“We’re not supposed to organize all of those pottery shards, are we?” asked Max-Ernest.
“In archaeology, we call them sherds, not shards,” said Albert 3-D. “And, yes, I want you to sort them all.”
“That’s what I meant—sherds,” said Max-Ernest, embarrassed to be caught in such an obvious mistake (a mistake I’m sure you would never make).
The ceramic sherds-not-shards had been excavated from Dr. Amun’s tomb and had been brought from Egypt to make use of the museum’s new magnetic-imaging equipment. The three friends’ job: to sit on stools and separate the sherds-not-shards into piles by size and color—and by nothing else.
“You might find some funny drawings on some of the sherds. The Egyptians liked cartoons, and a large number were found in Dr. Amun’s tomb. But please ignore them,” Albert 3-D warned. “Don’t try to put the pieces back together—you’ll just mess up everything.”
With those encouraging words, Albert 3-D plunked himself down on the other side of the room to do some paperwork and let his prisoners get to work.
Their task turned out to be not unlike the early, sorting stage of a jigsaw puzzle—the main difference being that they were never supposed to go beyond that stage. Not surprisingly, this limitation proved extremely frustrating for Max-Ernest, who was expert at jigsaw puzzles, and for Cass, whose nature demanded that she investigate any mystery put in front of her. As for Yo-Yoji, he didn’t like limits in general. Still, they were terrified of not graduating and didn’t want to get into any further trouble, so they tried to do as they were told.
Albert 3-D hadn’t said anything about talking, however.
“Yo, anybody else check Glob’s blog last night?” asked Yo-Yoji.
The others shook their heads.
“So you don’t know what happened to Amber, then?”
“Should I care?” asked Cass as she examined a sherd decorated with a bird painted in black. Could that be an ibis? she wondered, before putting it off to the side.
“Haven’t you noticed that she’s been gone for a week?”
“No. Why, did you miss her?” Cass teased.
“No!” Yo-Yoji glared.
Max-Ernest held up a sherd with the image of a scarab. “Hey, did you guys know a scarab was the same thing as a dung beetle?”
“Awesome,” said Yo-Yoji. “You guys want to hear about Amber or not?” He looked at them to make sure he had their full attention.
“OK, what happened?” asked Max-Ernest.
“She went blind.”
“Blind?!” the other two echoed in chorus.
“Well, sort of blind—she could still see light and stuff,” Yo-Yoji amended, enjoying the effect his words were having. “And it was only for a day.”
“Did she get a chemical burn? Or was it viral?” asked Cass, her mind racing through all the scenarios she’d studied.
Yo-Yoji shook his head. “Nothing like that. Glob said that Veronica said that Amber had some mystery disease or something—whatever it was, the next morning she woke up and she couldn’t see a thing.”
“That’s awful,” said Cass, although, as everybody knew, she had wished far worse on Amber in the past. “And I’ll bet anything that she’s never even done any sensory-deprivation training.”
(Going blind was one of Cass’s top ten fears—above malaria and below cerebral hemorrhage; she trained for it constantly.)
“Glob says it’s a huge secret. Course, that didn’t keep him from writing about it,” Yo-Yoji snickered.
Albert 3-D looked up from his desk. “Why doesn’t it sound like you guys are working?”
“Sorry!” they cried in unison.
After that, they were quiet—for at least three minutes.
Then Yo-Yoji broke the silence again: “Hey, is this one of those cartoons he was talking about?” He held up a largish sherd on which someone had drawn a mouse sitting on a throne. “The mouse is supposed to be a pharaoh, right?”
“Well, he’s sitting on a throne and wearing a pharaoh’s crown and beard, so, yeah, I would say so,” said Max-Ernest.
“OK, Mr. Knows-Everything-About-Shards, I mean sherds,” said Yo-Yoji. “If it’s so obvious, what’s that coming out of his ear?”
“It’s the beak of an ibis,” said Cass. “Look.”
Cass took Yo-Yoji’s sherd from him and placed it next to the sherd she had put aside. “I noticed this one before….”
