by Libba Bray
There’s a walk-in closet in the burial chamber. I went through it looking for something useful. Anything useful. Silk shawls, crushed velvet dresses, black jeans. A stereo system loaded with the kind of music rich goth girls listen to. Extra pillows. Sterling silver. Perfumes, makeup. A mummified cat. [Noodles.] I remember when [Noodles] died. We were eight. They were already laying the foundations of [Hero]’s pyramid. The Olds called in the embalmers.
We helped with the natron. I had nightmares for a week.
[Hero] says, “They’re for the afterlife, OK?”
“You’re not going to be fat in the afterlife?” At this point, I still don’t know [Hero]’s plan, but I’m starting to worry. [Hero] has a taste for the epic. I suppose it runs in the family.
“My Ba is skinny,” [Hero] says. “Unlike you, [ ]. You may be skinny on the outside, but you have a fat-ass heart. Anubis will judge you. Ammit will devour you.”
She sounds so serious. I should laugh. You try laughing when you’re down in the dark, in your sister’s secret burial chamber—not the decoy one where everybody hangs out and drinks, where once, oh god, how sweet is that memory, still, you and your sister’s Face did it on the memorial stone—under three hundred thousand limestone blocks, down at the bottom of a shaft behind a door in an antechamber that maybe, somebody, in a couple of hundred years, will stumble into.
What kind of afterlife do you get to have as a mummy? If you’re [Hero], I guess you believe your Ba and Ka will reunite in the afterlife. [Hero] thinks she’s going to be an Akh, an immortal. She and the rest of them go around stockpiling everything they think they need to have an excellent afterlife. They’re rich. The Olds indulge them. It’s just the girls. The girls plan for the afterlife. The boys play sports, collect race cars or 20th century space shuttles, scheme to get laid. I specialize in the latter.
The girls have ushabti made of themselves, give them to each other at the pyramid dedication ceremonies, the sweet sixteen parties. They collect shabti of their favorite singers, actors, whatever. They read The Book of the Dead. In the meantime, their pyramids are where we go to have a good time. When I commissioned the artist who makes my ushabti, I had her make two different kinds. One is for people I don’t know well. The other shabti for the girls I’ve slept with. I modeled for that one in the nude. If I’m going to hang out with these girls in the afterlife, I want to have all my working parts.
Me, I’ve done some reading, too. What happens once you’re a mummy? Graverobbers dig you up. Sometimes they grind you up and sell you as medicine, fertilizer, pigment. People used to have these mummy parties. Invite their friends over and unwrap a mummy. See what’s inside.
Maybe you end up in a display case in a museum. Or nobody ever finds you. Or your curse kills lots of people. I know which one I’m hoping for.
“[ ],” [Yumiko] said, “I don’t want this thing to be boring. Fireworks and Faces, celebrities promoting their new thing.”
This was earlier.
Once [Yumiko] and I did it in [Angela]’s pyramid, right in front of a false door. Another time she punched me in the side of the face because she caught me and [Preeti] in bed. Gave me a cauliflower ear.
[Yumiko]’s pyramid isn’t quite as big as [Stevie]’s, or even [Preeti]’s pyramid. But it’s on higher ground. From up on top, you can see down to the ocean.
“So what do you want me to do?” I asked her.
“Just do something,” [Yumiko] said.
I had an idea right away.
“Let me out, [Hero].”
We came down here with a bottle of champagne. [Hero] asked me to open it. By the time I had the cork out, she’d shut the door. No handle. Just a key pad.
“Eventually you’re going to have to let me out, [Hero].”
“Do you remember the watermelon game?” [Hero] says. We’re reminiscing about the good old times. I think. She’s lying on a divan. She lit a couple of oil lamps when she brought me down here. We were going to have a serious talk. Only it turned out it wasn’t about what I thought it was about. It wasn’t about the sex tape. It was about the other thing.
“It’s really cold down here,” I say. “I’m going to catch a cold.”
“Tough,” [Hero] says.
