—
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. Ragnarök.
None of the other guys showed up for Yumiko’s party. It’s just their Faces. The guys all left for the moon about a week ago. They’ve been partying up there all week. I’ve never been into the space travel thing. Plenty of ways to have fun without leaving the planet.
—
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 Nikolay 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’s very nice. Very sexy.”
“That’s my sister,” I said. “She’s seventeen.”
“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 sexy video or the other thing.
“It was bad enough when you slept with her,” she says, weeping. “That was practically incest. But I saw the video.” So: the video, then. “The one you gave Yumiko. The one she’s going to put online. Don’t you understand? She’s me. He’s you. That’s us, on that video, 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. I was a baby, she climbed in. 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 so vile, ,” Hero says. “Have you ever been in love? Even once?”
She’s fishing. She knows. Of course she knows.
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 an 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, 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 after the fireworks, and then I decided that I didn’t want to be alone when I did it.”
Which is just like Hero. Throws a pity party, then realizes she’s forgotten to send out invitations.
“And then I found out what you were up to,” Hero says. “I thought I ought to stop you. 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 say. “For real? Like with a gun?”
“Like with 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.
—
Alicia was the first one to get a Face. I got mine when I was eight. I didn’t really know what was going on. I met all these boys my age, and then the Olds sat down and had a talk with me. They explained what was going on, said that I got to pick which Face I wanted. I picked the one who looked the nicest, the one who looked like he might be fun to hang out with. That’s how stupid I was back then.
Hero couldn’t choose, so I did it for her. Pick her, I said. That’s how strange life is. I picked her out of all the others.
—
Yumiko said she’d already had the conversation with her Face. (We talk to our Faces as little as possible, although sometimes we sleep with each other’s. Forbidden fruit is always freakier. Is that why I did what I did? I don’t know. How am I supposed to know?) Yumiko said her Face agreed to sign a new contract when Yumiko turns eighteen. She doesn’t see any reason to give up having a Face.
—
Nishi is Preeti’s younger sister. They only broke ground on Nishi’s pyramid last summer. Upper management teams from her father’s company came out to lay the first course of stones. A team-building exercise. Usually it’s lifers from the supermax prison out in Pelican Bay. Once they get to work, they mostly look the same, lifers and upper management. It’s hard work. We like to go out and watch.
Every once in a while a consulting archaeologist or an architect will come over and try to make conversation. They think we want context.
They talk about grave goods, about how one day future archaeologists will know what life was like because some rich girls decided they wanted to build their own pyramids.
We think that’s funny.
They like to complain about the climate. Apparently it isn’t ideal. “Of course, they may not be standing give or take a couple of hundred years. Once you factor in geological events. Earthquakes. There’s the geopolitical dimension. There’s grave robbers.”
They go on and on about the cunning of grave robbers.
We get them drunk. We ask them about the curse of the mummies just to see them get worked up. We ask them if they aren’t worried about the Olds. We ask what used to happen to the men who built the pyramids in Egypt. Didn’t they used to disappear? we ask. Just to make sure nobody knew where the good stuff was buried? We say there are one or two members of the consulting team who worked on Alicia’s pyramid that we were friendly with. We mention we haven’t been able to get hold of them in a while, not since the pyramid was finished.