Reunited, the two pieces of pottery showed an ibis standing beside the mouse pharaoh’s throne and whispering in his ear. The mouse was pounding on his scepter, his whiskers twitching angrily—not a very flattering portrayal of a potentate.
Cass felt a familiar tingle in her ears. She had no doubt what the illustration meant. “So, do you guys still not think the mummy was him?” she whispered.
Before they could respond, Albert 3-D stood up, shaking his head. “You guys are hopeless. I can see why you’re always getting in trouble with your principal.” He smiled. “I like that about you.”
Reminding them to focus on their work, he told them he would be leaving them alone for twenty minutes or so. The exhibit would be moving to the Cairo Hotel in Las Vegas in a few days, and there were many details to arrange.
As soon as their not-so-strict-after-all chaperone had left, Yo-Yoji turned back to Cass. “So you think the ibis is the doctor who discovered the… it?”
Cass nodded. “Look, he’s even whispering in the pharaoh’s ear.”
“And that means he’s Dr. Amun, the mummy right here in this museum? Ridiculous!” said Yo-Yoji, amazed at the coincidence. “It’s so ridiculous it’s re-sick-ulous!”
“I told you—there was a mark from the ibis ring on the mummy’s finger,” said Cass, pulling the ibis ring out of her pocket to show Yo-Yoji. “It has to be him.”
(On the way to the museum that afternoon, Cass had filled Yo-Yoji in on their findings about the ibis and the Secret.)
“Can I see?” Yo-Yoji, who’d never seen the ring up close before, reached for it—then jerked his hand back in surprise. “Whoa! Did you feel that shock?”
Cass nodded, rattled. “It’s the ring. It… buzzes sometimes when you touch it. I don’t know why.”
Max-Ernest looked curiously at it. “That’s strange. They definitely didn’t have batteries in ancient Egypt.”
“We can think about it later,” said Cass, slipping the ring back into her pocket. “We don’t have much time—”
“Uh, time for what?” asked Max-Ernest suspiciously.
“To go look at the mummy, of course,” said Cass.
Max-Ernest looked at her in alarm. “Right now? The museum’s closed.”
“Yeah, it’s perfect. Nobody’s around to bother us. The exhibit is right upstairs.”
“Cool,” said Yo-Yoji, who was so antsy after forty-five minutes in the Restoration Room that he would have accepted any excuse to leave.
“Albert 3-D is going to come back any second,” said Max-Ernest, aghast. “We’re in enough trouble already!”
“I know, and I want to graduate as much as you do,” said Cass. “But think about it: the papyrus and the ring, the only clues we have about the… thing, were both stolen from Amun’s grave. Maybe there’s something else in his sarcophagus, or wrapped up with him or something, that the tomb robbers didn’t get.”
“So now you want to go rob his grave?”
“No, just look at it!” said Cass, exasperated. “We’ll never have a chance like this again.”
“For all we know, it’s totally dark up there,” said Max-Ernest.
“Are you scared?” asked Yo-Yoji.
“Of what you guys will do, yes! Anyway, how do we know the alarm’s not on?”
“They don’t put the alarms on until later at night,” said Cass. “Too many people are walking around before that.”
“You asked?”
“I thought you wanted to help,” said Cass, avoiding the question.
She pulled a small penlight out of h
er pocket, ready to go.
“Now I know for sure you planned this,” said Max-Ernest.
“What do you mean?”
“The flashlight.”
“I always carry a flashlight.”
“Yeah, in your backpack. But that one is the extra one you only take when we’re going on a mission.”
“Fine, you busted me. Are you in or aren’t you?”
Max-Ernest looked from Cass to Yo-Yoji and back again.
He was still sore at Cass. She seemed to want his help only when it was convenient for her. Otherwise, the Secret was hers alone to discover. And yet, if this truly was their one chance to discover it—her one chance to discover it, he corrected himself—he had no choice. He had to go along. In the end, the Secret was bigger than either of them.
“I’m in,” he said.
