Phineas fumbled for Eliza's fingers in the darkness, taking the flashlight and a bundle of weathered maps into his hands. He flipped the flashlight's switch, but was met with only a dull [i]click.[/i] He wiggled it back and forth, but it was no use.

"Balls," he mumbled, dropping the useless metal tube to the ground, "Torch's broken." He sighed, stretching his arms into the lockers and cursing his poor night vision. Eventually his hands encountered the small box of matches amidst the other survival equipment, which he snatched up and stuffed into his pocket. Eliza had cracked the door open already; he finished the job with a hefty kick that left a deep resonance in the air and a sharp pain in his leg. 

The moon was bright, but not half bright enough to make out the writing on the maps. After several attempts, he managed to strike a match. He held it in the air, scrutinizing the Mediterranean Region map until the match died and he had to light another. He frowned. The map was replete with landmarks and cities, but all he could see around himself was dunes, trees and endless ocean. He tossed the map onto the sand and sifted through the other charts. He discarded every sovereign state he was greeted with until he found the one he was looking for: a compact atlas of constellations. As his match went out, he lit another and got to work.

Within a few minutes, he managed to determine their location. They were farther west than he'd expected, he noted with distaste. He picked up the charts, blew out his sixth or seventh match, and turned back to Eliza.

"The good news," he said, "Is that I know precisely where we are. The bad news is that we're in Libya."  He swallowed. After their recent run-in with Libyan special forces, he was quite sure that they would not be welcome guests. "We ought to remedy that and get to Egypt as soon as we can. If we walked due east along the beach, we would be in Egypt by tomorrow evening, if the sun didn't get us. I propose a different solution. A few miles south from here there's a little trading hub. Zanzik, it's called. If we make it there, which should only take until dawn, we can take the roads south to a border crossing and maybe figure out just what's going on along the way."

He glanced out across the dark landscape. "I, for one, would like to know exactly who's been trying to kill us, and why."