by P. J. Hoover
“No! We aren’t going to kill the guards.” The shabtis did pretty much everything I wanted them to do and sometimes things I didn’t. “No one gets killed. Or seriously injured. Okay?”
Colonel Cody lowered his arm. His majors relaxed their stance, but stood ready to move at his next order.
“Okay?” I said again.
Colonel Cody nodded. “Fine. No one gets killed. I swear it on the mummified body of Osiris himself.”
“Or seriously injured,” I added.
“Or seriously injured,” he repeated.
Good. Now that we had that settled, I could break into the library.
“Where’s the entrance to this secret room?” I asked.
“The cat referred to a statue,” Colonel Cody said.
Nice lead, except D.C. had more statues than an old dog had warts.
“Which statue?”
“The cat said it would be where the king sits.”
“What king? Osiris?” If Horus hadn’t been in such a hurry to head off on his date, he could have told me himself. As far as I knew, there were no statues of Osiris anywhere near the Library of Congress. Or in D.C., for that matter.
Colonel Cody’s face turned ashen. “The cat said you would know.”
King. Statue. King. Statue …
I scanned the area, looking for anything that fit. There were a couple of naked women on horses. I diverted my eyes. There were some turtles and snakes and fish. Hardly kingly creatures. And then there was the giant statue of Neptune right in the middle of a fountain.
That was it. Neptune! He was king of the sea. Maybe not a king that Horus would consider an equal, but given the surroundings, he was the closest thing.
I waded in the water and gazed up at the giant statue of Neptune. It stood over twice as tall as me and was carved from a single piece of marble. He commanded the world from the top of a rock and was flanked by two of his minions. I climbed the rock and grabbed the statue’s arms and fingers, looking for a lever or something that might reveal an entrance.
Nothing happened.
I prodded at the statue. Still nothing. And then, from under the surface of the dark water, glittering gold caught my eye. I held my breath and put my head under.
Engraved in the base of the statue and etched with gold was the Eye of Horus.
It was the most sacred representation of Horus, symbolizing what he gave up in his eternal fight with Set, or some nonsense like that. I got sick of seeing it everywhere. Horus had it plastered on all sorts of stuff back at the town house, like he was marking his territory. He must be marking his territory here, too.
I pressed my thumb into the eyeball. That was the standard way to open secret passages in tombs. Neptune and his minions slid backward, creating a chasm in the ground.
Water poured into the opening, cascading downward. It gushed by my feet, pulling at the material of my jeans. I held onto the rock base of the statue as the fountain emptied. When it finally all drained, I could see a stairway descending into the darkness.
“So that’s how you get in,” someone said.
I whipped around and came face-to-face with Tia.
“You!” I said. “What are you doing here?”
Tia was decked out in a bright-orange workout shirt, cargo pants and, of course, her combat boots. I wondered if she slept with them on. Her orange hair streak matched her shirt, and the number of necklaces she wore had doubled. I was surprised she wasn’t hunched over from their weight.
“Why are you following me?” she said, crossing her arms. The sweet aroma of lotus blossoms filled the air, reminding me of perfume girls used to wear back in ancient Egypt.
“Following you! You’re following me.” I tried to ignore her scent. It brought back too many memories I kept hidden in the deepest part of my mind. Happy times, back before the priests and Horemheb revolted against me.
“Please. Don’t flatter yourself.” Tia started down the staircase.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I asked.
“Seeing what’s below,” Tia said.
“But…”
“Are you coming or not?” she said.
I followed her inside, and pretty soon the darkness swallowed us. I would’ve used my scarab heart to light up the passageway if I wasn’t trying to keep my immortality a secret. But Tia was more prepared than a Girl Scout. She pulled a flashlight from one of the pockets of her cargo pants and flipped it on.
“You told Henry where I live,” I said. “How do you even know where I live?”
I felt a tug on the leg of my jeans. I didn’t dare look. Colonel Cody knew to stay hidden, since the shabtis were under direct orders to hide from mortals. That didn’t mean he didn’t look for creative ways around those orders.
“I know all sorts of things about you, Tut,” Tia said, making finger quotes when she said my name, causing her multitude of bracelets to jingle.
“Like what?” My scarab heart started to pump blood at the rate of a jackhammer. I needed to get control of myself.
“Well, for starters, you’re Tut,” she said. There went the finger quotes again, and with them, a fresh wave of her awesome perfume.
“And you’re Tia. So what? You know my name.” I pushed away her lotus blossom scent and kept going. The stairs went on forever. I’d counted over a hundred so far.
“Everyone knows your name,” she said.
Okay, this is the part where my sensors went up. I mean, sure, everyone in the world did know my name—Tutankhamun. But nobody in the world besides Horus and Gil knew that the King Tut from ancient Egypt was actually me.
“You mean like everyone at school?” I said.
Tia laughed out loud. “Yeah, everyone at school—when they read about you in a textbook.”
I sucked in a breath and held it. After three thousand years, I was a master of hidden identities. My spells had never failed.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I summoned the scent of herbs and started inaudibly intoning the spell I used to hide my identity.
Tia ignored me. “You know, I thought you’d be taller.”
