Both Peter and Wendy blinked a few times.
“Wow,” conceded Wendy. “That was really specific.”
“Sweet, let’s do it,” said Peter.
“You’re welcome,” muttered John.
Peter and Wendy had to do some reconnaissance, running around the perimeter of the market and counting the number of stalls on each side. Though the market looked and felt stifling, running around it showed that it wasn’t much longer than the dining hall, which was, incidentally, as massive and grandiose as any dining hall in New York. John made the calculations using a stick to draw in the dirt. After some time, he got up and patted the dirt from his knees. He drew an X on a rudimentary map he’d sketched in the dirt and said, “It’s somewhere around there.”
“That’s the best we can do?” said Peter.
“We could wander aimlessly till the sandworm eats us,” retorted John.
“Let’s just go,” said Wendy, surveying the long run toward the middle.
The three of them paused, made sure that their shoelaces were tight, gave one another a last look, and started running toward the center of the invisible circle the worm was protecting. The mounds of loose dirt the worm had made when it chased them had already receded back into flat earth. They threaded in between the stalls, zigzagging the grid in as straight a line as they could. When they crossed what John had assumed was the perimeter, they picked up the pace.
“That way!” John shouted, squinting to see the trajectory of the worm.
It wasn’t long before a chunk of earth shot up behind Wendy and gave chase. Wendy screamed and sprinted. The mound wormed along, just under the surface of the earth, crashing through the stalls and making them explode with clusters of dried fruit and clouds of spice. Wendy bought some time by making a quick right. The worm was too big to make quick turns.
“It should be somewhere around here,” yelled John. “Hurry!”
Peter took hold of one of the old crones by the hood of her burlap robe. He yanked back. The figure crumbled. Decayed old bones . . . either that or this thing was carved out of rotting clay. “They’re all the same,” said Peter, grunting in frustration. He was growing visibly angry. He went from stall to stall, pulling the old crones down from their perches. Wendy couldn’t tell if it was adrenaline from running from the worm or if he was becoming furious for not finding the bones he so desperately wanted.
Just then, John yelled, “Wait!”
Peter stopped in the middle of ripping down another body.
“Look at that one,” said John, pointing to one of the figures now lying on the ground. Instead of the withered old clay, it seemed to be carved out of smooth pine. It was hunched over in the same position, but the face was young.
“That has to be it,” said Wendy. “Harere died young.”
All three of them jumped onto the stall, digging into the sacks of figs, pistachios, and dried thyme. “It has to be here,” said John.
As they rummaged through the piles of goods, they heard the rumbling of the sandworm coming closer. It would reach them soon, and then —
They didn’t know what would happen when the worm reached them. Wendy thought of those enormous teeth, all packed together in that disgusting circular mouth. A wild-eyed Peter upturned entire barrels at a time. John kept looking over his shoulder, trying to locate the rumbling. Then Wendy cried out. John and Peter saw her pulling a skeletal hand from under a pile of rice. In an instant, Wendy was mesmerized. It was withered, its long, thin fingers shriveled to nothing. But it wasn’t ugly. Its fingers were curled delicately toward the center, the thumb and middle finger reaching for each other in an elegant pose. Wendy imagined what this gray, ashen hand must have looked like eons ago. Long fingers under soft, creamy skin. Short, glossy fingernails much like her own.
Peter jumped over a few barrels to where Wendy stood. Together, they began digging the entire skeleton out of its rice grave, working outward from the hand, up toward the wrist, and then revealing an entire arm. The rumble was deafening as they uncovered the skull and the neck. But as they continued, the rumbling came to a sudden stop. Silence. A whirring of wind. A flapping of tent coverings.
“What’s happening?” whispered Wendy.
Peter shrugged.
Behind them, a young voice was whispering. They turned, all three at once. But the only thing there was the discarded figure of the stall keeper. She was sitting at her perch, hunched over, hood over her face.
“Wait,” said Wendy. “Wasn’t she lying on the floor a minute ago?”
Wendy brushed the rice off her hands and stepped closer. In the still silence, the figure moved. There was another whisper. The young stall keeper was calling to something.
