Chapter 1
The rusty metal slat door of the storage pod rattled up with a squeal, setting April Owens’s teeth on edge. Her wavy brown hair felt like a damp wool scarf against her neck, even though the September afternoon was fairly cool for Cairo, Illinois.
Properly pronounced Kay-row with the twist of local dialect, not at all like the desert city in Egypt. Not that anyone would ever mistake this part of the country for any kind of desert.
Even compared to typical St. Louis late summer weather, eighty-five degrees with well over ninety percent humidity was incredibly sticky and miserable.
The pea-soup thick air had long since had its way with the ball bearings in the door’s frame. Or else—like so many other things in and around Cairo—no one had tended to it for far too long.
The vast