I pace a bit. “The watermelon game. With [Vyvian]’s unicorn?” [Vyvian] is twice as rich as God. She’s a year younger than us, but her pyramid is three times the size of [Hero]’s. She kisses like a fish, fucks like a wildebeest, and her hobby is breeding chimeras. Most of the estates around here have a real problem with unicorns now, thanks to [Vyvian]. They’re territorial. You don’t mess with them in mating season. I came up with this variation on French bullfighting, Taureux Piscine, except with unicorns. You got a point every time you and the unicorn were in the swimming pool together. We did Licorne Pasteque, too. Brought out a sidetable and a couple of chairs and set them up on the lawn. Cut up the watermelon and took turns. You can eat the watermelon, but only while you’re sitting at the table. Meanwhile the unicorn is getting more and more pissed off that you’re in its territory.
It was insanely awesome until the stupid unicorn broke its leg going into the pool, and somebody had to come and put a bullet in its head. Plus, the Olds got mad about one of the chairs. The unicorn splintered the back. Turned out to be an antique. Priceless.
“Do you remember how [Vyvian] cried and cried?” [Hero] says. Even this is part of the happy memory for [Hero]. She hates [Vyvian]. Why? Some boring reason. I forget the specifics. Here’s the gist of it: [Hero] is fat. [Vyvian] is mean.
“I felt sorrier for whoever was going to have to clean up the pool,” I say.
“Liar,” [Hero] says. “You’re a sociopath. You’ve never felt sorry for anyone in your life. You were going to kill all of our friends. I’m doing the world a huge favor.”
“They aren’t your friends,” I say. “I don’t know why you’d want to save a single one of them.”
[Hero] says nothing. Her eyes get pink.
I say, “They’ll find us eventually.” We’ve both got implants, of course. Implants to keep the girls from getting pregnant, to make us puke if we try drugs or take a drink. There are ways to get around this. Darius is always good for new solutions. The implant—the Entourage—is also a way for our parents’ security teams to monitor us. In case of kidnappers. In case we go places that are off limits, or run off. Rich people don’t like to lose their stuff.
“This chamber has some pretty interesting muffling qualities,” [Hero] says. “I installed the hardware myself. Top-gear spy stuff. You know, just in case.”
“In case of what?” I ask.
She ignores that. “Also, I paid a guy for fifteen hundred microdot trackers. Seven hundred and fifty have your profile. Seven hundred and fifty have mine. They’re programmed to go on and offline in random clusters, at irregular intervals, for the next three months, starting about two hours ago, when you were setting up your video feeds on Tara and Philip.
“Who?” I say.
“Your Face and my Face,” [Hero] says. “You freak.” She turns bright red, and now there are tears in her eyes, but her voice stays calm. “Anyway. The trackers are being distributed to partygoers at raves worldwide tonight. They’re glued onto promotional material inside a CD for one of my favorite bands. Nobody you’d know. Oh, and all the guests at [Yumiko]’s party got one too, and I left a CD at all of the false doors at all of the pyramids, like offerings. Those are all live right now.”
I’ve always been the good-looking one. The popular one. The smart one. Sometimes I forget that [Hero] is as smart as I am. Maybe even smarter.
“I love you, [ ].”
[Liberty] falls in love all the time. But I was curious. I said, “You love me? Why do you love me?”
She thought about it for a minute. “Because you’re insane,” she said. “You don’t care about anything.”
“That’s why you love me?” I said. We were at a gala or something. We’d just come back from the Men’s room where
everybody was trying out Darius’s new drug.
My Face was hanging out with my parents in front of all the cameras. The Olds love my Face. The son they wish they had. Somebody with a tray walked by and [Hero]’s Face took a glass of champagne. She was over by the buffet table. The other buffet table, the one for Faces and the Olds and the celebrities and the publicists and all the other tribes and hangers on.
My darling. My working girl. My sister’s Face. I tried to catch her eye, clowning in my latex leggings, but I was invisible. Every gesture, every word was for them, for him. The cameras. My Face. And me? A speck of nothing. Not even a blot. Negative space.
