’s not time to panic yet, but it is becoming obvious that we’re essentially searching for a needle in a haystack. For all we know, we walked right by the clue box and didn’t see it because the corridors are so packed. “What does our clue say again?”

Hartley unzips her fanny pack and removes the blue-and-orange envelope.

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