Muddy, exhausted, scared, hungry and alone: the Justin was perhaps feeling an appropriate amount of self-pity. He didn’t even have his boat anymore. Also, he was technically dead.

He sat on a sandbar a little ways from the shore, and tears ran salty in his mouth.

The Nile rose to lap at his sandals, then the seat of his jeans, his waist. The sandbar submerged itself. The Justin heard a soft sound: the current rippling, dividing around the ankles of a man behind him.

“Well,” said the man wryly, “cry me a river.”

“Ptah!”

They embraced like water and sand.