She’d said we couldn’t see each other anymore. She said she was afraid of getting caught breaking contract. Like that didn’t happen all the time. Like with Mr. Amandit. [Preeti] and [Nishi]’s father. He left his wife. It was [Liberty]’s Face he left his wife for. The Face of his daughters’ best friend. I think they’re in Iceland now, Mr. Amandit and the nobody girl who used to be a Face.
Then there’s [Stevie]. Everybody knows she’s in love with her own Face. It’s embarrassing to watch.
Anyway, nobody knew about us. I was always careful. Even if [Hero] got her nose in, what was she going to say? What was she going to do?
“I love you because you’re you, [ ],” [Liberty] said. “You’re the only person I know who’s better looking than their own Face.”
I was holding a skewer of chicken. I almost stabbed it into [Liberty]’s arm before I knew what I was doing. My mouth was full of chewed chicken. I spat it out at [Liberty]. It landed on her cheek.
“What the fuck, [ ]!” [Liberty] said. The piece of chicken plopped down onto the floor. Everybody was staring. Nobody took a picture. I didn’t exist. Nobody had done anything wrong.
Aside from that, we all had a good time. Even [Liberty] says so. That was the time all of us showed up in this gear I found online. Red rubber, plenty of pointy stuff, chains and leather, dildos and codpieces, vampire teeth and plastinated viscera. I had a really nice pair of hand-painted latex tits wobbling around like epaulets on my shoulders. I had an inadequately sedated fruit bat caged up in my pompadour. So how could she not look at me?
Kids today, the Olds say. What can you do?
I may be down here for some time. I’m going to try to see it the way they see it, the Olds.
You’re an Old. So you think, wouldn’t it be easier if your children did what they were told? Like your employees? Wouldn’t it be nice, at least when you’re out in public with the family? The Olds are rich. They’re used to people doing what they’re told to do.
When you’re as rich as the Olds are, you are your own brand. That’s what the publicists are always telling them. Your children are an extension of your brand. They can improve your Q rating or they can degrade it. Mostly they can degrade it. So there’s the device they implant that makes us invisible to cameras. It’s called an Entourage.
And then there’s the Face. Who is a nobody, a real person, who comes and takes your place at the table. They get an education, the best health care, a salary, all the nice clothes and all the same toys that you get. They get your parents whenever the publicists decide there’s a need or an opportunity. If you go online, or turn on the TV, there they are, being you. Being better than you will ever be at being you. When you look at yourself in the mirror, you have to be careful, or you’ll start to feel very strange. Is that really you?
But it isn’t just about the brand, or having good children who do what they’re told, right? The Olds say it’s about kidnappers, blackmailers, all those people who want to take away what belongs to the Olds. Faces mitigate the risk.
Most politicians have Faces too. For safety. Because it shouldn’t matter what someone looks like, or how good they are at making a speech, but of course it does. The difference is that politicians choose to have their Faces. They choose.
The Olds like to say it’s because we’re children. We’ll understand when we’re older, when we start our adult lives without blemish, without online evidence of our indiscretions, our mistakes. No sex tapes. No embarrassing photos of ourselves in Nazi regalia, or topless in Nice, or honeytraps. No footage before the nose job, before the boob job, before the acne clears up.
The Olds get us into good colleges, and then the world tilts just for a moment, and maybe we fall off. We get a few years to make our own mistakes, out in the open, and then we settle down, and we come into our millions or billions or whatever. We inherit the earth, like that proverb says. The rich shall inherit the earth.
We get married, merge our money with other money, millions or billions, improve our Q ratings, become Olds, acquire kids, and you bet your ass those kids are going to have Faces, just like we did.
I never got into the Egyptian thing the way the girls did. I always liked the Norse gods better. You know, Loki. The slaying of Baldur. Ragnarok.
It wasn’t hard to get hold of the thing I was looking for. Darius couldn’t help me, but he knew a guy who knew a guy who knew exactly what I was talking about. We met in Las Vegas, because why not? We saw a show together, and then we went online and watched a video that had been filmed in his lab. Somewhere in Moldova, he said. He said his name was Nikolay.