In order to get upstairs, they first had to walk through the Osteology and Taxidermy Room—in other words, the room in which the bones of a raptor would be reassembled, or a lifeless raccoon stuffed. Enough animal heads lined the walls to fill a dozen hunting lodges. In one corner, there were so many hair and whisker samples it could have been a hair salon for woodland animals. In another corner, carefully labeled little bones sat in boxes, like parts at an auto-repair shop. Bigger bones lay in rows on tables, and three partly assembled dinosaur skeletons struck poses around the room.
Yo-Yoji picked up the femur of a large mammal off a table. “You think if I toss this, any of them will run after it?”
Like most museums, the Natural History Museum had many more items in storage than on display. After our friends left the Osteology and Taxidermy Room, they found themselves weaving through racks of Native American tribal garments and headdresses, bows and arrows and other assorted weapons, even a tepee hanging upside down from the ceiling. Next were the seal coats and harpoons of Eskimos, and a collection of pans and tools and other memorabilia from the gold rush, followed by a pair of nineteenth-century sea-diving suits that looked like antique astronauts.
After that, the collections became too eclectic to categorize. It’s very likely that not even the curators of the museum knew everything they had.
An unmarked door opened into a stairwell that led to the museum upstairs. Quietly, they crept up the stairs, hoping nobody was waiting for them at the top.
“Aargh!” Cass spun around when she reached the landing above. “Max-Ernest, I’m going to kill you if you tap me like that one more time!” she said in an angry whisper.
From several feet behind, Max-Ernest looked at her in confusion. “What do you mean? I didn’t—”
Yo-Yoji nodded. “I can back him up. Right there the whole time.”
Cass’s ears turned pink. “Oh. Sorry. I guess I’m just a little jumpy. Come on, let’s go.” She brushed past a potted palm and headed toward the mummy exhibit.
Just as Max-Ernest had feared, in contrast to the fluorescent-bright hallways below, the galleries upstairs were barely lit. Aside from a few dim lights here and there, the museum was dark. Not so dark you couldn’t see your own hands. But too dark to read the labels on the displays, let alone to read hieroglyphs.
Cass turned on her flashlight. The beam landed on the bottom of the sign introducing the exhibit.
“Hey, did you guys see that before?” Max-Ernest asked, peering at the sign. “ ‘Exhibition made possible by a generous grant from Solar-Zero LLC.’ ”
“So?” asked Cass, impatient to get to the mummy.
“It’s just a weird name, that’s all. If they’re a solar-power company, why zero?”
“Maybe they make sunglasses, like zero UVA rays?” suggested Yo-Yoji.
“All I know is my flashlight is solar, and it’s going to lose its power in a minute.”
Cass pushed ahead into the exhibit, her flashlight thrust forward as if she meant to ward off any attackers along with the darkness.
If you’ve ever explored a crypt in the middle of the night (and knowing you, you have), then I don’t need to tell you how unnerving it is to see a flashlight beam land on the face of a corpse. Imagine, then, what a mummy might look like. Then multiply that by about fifty (the approximate number of mummies in the exhibit, including cats, dogs, birds, and crocodiles). For all her bravery, Cass soon stopped waving the flashlight around and kept it pointed at the floor.
Ahead of them, in the center of the gallery, Dr. Amun’s glass chamber glinted forebodingly.
“What was that?” Cass whispered.
“What?” asked Max-Ernest.
“Didn’t you hear footsteps?”
“I thought that was you.”
“I thought it was a guard,” said Yo-Yoji.
They all stood still for a moment. But there was no other sound.
Slowly, gingerly, they tiptoed toward the glass chamber.
The door was slightly ajar. Cass entered first, and by the time Max-Ernest and Yo-Yoji let themselves in, she was already standing over the sarcophagus.
Before they caught up with her, they heard something they’d rarely heard in all the dangerous and death-defying adventures they’d shared with Cass.
The sound of Cass screaming.
No, this isn’t a new chapter, I’m just prolonging the…
s u s p e n s e.
I guess that’s enough.
Well, maybe just one more…
m o m e n t.
OK, here’s what happens next:
With Cass’s scream echoing in their ears, Max-Ernest and Yo-Yoji ran to where she was standing by the mystery mummy’s open sarcophagus.