Holy Osiris, I got sick of people calling me short. “I’m only fourteen,” I said, and I kept pushing the spell her way.
“All those statues in the museum make you look taller,” Tia said. “I have to admit, I like your hair this way. It looks way better than those portraits you see in books.” She stopped walking and pulled a piece of my hair from behind my ear.
I figured I’d died and gone to the Fields of the Blessed right then and there. Amun above, I had to focus. I couldn’t go around having people know who I was.
“Who do you think I am, anyway?” I asked. I doubled my spell attempts.
Tia crossed her arms, making the flashlight bounce against the side wall, revealing all sorts of paintings of cats and falcons. “Duh.”
Which didn’t answer the question I already knew the answer to.
“What’s it like to be immortal, anyway?” she asked.
I balled my hands into fists. “It’s not working.”
“What?”
“The spell. You’re supposed to forget who I am.” I knew this sounded absurd, but I didn’t care. Had Horus giving me power from the Book of the Dead done something to my normal Osiris-given spells?
Tia narrowed her eyes. “You’re trying to put a spell on me?”
Not the best way to strengthen a relationship, but that had never stopped me in the past.
“Maybe?” I said.
Fire lit up her blue eyes. “Keep your spells to yourself.”
I met her eyes with fire in my own. “Then tell me how you know.”
“You never told me what it’s like to be immortal, King Tut,” Tia said.
That was it. I gave up on the spell entirely. And an enormous weight lifted off me. For the first time in forever, I could admit my identity. My life was so much about pretending to be someone else. Someone normal and mortal. But every once in a while, I just
wanted to be the real Tut.
I put my hand on the wall and, just to make sure my normal powers still worked, I made moss grow on it, covering the image of a cat that looked a lot like Horus. Really, I could make anything grow out of anywhere. Roses out of bricks. Weeds in people’s gardens. My powers worked perfectly, which meant there was nothing wrong with my identity-hiding spells. So why weren’t they working on Tia?
“Truthfully?” I said.
“No, I want you to lie,” Tia said. “Of course, truthfully.”
“Okay, truth is that sometimes it gets a little boring, but overall, it’s awesome.”
“What do you do with all your time?” she said as we continued downward. Lights flickered far below, like maybe there was an end to our descent. “You’ve been around for thousands of years, right?”
I still couldn’t believe I was really talking about this. It was almost as if I’d been wanting to tell her about my life.
“I do everything,” I said. “All great moments of history—I’ve witnessed them. The Crusades. The assassination of Julius Caesar. The building of the Great Wall of China.”
“That doesn’t sound even kind of boring.” She tilted her head, and I couldn’t help but notice the smooth skin of her neck. Great Isis, I was acting like I’d never talked to a girl before. What was wrong with me?
“Sure, when I mention the highlights. But trust me, thirty-three hundred years is a long time. I’ve had to get pretty creative to keep from going insane.”
“Oh, really?” she said.
I reached back to the wall, but instead of making moss grow, I sprouted a lotus blossom from a crack in the stones. Once the flower reached full bloom, I plucked it and handed it to her. Her eyes widened as she took it, but then she only gave a little shrug. And here I thought it was a pretty cool trick.
“Stop showing off,” she said. But I noticed she tucked the flower behind the orange streak in her hair.
Yes, I was showing off, just a little.
We descended the last few steps until we reached the bottom, ending up in a circular room about the size of my kitchen. Paintings and engravings of Horus covered the walls, showing him in both his falcon and cat forms gloriously ruling over the world. Ahead of us was a closed door with some sort of complex locking mechanism shaped in the eye of Horus. This whole place was like a monument to him. I knew Horus was vain, but this was ridiculous. He was never going to hear the end of it when I got back home.
I had no clue how to get the door open. Ten metal bars interlocked with one another, sealing it shut. My identity had already been blown. I figured there was no harm in announcing my shabtis.
I looked down. “Colonel Cody?”
“It is my deepest honor, Great Pharaoh,” Colonel Cody said, emerging from the shadows.
“Great Pharaoh?” Tia said. “You’re kidding me, right?”
I shrugged and tried to act normal, even though my face had to be bright red.
The other four shabtis shifted enough that the light caught their reflection. Then, forming some sort of cheerleading pyramid, with two on the bottom and two in the middle, they made a tower with Colonel Cody at the top.
“Look at them,” Tia said. “They’re so cute!”
Cute? They were fierce and awesome.
“Thank you, beautiful mortal girl.” Colonel Cody beamed under her praise.
I’ll give him credit for being perceptive.
The shabti majors poked and prodded different parts of the lock until, like some choreographed dance, the long metal bars pulled away, one by one. When the last piece of metal grinded to a halt the door slid open, revealing a tunnel lit with torches on the wall. Tia clicked her flashlight off and stuffed it back in the pocket of her cargo pants.
We started down the long tunnel ahead.
“Now tell me why you’re really here,” I said. No way was it some crazy fluke that Tia just happened to be hanging out at the Library of Congress after hours. She was following me.
“Why are you here?” Tia asked. The rubber soles of her combat boots slapped on each step, echoing in the silence while I tried to figure out what to say.