I showed him my video. The one I’d made for the party for [Yumiko]’s pyramid dedication thingy.
We were both very drunk. I’d taken Darius’s blocker, and he was interested in that. I explained about the Entourage, how you had to work around it if you wanted to have fun. He was sympathetic.
He liked the video a lot.
“That’s me,” I told him. “That’s [ ].”
“Not you,” he said. “You’re making joke at me. You have Entourage device. But, girl, she is very nice. Very sexy.”
“That’s my sister,” I said. “My twin sister.”
“Another joke,” Nikolay said. “But, if my sister, I would go ahead, fuck her anyway.”
“How could you do this to me?” [Hero] wants to know.
“It had nothing to do with you.” I pat her back when she starts to cry. I don’t know whether she’s talking about the sex tape or the other thing.
“It was bad enough when you slept with her,” she says, weeping. “That was practically incest. But I saw the tape. The one you gave [Yumiko]. The one she’s going to put up online. Don’t you understand? She’s me. He’s you. That’s us, on that tape, that’s us having sex.”
“It was good enough for the Egyptians,” I say, trying to console her. “Besides, it isn’t us. Remember? They aren’t us.”
I try to remember what it was like when it was just us. The Olds say we slept in the same crib. We had our own language. [Hero] cried when I fell down. [Hero] has always been the one who cries.
“How did you know what I was planning?”
“Oh, please, [ ],” [Hero] says. “I always know when you’re about to go off the deep end. You go around with this smile on your face, like the whole world is sucking you off. Besides, Darius told me you’d been asking about really bad shit. He likes me, you know. He likes me much better than you.”
“He’s the only one,” I say.
“Fuck you,” [Hero] says. “Anyway, it’s not like you were the only one with plans for tonight. I’m sick of this place. Sick of these people.”
There is a martial line of shabti on a stone shelf. Our friends. People who would like to be our friends. Rock stars that the Olds used to hang out with, movie stars. Saudi princes who like fat, gloomy girls with money. She picks up a prince, throws it against the wall.
“Fuck [Vyvienne] and all her unicorns,” [Hero] says.
She picks up another shabti. “Fuck [Yumiko].”
I take [Yumiko] from her. “I did,” I say. “I give her a three out of five. For enthusiasm.” I drop the shabti on the floor.
“You are such a slut, [ ],” [Hero] says. “Have you ever been in love? Even once?”
She’s fishing. She knows. My heart is broken, and [Hero] knows. Is that how
it works?
Why did you sleep with him? Are you in love with him? He’s me. Why aren’t I him? Fuck both of you.
“Fuck our parents,” I say. I pick up the oil lamp and throw it at the shabti on the shelf.
The room gets brighter for a moment, then darker.
“It’s funny,” [Hero] says. “We used to do everything together. And then we didn’t. And right now, it’s weird. You planning on doing what you were going to do. And me, what I was planning. It’s like we were in each other’s brains again.”
“You went out and bought a biological agent? We should have gone in on it together. Buy two and get one free.”
“No,” [Hero] says. She looks shy, like she’s afraid I’ll laugh at her.
I wait. Eventually she’ll tell me what she needs to tell me, and then I’ll hand over the little metal canister that Nikolay gave me, and she’ll unlock the door to the burial chamber. Then we’ll go back up into the world, and that video won’t be the end of the world. It will just be something that people talk about. Something to make the Olds crazy.
“I was going to kill myself,” [Hero] says. “You know, down here. I was going to come down here during the party, and then I decided that I didn’t want to do it by myself.”
My heart is broken, and so [Hero] wants to die. Is that how it works?
“And then I found out what you were up to,” [Hero] says. “I thought I ought to stop you. Then I wouldn’t have to be alone. And I would finally live up to my name. I’d save everybody. Even if they never knew it.”
“You were going to kill yourself,” I repeat. “How?”
“Like this,” [Hero] says. She reaches into the jeweled box on her belt. There’s a little thing curled up in there, an enameled loop of chain, black and bronze. It uncoils in her hand, becomes a snake.