“What happened?” asked Yo-Yoji. “Are you all right?”
“No…” Cass looked unharmed, but she was breathing hard and clutching her stomach.
“Did something scare you?” asked Max-Ernest. “Was there a rat?”
“No, nothing like that,” said Cass, her ears red with embarrassment. (She did not think of herself as the kind of girl who screamed in fright.) “I was just a little surprised, that’s all. Look!”
Max-Ernest and Yo-Yoji looked down and saw—
Nothing.
All that was left in the sarcophagus was a little spider crawling across the sandy bottom. The mummy was gone.
By the time Cass closed the door to her bedroom, she hardly had any fingernails left. She’d chewed them down to the nubs. Two of her fingertips were bleeding, gruesome reminders of the ancient finger that had signaled the beginning of her latest troubles. Her fingers hurt, but she didn’t mind the pain: she deserved it.
She’d never felt worse.
Never more guilty. She was the one who’d broken off the mummy’s finger. She was the one who had encouraged her friends to sneak back into the exhibit, making it look as though they had stolen the mummy. She was the one who had betrayed the trust of Albert 3-D.
Never more anxious. She didn’t know what punishment was in store for her friends and herself. Expulsion? Jail time? Whatever it was, not graduating from middle school was likely to be the least of it.
Never more afraid. Somebody had taken the mummy. Somebody who knew it was the mummy of the man who’d discovered the Secret. Somebody ruthless and disdainful of the consequences. Somebody who very likely knew about Cass and her friends as well.
Worst of all, she, Cass, was no closer to finding the Secret. With the mummy gone, she was farther away from the Secret than ever.
As she sat down on her bed, she looked up at all the old photos and magazine articles that covered her walls. They depicted disaster and destruction of countless varieties. Floods. Fires. Earthquakes. Explosions. Storms. Plagues. Animal attacks. Heat waves and droughts. Water and power shortages. War. Famine. Asteroid impacts. Meteorites. The list went on. But nothing that anticipated her current predicament.
She’d spent her whole life preparing for sudden, unexpected events over which she would have little or no control. And yet here she was, dealing with a calamity that was almost entirely of her own making.
Why did she have to break the mummy�
��s finger? Why did she have to insist on going back upstairs? Why couldn’t she ever leave well enough alone?
She, Cass, was the disaster. Instead of preparing for earthquakes, she thought, she should have been preparing for herself.
Her mother opened the door without knocking.
“Albert called,” she said, looking not at Cass but at some invisible point in the distance. “He’s very disappointed in you and your friends.”
“No kidding.”
“He wants to see us all first thing in the morning.”
“What about school?”
“Tomorrow is Sunday.”
“Oh yeah.”
“Besides, you’ll be lucky if you’re allowed back to school.”
“I told you we didn’t—”
“Save it, Cassandra.” Her mom slammed the door shut.
Cass stared at it. Her mother had said almost nothing all night—as if she had given up on Cass altogether. Cass would much have preferred a good fight. She knew her mother thought that she and her friends had taken the mummy. If her mother had come right out and said so, then Cass could have defended herself and had the pleasure of being angry at all the horribly unfair and totally unforgivable things her mother said. Her mother’s silence was excruciating.
Fully dressed, Cass crawled under the covers, ready to abandon herself to tears and self-pity.
But she couldn’t. It wasn’t in her nature.
Unbidden, the image of Pietro, beloved leader of the Terces Society, entered her head. He always told her how much he believed in her, the Secret Keeper. She couldn’t let him down. Not now.
Sit up, she told herself. You’re a survivalist. Think like one.
What to do?
She pulled the ibis ring out of her pocket and put it on her finger, hoping it might supply an answer.
Just a short time earlier, the ring had made her feel so confident. Then there was the excitement of finding the mummy, the so-called Dr. Amun. For a moment, it had seemed like such a breakthrough. The man who had discovered the Secret—what could bring her closer to discovering the Secret herself? Now Amun was missing. And the ring was seeming more mysterious than helpful.
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