“Research for our project,” I finally said.
“What a coincidence,” Tia said. “Me, too.”
“Yeah, right.”
“You don’t believe me? I’m offended, Tut.”
“Be offended all you want,” I said. “And you never told me how you knew who I was.”
Tia kept pace next to me, and I noticed she was about the same height as I was. Maybe I was short. Or maybe she was tall.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said.
“Of course it matters.”
“Why?”
There were about a million reasons. I listed them off on my fingers. “Because nobody knows who I am. Because I’ve never met you before this week. Because everything was just fine until you showed up.”
“What’s not fine?” Tia asked.
I stopped myself before mentioning Horemheb. The truth was that I knew nothing about Tia. I had no intention of trusting her. “Nothing. Everything’s fine. Except that I don’t believe a word you’re saying.”
“Good,” Tia said. “That means you’re smarter than I gave you credit for.” But then she ruined it by adding, “Great Pharaoh.”
I let it slide.
“What do you think about the gods?” Tia said, and she started fiddling with her necklaces, which were in a giant tangle.
“What do you mean, what do I think about them? They’re gods.”
“What do you think about all the fighting they do?” she asked.
“How do you know anything about the gods of Egypt and whether they fight or not?” I asked. Mythology, according to most of the world, was a bunch of made-up nonsense. Maybe I should just assume that Tia was not like most of the world. It might be a good starting point in figuring out who she really was.
Tia kept untangling her necklaces. They’d gotten into a giant jumble. I wasn’t sure her attempts to straighten them were helping. “From all the stories. All they ever do is fight.”
“Like you,” I said. “Did you really get kicked out of private school for fighting?”
“Maybe I did,” Tia said. “And maybe I didn’t.”
It was one more non-answer from her to add to the growing list.
“The gods have created an art out of bickering,” I said. “It’s just what they do.”
“But do you ever wonder what would have happened if they didn’t fight constantly?” Tia asked. “Do you ever think about how different history would have been?”
No, I never wondered. Fighting was just something the gods did. Sort of like how breathing was something people did.
“For starters, I wouldn’t be here,” I said. After all, the whole reason I was immortal was because of the battle between Set and Osiris. Same with Horemheb. Which brought my need for revenge back to the forefront. “Anyway, there’s nothing you can do to change the gods.”
“Yeah, I know,” Tia said. But she almost looked sad about the whole thing.
We continued on in total silence, because I couldn’t think of a response. And then I didn’t have to, because we came to an arched opening.
“Tut!”
Lights blasted through the archway. We stepped inside.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said.
“Not kidding at all,” someone said. And the next thing I knew, I was wrapped in a hug that would have crushed me, if I hadn’t been immortal, by a guy with the head of a falcon.
Right. Head of a falcon. It was Qeb, which was short for some really long name nobody could ever pronounce. He was one of Horus’s sons. Horus had four sons, and apparently we’d just found two of them.
“Let go, Qeb,” I managed to say, even though my lungs had been squashed to the size of walnuts.
“Hey, who’s your girlfriend?” Imsety said, swaggering over to join us. He was the only one of Horus’s sons to have a normal head, although it w
as completely swollen with how much he thought of himself. Aside from Qeb and his falcon head, Horus’s other two sons had jackal and baboon heads.
“She’s not my girlfriend,” I said once Qeb let me go.
“Seriously not his girlfriend,” Tia said.
Wait … was there some reason she wouldn’t want to be my girlfriend? It’s not like I was a hideous monster.
“Tia, meet Qeb and Imsety,” I said. “But no matter what you do, don’t trust a word they say. It will only get you in trouble.”
“The last time was your fault,” Imsety said. “We’ve been over that. You’re the one who didn’t stick to the plan.”
I couldn’t argue. There was this whole thing about a dare and a cemetery at night and Horus’s favorite catnip toy. Horus had blamed me for everything. It had taken fifty years to get him back on my good side.
“But the five times before that, you guys got me in trouble,” I said. It seemed like every time I ran into these two, we caused some near catastrophe.
“Is Gil still the same stick-in-the-mud he’s always been?” Imsety asked.
Oh, yeah—Gil and Imsety hated each other. It was time for a change of subject. “What are you guys doing here, anyway?”
“Our job,” Qeb said. “What does it look like?”
From the looks of the giant screen on the wall and the remote controls in their hands, I figured their job must be playing Mario Kart. The place looked like a bachelor pad decorated with pizza boxes and soda cans. There were a couple of sofas, a pub table, and five different gaming consoles.
“What exactly is your job?” Tia asked.
Imsety flashed a giant smile that was so completely cheesy, I couldn’t believe it. I almost expected him to say, “I’m sorry. I can’t hear you over the sound of how awesome I am.” Instead he said, “Well, you see, our dad is Horus. You may have heard of him. He’s a pretty important god. Anyway, he needed some very important guardians. And seeing as how we’re so dependable and trustworthy…”
I let that part slide. At least I knew I was in the right place.
“Enough,” I said. “We get it. If you’ll just point us in the direction of the secret room you’re guarding, we’ll get on our way.”