On return to Santa Fe, the first order of business is to get Alexandra and Esteban into the infirmary. Alexandra's injuries mystify Dr. Staadler, although she does send out for blood work. Esteban has more straightforward burns and a few cracked ribs from being worked over by mummies. He gets taped up and spends the next few days wincing whenever he laughs.
Thielo spends his night reading the books recovered from Anne's condominium. He discovers a lot of Egyptian mystic claptrap, including a ritual to reenact the myth of Isis and Osiris in order to give power over the dead to the Osiris figure. Apparently it was attempted once but due to impurity of the heroin used to drug the Osiris figure (for being ritually cut) the ritual was a failure.
In the morning, Damien insists on written reports from everyone. Angelina's leaves out a lot of things, but Esteban is surprisingly forthcoming about his frustrations with the (to him) slow pace. Gavin talks to everyone about the mission and also tells them that Alex wants them to think about how to become a proxy for an unwilling avatar target (in order to depower him). They want to know more, so Gavin calls Abel and gets him to send TNI's file on the man in question. He turns out to be the present Godwalker of the Merchant, Thorbald Drake, a man the Inquisition believes to be over 150 years old. He's very rich and well protected.
The next day, Damien wants to talk to everyone about the mission. He has two lessons they should draw - first, stay in communication at all times. Second, try to bring them back alive - while Mubarek might have been difficult, they should have made a try to get Anne alive.
Afterwards everyone begins sorting through the Egyptian junk except for Esteban who goes home to be with Tina. They find that one of the statues (a Ba statue) and some of the canopic jars seem to have an aura. There is a Ba awakening chant in the notebooks, Thielo remembers. Darwin also has something for them to go investigate - a coyote shaman in Roswell named Randall Bluefeather, who has recently been arrested after a large number of strange coyote attacks (they often bit off watches, and generally harassed people). A website called Inside/Outside calls them Government Death Dogs.
They decide to hook up the speak to dead machine to the Ba statue, and succeed in hearing the spirit inside. Its name is Jesus, and it speaks only Spanish (though that may be the machine). Luckily Graham can translate for them, if without the full colorful nature of the original speech. They worry about whether it is Esteban's brother and what to tell him. Alexandra starts work on another machine so they can actually speak to the spirit as well as hear it without resorting to the Ba chant.
"Esteban goes and picks up women, we talk to a dead guy, what's wrong with this picture?" -Angelina
The next day they do manage to get the new machine working and talk to Jesus enough to determine that he is indeed Esteban's brother. Then they stop and fret about what to do some more.
"He just got closure. We're about to so unclose it." - Angelina
The following day (Sunday) Dr. Atsui arrives to talk to Esteban. Her efforts to talk to the team about him are mostly thwarted by a hostile Angelina, and when Esteban arrives the others tell him they have something to show him but it may need to wait until after his session. Gavin blurts out that they think the jars are full of bits of his brother. Needless to say, the session is mostly fruitless, and Dr. Atsui decides that Esteban should go deal with whatever it is before trying to continue.
So Esteban talks to his dead brother, and is less disturbed than everyone expects. The Ba seems to be only the mean and evil aspects of his brother, with little concern left for Esteban or Tina. Esteban tells the others to destroy the statue, and then goes back for more therapy.
By that evening, the others have decided they will destroy the statue and burn the jars, and do so. As Alexandra is watching Thielo smash the statue, she notes the clean regular lines of his aura, the mechanical whirrings and buzzings... she realizes that he is a clockwork. Everyone else is temporarily convinced that she is possessed due to her sudden silence.
After reassuring everyone, she goes for a long walk. Upon finding a good tree to hide under, she calls Graham and talks to him a bit. He thinks that Thielo may be embarrassed, or trying to be human. Graham saw Thielo working on his arm the previous few nights, and assumed that Alexandra knew. This destroys her theory that Thielo doesn't know. Eventually she returns to the lab and finds Thielo, who went out to look for her but failed to find her. She asks him why he didn't tell her, and he says "because you said you never wanted to have this conversation again."