The Immortals by Jordanna Max Brodsky

She’d been picking up a fresh copy of the
Pocket Oxford Classical Greek Dictionary
(her copious annotations had made her original copy illegible), and he’d been browsing the science fiction section, looking for a new escapist adventure. A quick hug and a few self-deprecating jokes later, Theo found himself staring at her naked body while studiously avoiding looking at the ring on her finger. It’d been dumb and dishonorable—and they’d done it anyway. His stupid male egocouldn’t help preening at the thought that she’d come back to his apartment because she wasn’t satisfied with Everett. And for all her faults, Helen was a brilliant scholar and a beautiful woman. She was hard to resist.
    Groaning, Theo pulled the photo back off the wall. For the first time in nearly a year, he allowed himself to feel angry with her. Not for leaving him, not for tempting him back again, but for abandoning him now. Barely aware of his actions, he tore the picture in half. Then he ripped it again, and again, until Helen’s image lay in mangled fragments in his palm. Ashamed, he thrust the shreds into his desk drawer.
    Theo turned his attention back to his research. Helen had focused much of her energy on deciphering and translating fragments of papyrus from the Oxyrhynchus horde. It was as good a place to start as any. There was no obvious correlation between the papyri and Greek cults, but with the Oxyrhynchus Project, anything was possible.
    In 1896, two British Egyptologists had discovered a massive trove of over four hundred thousand papyri fragments buried in a rubbish heap at the site of the ancient Hellenistic city. Egypt’s dry climate had allowed for the preservation of documents that would have moldered away two thousand years earlier in Greece or Italy. At first, elated archeologists were sure they’d uncovered the lost plays of Sophocles or the final works of Pythagoras. But before long, it became clear that most of the fragments, some no bigger than an inch across, were unreadable, blackened by exposure to minerals or damp. In a century of work, archeologists had succeeded in translating a mere four percent of the total horde.
    But in 2005, new multispectral imaging technology revolutionized the field of papyrology, allowing for the decipherment of previously illegible texts. The researchers at Oxford had put the entire trove online so scholars all over the world could participate. Theo’d joined the project for a year, gaining instantacclaim for his uncanny ability to piece together the fragments with the same speed he’d shown reconstructing vases. For a while, at least, he’d enjoyed the mind-boggling game of ancient Tetris. But depressingly, most of the documents he translated were household accounts, tax receipts, and marriage contracts. The most interesting thing he’d ever translated: a deed for the purchase of a parcel of uncultivated land for twelve drachmae. A far cry from the earth-shattering discoveries he’d hoped for. The scholars at Oxford were loath to let his talents go, but Theo, who preferred to study myth and epic, had moved on. Helen, however, had never lost the conviction that the papyri held secrets worth learning. When she joined the faculty at Columbia, she’d already been working with the Oxyrhynchus Project for years. Theo had happily shared his own techniques with her and wished her luck on her search.
    Theo pored over the project’s recent publications. Perhaps the last year had uncovered new information on Aesculapian worship—the city of Oxyrhynchus had been a Greco-Roman society, and even as Christianity spread through Egypt in the fourth century AD, the inhabitants would have known about pagan cult ritual. But after reading for hours, Theo concluded that no such discovery had been made—at least not by the official project at Oxford.
That doesn’t mean Helen didn’t find something,
he reminded himself. She’d always been very secretive about her research, but she hinted