Slowly, it lifted its head. Its hood fell back and Wendy saw the beautiful face of Harere, no longer carved in wood, but in the flesh, reeling with anger over the desecration of her mortal body. Her almond-shaped Egyptian eyes were narrowed with rage. Her red lips barely moving as she continued the chant summoning her monstrous sister. She bored into Wendy with her eyes. She grew louder, speaking words that sounded like ancient Egyptian. Wendy looked back at the mummy. Peter was still digging. The stall keeper grew so loud that her voice echoed in their ears and shook the ground at their feet.
“Look,” said John. Fear struck the three of them as they saw a fence of jagged teeth rising out of the sand, encircling their entire stand. At the outer edge of the stall, sand was beginning to pour into a growing chasm. The worm’s mouth surrounded them. The stall keeper sat silently once more.
“It’s below us,” said Peter. “It’s going to eat the whole stand to protect the mummy.”
John scrambled to his feet and jumped beyond the worm’s mouth. “Come on!” he shouted to Wendy.
Wendy looked at John, outside the worm’s mouth, then at Peter, who refused to stop digging. She implored him to come with her.
“Go,” said Peter. “I’ll be right there.”
Wendy hesitated, then turned and ran. When she reached the wall of teeth, it had already risen to her waist. She climbed and almost cut her hand on the tip of a tooth. Then, with John’s help, she fell to the other side.
Peter frantically dug through the rice, pulling every few seconds to loosen the mummy. The worm continued to swallow the sand. An inner row of teeth started to chew, while the outer row of teeth pulsed to help shake and direct everything downward. The outer-lying barrels dipped and then fell into the abyss of the worm’s belly.
“Leave it, Peter!” screamed Wendy.
But Peter didn’t seem to care. He would get eaten before he left the bonedust. Finally, the mummy came loose from the rice. Peter didn’t stop to celebrate. He lifted the skeleton and ran to the edge of the worm’s mouth. The teeth were too high, even for Peter to jump. He tried, but failed, cutting his hand open on the edge.
“Get a barrel to stand on,” said John, looking on from the other side.
“No, it’s too late,” said Wendy. “Stand on the mummy.”
Peter looked almost angry at that suggestion. Then he rethought the idea. Quickly, as the last of the stand began to waver and plunge, Peter situated the mummy into a sitting position. While holding on to one of its hands, Peter placed a foot on the mummy’s shoulder and scrambled up and over the worm’s teeth. As soon as he landed on the other side, Peter turned and began pulling the mummy over by the hand. Just as it seemed that Peter would be able to pull the skeleton over, the worm chomped its jaw.
“Nooo!” shouted Peter. He wrenched the hand of the skeleton, but the worm had bitten down on all the rest of the mummy. The mummy shattered at the wrist bone, leaving a severed hand in Peter’s grip.
They didn’t have much time. The worm’s mouth closed and just as suddenly burrowed back under the earth. The three of them dashed deep into the marketplace as fast as they could. The sand in the air scraped at their lungs. The worm chased after them. It knew that a piece of the mummy had been stolen. It would eat all three of them to retrieve it.
The mound gained on them with every step they took. Wendy closed her eyes and sprinted, tears squeezing out of her ducts. The mound was about to overtake them. Teeth punctured the earth’s surface to claw at their heels. John was calculating out loud, trying to figure out the location of the still-open gate. He yelled, “Jump!”
All three leaped blindly across some unseen barrier that only John’s calculations could have guessed. John prayed that he hadn’t made a mistake — that they were in fact jumping through the portal. They fell to the ground and rolled, waiting for the painful crunch of the monstrous teeth. But none came. Wendy opened her eyes. The mound was gone. They were lying on the cold floor of the dining hall, right next to the lunch line. Thankfully there were no students around. The book was lying next to John, and the kitchen door behind them was wide open. Without getting up, Wendy reached over and slammed it shut. Slowly, the Eye of Ra disappeared from the doorpost. Peter was looking at her, smiling wide. He had the bones in his hand.
John opened his eyes, too, and let out a relieved hoot. “We made it,” he said.
