THE LOST DIAL

Archaeologist Dr. Leah Katz doesn't believe in magic. She believes in checking her work.

When a corporate fixer turns up in her university basement at nine at night, Katz is offered a deal: help a private interest called Helix recover the Sun Dial — a four-hundred-year-old Paititi artifact buried deep in the Javari Valley — before a weapons developer called Matriz gets there first. The legends say the Dial can move a person through time and distance, bend events, make its bearer nearly impossible to kill. Katz doesn't buy any of that. She just wants to know who built it, and why nobody's heard of them since.

The expedition costs more than she bargained for. A debt-ridden former colleague who sold his name to the wrong people. A guide's quiet warning that the real danger isn't the jungle, the rivals, or the artifact — it's what people become once they decide they're owed whatever's inside. A handler who isn't quite who he claims to be, photographing things he shouldn't.

By the time Katz reaches the chamber and the light does exactly what a four-hundred-year-old diary said it would, she's no longer sure the line between engineering and myth is where she thought it was — or whether she's still the careful, rule-bound scientist she's spent her career insisting she is.

The Lost Dial is a tense, character-driven archaeological thriller about ambition, trust, and the stories we tell ourselves to justify wanting something too much.