Only now did she note the other people. Strangers in her home.

Folks labored in pockets, talking in hushed tones, as if in a graveyard. Building inspectors examined the infrastructure while fire investigators took readings with handheld devices. A pack of municipal engineers argued in a corner about budgets and bids, and a few policemen stood guard by the collapsed section of the exterior wall. Workmen were already constructing a crude plank blockade to cover the opening.

Through the gap, she spotted gawkers across the street, held back by cordons. They were surprisingly persistent considering that the morning drizzle had turned into sleet by the afternoon. Flashes of camera bulbs flickered in the gloom. Tourists.

A surge of anger flamed through her numbness. She wanted to throw the lot of them out of here. This was her wing, her home. Her anger helped focus her, bring her back to the situation at hand. She had a duty, an obligation.

Safia returned her attention to the other scholars and students from the museum. They had begun to sift through the debris. It was heartening to see their usual petty professional jealousies set aside for now.

Safia crossed back toward the entrance, ready to organize those who had volunteered. But as she reached the first gallery, a large group appeared at the entrance. At the forefront strode Kara, dressed in work clothes, a red hard hat emblazoned with the insignia for Kensington Wells. She led a team of some twenty men and women into the gallery. They were identically outfitted, wearing the same red hard hats.

Safia stepped in front of her. “Kara?” She had not seen the woman all day. She had vanished with the head of the museum, supposedly to help coordinate the various investigative teams of the fire and police. It seemed a few billion in sterling garnered some authority.

Kara waved the men and women into the gallery. “Get to work!” She turned to Safia. “I’ve hired my own forensic team.”

Safia stared after the group as they tromped like a small army into the rooms. Instead of weapons, they carried all manner of scientific tools. “What’s going on? Why are you doing this?”

“To find out what happened.” Kara watched her team set to work. Her eyes had a feverish shine, a fiery determination.

Safia had not seen such a look on her face in a long time. Something had sparked an intensity in Kara that had been missing for years. Only one thing could bring about such fervor.

Her father.

Safia remembered the look in Kara’s eyes as she had surveyed the videotape of the explosion. The strange relief. Her one spoken word. Finally…

Kara stepped out into the gallery. Already her team had commenced digging samples from various surfaces: plastics, glass, wood, stone. Kara crossed to a pair of men carrying metal detectors, sweeping them along the floor. One pulled a bit of a melted bronze from some debris. He set it aside.

“I want every fragment of that meteorite found,” Kara ordered.

The men nodded, continuing the search.

Safia joined Kara. “What are you really seeking here?”

Kara turned to her, eyes ablaze with determination. “Answers.”

Safia read the hope behind the set in her friend’s lips. “About your father?”

“About his death.”

4:20 P.M.

KARA SAT in the hall on a folding chair. The work continued in the galleries. Fans whirred and rattled. The mumble and chatter of workers in the wing barely reached her. She had come out to smoke a cigarette. She had long given up the habit, but she needed something to do with her hands. Her fingers trembled.

Did she have the strength for this? The strength to hope.

Safia appeared at the entryway, spotted her, and stepped in her direction.

Kara waved her off, pointed to the cigarette. “I just need a moment.”

Safia paused, staring at her, then nodded and headed back into the gallery.

Kara took another drag, filling her chest with cool smoke, but it did little to settle her. She was too unbalanced, the adrenaline of the night wearing thin. She stared at the plaque beside the gallery. It bore a bronze likeness of her father, the founder of the gallery.

Kara sighed out a stream of smoke, blurring the sight. Papa…

Somewhere out in the gallery, something fell with a loud bang, sounding like a gunshot, a reminder of a past, of a hunt across the sands.

Kara drifted into the past.

It had been her sixteenth birthday.

The hunt had been her father’s gift.

The Arabian oryx fled up the slope of the dune. The antelope’s white coat stood out starkly against the red sands. The only two blemishes to its snowy hide were a black swatch on the tip of its tail and a matching mask around its eyes and nose. A wet crimson trail dripped down its wounded haunch.

As it fought to escape the hunters, the oryx’s hooves drove deep into the loose sand. Blood flowed more thickly as it kicked toward the ridgeline. A pair of tapered horns sliced through the still air as the muscles of its neck wrenched with each painful yard gained.

A quarter mile back, Kara heard its echoing cry over the growl of her sand cycle, a four-wheel all-terrain vehicle with thick knobby tires. In frustration, she gripped the handles of her bike as it flew over the summit of a monstrous dune. For a breathless moment, she lifted out of her seat, airborne, as the cycle bucked over the ridge.

The angry set to her lips remained hidden behind a sand scarf, a match to her khaki safari suit. Her blond hair, braided to the middle of her back, flagged behind her like a wild mare’s tail.

Her father kept pace on another cycle, rifle carried across his back. He had his own scarf dropped around his neck. His skin was tanned the color of saddle leather, his hair gone a sandy gray. He caught her glance.

“We’re close!” he yelled above the whining growl of their engines. He gunned his engine and sped down the windward side of the dune.

Kara raced after him, bent over her cycle’s handlebars, followed closely by their bedouin guide. It had been Habib who had led them to their quarry. It had also been the bedouin’s skilled shot that had first wounded the oryx. Though impressed with his marksmanship, shooting the antelope on the fly, Kara had become furious upon learning the wounding had been deliberate, meant not to kill.

“To slow…for the girl,” Habib had explained.

Kara had rankled at the cruelty…and the insult. She had been hunting with her father from the age of six. She was not without skill herself and preferred a clean kill. Purposely wounding the animal was needlessly savage.

She cranked the throttle, kicking up sand.

Some, especially back in England, raised their eyebrows at her up-bringing, considering her a tomboy, especially with no mother. Kara knew better. Traveling half the world, she had been raised with no pre-tensions about the line between men and women. She knew how to defend herself, how to fight with fist or knife.

Reaching the bottom of the dune now, Kara and their guide caught up with her father as his cycle bogged down in a camel wallow, a patch of loose sand that sucked like quicksand. They passed him in a cloud of dust.

Her father bulled the bike out of the wallow and gave chase up the next dune, a massive six-hundred-foot mountain of red sand.

Kara reached the crest first with Habib, slowing slightly until she could see what lay beyond. And it was lucky she had. The far side of the dune fell away as steeply as a cliff, ending in a wide plain of flat sand. She could have easily tumbled tail over head down the slope.

Habib waved for her to stop. She obeyed, knowing better than to proceed. She idled her bike. Stopped now, she felt the heavy heat drop like a weight on her shoulders, but she barely noticed. Her breath escaped her in a long awed sigh.