“We made it,” echoed Wendy, focusing only on Peter now that they were safe. Watching him lying there, clutching his prize with everything he had, Wendy was sure that she was falling for him, a lot worse than she had ever fallen for Connor. And judging from the way he looked at her just then, she was starting to believe that maybe he had fallen for her, too. But then Peter turned back toward Harere’s hand and his attention was gone. He looked at it with all the affection of a lost love.
In the quiet of the dining hall, once they had caught their breath, all three of them noticed that Peter’s handheld was beeping in twos and threes. He ignored it at first, too absorbed with the hand of Harere. Wendy nudged him, and finally Peter picked it up. He flicked through the messages with his thumb, then said, “The LBs are a go. We’re gonna get the second batch of bonedust back from Simon.”
“I’m getting out of here,” said John. He and Wendy got up and dusted themselves off. But, for the four and a half minutes it took to properly wrap and stow the hand, Peter sat still.
The nurse with the limp hair and dull eyes stormed through the ruined market in a rage. The underworld thundered and cracked under the weight of her fury. Billowing plumes of smoke suffocated the maze, filling up the labyrinth and seeping into the Marlowe school. After all these years, the third batch of bonedust had been lost.
Again, death had been robbed. The ageless demon was desperate to be rid of Peter — a boy who vowed revenge against the one who had raised him. In the daily hours she spent up above, she sat in her forgettable nurse’s body and watched the unhappy children that ran unguided in the halls of the school. She squirmed in her weak form, unable to see or hear more than ordinary human eyes or ears can. She hated covering her shattered eye, the one true part of herself . . . but not the only true part, because this pathetic form, this mousy wreck of a girl, was her original body. Not the beautiful governess Vileroy. Not the goddess of death. No, this brown-haired girl with dull eyes and thin lips was older than them all.
Up above, the Marlowe school was shut down for the afternoon in order to investigate strange fumes, air out the tufts of unexplained smoke, and find a solution to the rising humidity. Teachers and students walked around in a fog of gloom, wondering whom to call for an entire school afflicted with depression and paranoia.
Peter looked at the text message on his phone. The LBs were ready. The Garosh bone had been in the overworld ever since John used the priceless relic as a grappling hook. Now it was in the hands of an ambitious twit, who so far hadn’t figured out that it was more valuable than everything in the British Museum put together.
During his lecture, he’d used it as a pointer, a pretend drumstick, and a back scratcher. If he did manage to figure out the secret (for instance, if the bonedust miraculously healed him from his idiocy), then he’d never let it see the light of day again. Of course, he’d take it on 60 Minutes and pretend he’d found it after years of research and digging in the Sahara. Or before that happened, the Dark Lady would ruthlessly kill him and take back the bone, which would guarantee that no one would ever see it again.
The next day, John, Peter, and Wendy hurried to the rendezvous point, a smoothie bar a few blocks away from Marlowe. When they arrived, Wendy spotted two of the boarding boys and Tina leaning on the fresh-fruit counter. The twenty-something worker was trying to pick up Tina, who, even in her advising uniform, looked good enough for clubbing. No guy at Marlowe — LBs included — was stupid enough to try to hit on her.
Tina glided over and wrapped her arms around Peter’s neck while Wendy glared.
The two LBs stepped away from the smoothie counter. One of them was the blond with cornrows, who had obviously risen to the top of the ranks. As far as guts and connections were concerned, this kid had it all. He was probably using his dad’s company to get funds to Peter by now. He was lanky; every time John saw him, the LB reminded him of the ghost twins from The Matrix Reloaded. “Everything’s in place,” he said to Peter.
The other LB was the rapper’s broad-shouldered son with thick-framed poet glasses. He spoke with a calm confidence. “We’re at launch sequence, T minus whatever.”
“Good,” said Peter, nodding like a unit commander. “Any variables?”
“None that we’ve reconned from the op site,” said Cornrow.
“Our point is a perimeter guard, code name: Poopinski,” said the buff Poet.
“The guard’s name is Poopinski?” asked Peter.
“It’s Roy Boykins, but we liked Poopinski,” said Poet.
“Hmm,” said Peter, weighing the comment, “I would have gone with RoyBoy.”
