“Wonderful,” I managed to say. “If you’re here, I must be dead.”
Anubis smiled. “Not dead, though you came close. That was a risky move.”
A burning sensation started in my face and worked its way down my neck. I wasn’t sure if it was embarrassment, anger, or delight at seeing him.
“Where have you been?” I demanded. “Six months, not a word.”
His smile melted. “They wouldn’t let me see you.”
“Who wouldn’t let you?”
“There are rules,” he said. “Even now they’re watching; but you’re close enough to death that I can manage a few moments. I need to tell you: you have the right idea. Look at what isn’t there. It’s the only way you might survive.”
“Right,” I grumbled. “Thanks for not speaking in riddles.”
The warm sensation reached my heart. It began to beat, and suddenly I realized I’d been without a heartbeat since I’d passed out. That probably wasn’t good.
“Sadie, there’s something else.” Anubis’s voice became watery. His image began to fade. “I need to tell you—”
“Tell me in person,” I said. “None of this ‘death vision’ nonsense.”
“I can’t. They won’t let me.”
“You still sound like a little boy. You’re a god, aren’t you? You can bloody well do what you like.”
Anger smoldered in his eyes. Then, to my surprise, he laughed. “I’d forgotten how irritating you are. I’ll try to visit…briefly. We have something to discuss.” He reached out and brushed the side of my face. “You’re waking now. Good-bye, Sadie.”
“Don’t leave.” I grasped his hand and held it against my cheek.
The warmth spread throughout my body. Anubis faded away.
My eyes flew open. “Don’t leave!”
My burned hands were bandaged, and I was gripping a hairy baboon paw. Khufu looked down at me, rather confused. “Agh?”
Oh, fab. I was flirting with a monkey.
I sat up groggily. Carter and our friends gathered around me. The room hadn’t collapsed, but the entire King Tut exhibit was in ruins. I had a feeling we would not be invited to join the Friends of the Dallas Museum anytime soon.
“Wh-what happened?” I stammered. “How long—?”
“You were dead for two minutes,” Carter said, his voice shaky. “I mean, no heartbeat, Sadie. I thought…I was afraid…”
He choked up. Poor boy. He really would have been lost without me.
[Ouch, Carter! Don’t pinch.]
“You summoned Ma’at,” Alyssa said in amazement. “That’s like…impossible.”
I suppose it was rather impressive. Using divine words to create an object like an animal or a chair or a sword—that’s hard enough. Summoning an element like fire or water is even trickier. But summoning a concept, like Order—that’s just not done. At the moment, however, I was in too much pain to appreciate my own amazingness. I felt as if I’d just summoned an anvil and dropped it on my head.
“Lucky try,” I said. “What about the golden cabinet?”
“Agh!” Khufu gestured proudly to the gilded box, which sat nearby, safe and sound.
“Good baboon,” I said. “Extra Cheerios for you tonight.”
Walt frowned. “But the Book of Overcoming Apophis was destroyed. How will a cabinet help us? You said it was some kind of clue…?”
I found it hard to look at Walt without feeling guilty. My heart had been torn between him and Anubis for months now, and it just wasn’t fair of Anubis to pop into my dreams, looking all hot and immortal, when poor Walt was risking his life to protect me and getting weaker by the day. I remembered how he had looked in the Duat, in his ghostly gray mummy linen.…
No. I couldn’t think about that. I forced myself to concentrate on the golden cabinet.
Look at what isn’t there, Anubis had said. Bloody gods and their bloody riddles.
The face in the wall—Uncle Vinnie—had told me the box would give us a hint about how to defeat Apophis, if I was smart enough to understand it.
“I’m not sure what it means yet,” I admitted. “If the Texans let us take it back to Brooklyn House…”
A horrible realization settled over me. There were no more sounds of explosions outside. Just eerie silence.
“The Texans!” I yelped. “What’s happened to them?”
Felix and Alyssa bolted for the exit. Carter and Walt helped me to my feet, and we ran after them.
The guards had all disappeared from their stations. We reached the museum foyer, and I saw columns of white smoke outside the glass walls, rising from the sculpture garden.
“No,” I murmured. “No, no.”
We tore across the street. The well-kept lawn was now a crater as big as an Olympic pool. The bottom was littered with melted metal sculptures and chunks of stone. Tunnels that had once led into the Fifty-first Nome’s headquarters had collapsed like a giant anthill some bully had stepped on. Around the rim of the crater were bits of smoking evening wear, smashed plates of tacos, broken champagne glasses, and the shattered staffs of magicians.
Don’t blame yourself for the deaths, my mother had said.
I moved in a daze to the remains of the patio. Half the concrete slab had cracked and slid into the crater. A charred fiddle lay in the mud next to a gleaming bit of silver.
Carter stood next to me. “We—we should search,” he said. “There might be survivors.”
I swallowed back a sob. I wasn’t sure how, but I sensed the truth with absolute certainty. “There aren’t any.”
The Texas magicians had welcomed us and supported us. JD Grissom had shaken my hand and wished me luck before running off to save his wife. But we’d seen the work of Apophis in other nomes. Carter had warned JD: The serpent’s minions don’t leave any survivors.
I knelt down and picked up the gleaming piece of silver—a half-melted Lone Star belt buckle.
“They’re dead,” I said. “All of them.”
3. We Win a Box Full of Nothing
ON THAT HAPPY NOTE, Sadie hands me the microphone. [Thanks a lot, sis.]
I wish I could tell you that Sadie was wrong about the Fifty-first Nome. I’d love to say we found all the Texas magicians safe and sound. We didn’t. We found nothing except the remnants of a battle: burned ivory wands, a few shattered shabti, scraps of smoldering linen and papyrus. Just like in the attacks on Toronto, Chicago, and Mexico City, the magicians had simply vanished. They’d been vaporized, devoured, or destroyed in some equally horrible way.
At the edge of the crater, one hieroglyph burned in the grass: Isfet, the symbol for Chaos. I had a feeling Apophis had left it there as a calling card.
We were all in shock, but we didn’t have time to mourn our comrades. The mortal authorities would be arriving soon to check out the scene. We had to repair the damage as best we could and remove all traces of magic.
There wasn’t much we could do about the crater. The locals would just have to assume there’d been a gas explosion. (We tended to cause a lot of those.)
We tried to fix the museum and restore the King Tut collection, but it wasn’t as easy as cleaning up the gift shop. Magic can only go so far. So if you go to a King Tut exhibit someday and notice cracks or burn marks on the artifacts, or maybe a statue with its head glued on backward—well, sorry. That was probably our fault.