“We can switch to RoyBoy,” said Poet immediately. He put his hand up to his earphone and spoke, “LB29 to world, make Poopinski RoyBoy. Repeat. Poopinski is RoyBoy.”
“Never mind,” said Peter. “Don’t even worry about it.”
Poet broke off his transmission.
“Cancel that, world. RoyBoy is no go. Repeat, ixnay Oyray Oybay.”
“Why do you guys talk like that?” asked Wendy.
The two LBs and Peter turned from their strategizing. Wendy was looking at them as though they were little kids playing with LEGOs.
“What do you mean? It’s pig Latin,” said Peter.
“No, like that. Like soldiers in action movies.”
Peter’s eyes widened. Cornrow’s hand slowly came up to his ear. He whispered something into his iPhone.
“They are soldiers,” said Peter, still staring at Wendy.
“They’re boarding boys,” said Wendy.
“Oh, no, she didn’t,” said Tina under her breath. For the first time, Wendy saw a hostile look in Peter’s gaze.
Now Poet forgot about his earpiece and brought his phone to his ear. She heard him whisper, “Transmit happy thoughts, stat! For the love of humanity, launch the happy thoughts now, now, now.”
Peter’s phone was suddenly alive with buzzes and beeps. He broke off his stare, the hypertense moment between him and Wendy, to check it. Wendy spied text after text streaming into his phone from all over. One said: The Highlander series just came out on DVD. Another said: Hollywood Rumor: Ra’s al Ghul is next Batman villain. A text came in about Dracula, and another about Mrs. Whatsit, the immortal character from A Wrinkle in Time.
Peter’s scowl slowly turned into a wistful smile. By the time he had scrolled through every text, he seemed to have forgotten any angry feelings he may have had. When he looked up from his phone, he seemed almost surprised to see everyone. “Where were we?” he said.
Wendy wondered how often the boarding boys had to manage Peter’s moods.
Meanwhile, John shifted closer to Tina. He turned to her and said, “So, maybe you and me should find some time later.”
Tina looked down at him and chuckled. “Gimme a wildberry, large,” she said to the vendor, and walked away.
Simon sat at the teacher’s desk in history class,
grading inarticulate, illiterate backwash that somehow passed for essays these days. His red pen slashed at the papers like the samurai that he was. He had three katanas and a kodachi blade in his apartment in London, which he’d gotten in a seedy Chinatown mall. They were sharp enough to slice through any intruders — not to mention the shuriken he had under his pillow. Now he was performing a ritualistic slaughter of every three-page response paper in the stack in front of him.
“Stupid.”
“Inane.”
“Asinine,” he said to no one in particular, as he scrutinized each assignment.
“Garbage.”
“Archeologically inaccurate.”
“Grade-school material.”
“Wrong font.”
“One-inch margins? Right.”
Simon took immense pleasure in imagining their smiley young faces dropping as they saw their grades tomorrow. Somehow, the professor had managed to slough off the work of grading these essays onto Simon, just because they were response papers to his lecture. It was ludicrous and beneath him, but of course, he couldn’t say no. The old man had connections far above Simon.
As Simon wrote a particularly cutting remark on the cover page of Marla’s paper (Try to think on a higher level — at least where the rest of the class is), he heard a creak. Simon jerked his head upward. He didn’t see anyone. It could have been the pipes. Or it could have been spies sent from the Egyptology department of Duke University trying to plagiarize his work. Simon pretended to go back to the papers. Then, nonchalantly, as though he didn’t suspect anything, he pretended to yawn. The dramatic arc of his neck allowed him to look into the vent shaft above his head. There was no one in there.
But he couldn’t be too careful with his work. Simon decided to do something else, something that he could do while laying a trap for any archeology spies from Duke. He picked up his new trinket, the arm bone he’d gotten from John, from atop an old, dusty book with a broken spine and wrinkled pages, The Undiscovered Histories, by Professor George Darling. Simon didn’t have much respect for it. It was written before carbon-14 dating, and it may as well have been a work of fiction. But Simon thought he should scan it a little, if only for amusement. He flipped to a random page.
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