Living in Threes (13 page)

“Some of those worlds had had intelligent life,” said Vekaa, “but it was long gone.”

“Plague?” Meru asked.

He nodded. He was steadier now that he could be a scientist and not a brother. “That was her specialty, after all: the effect of epidemics on starfaring cultures. We’re looking for patterns in the research she did, but so far we haven’t found any that would lead her to Earth. Maybe she left something in that package.”

Meru understood his meaning perfectly. If it was keyed to her, nothing and no one else could open it.

They were desperate for answers. So was she. But she was—not afraid, no, but uncertain. What if the answer was something none of them could bear to know?

People were dying. Jian was dead. What could be worse than that?

Slowly Meru drew the package toward her. She took a deep breath and tried not to shake. When she touched the seal, the wrapping folded back. Inside was a packet in a crackly brownish wrapper, with words written on it in ancient ink:
This is the key.

Something was rolled up inside, tumbling out onto the table. Meru stared blankly at the thing her mother had left her.

It was a stasis field; it contained a withered flower and a blue bead. She had seen a bead exactly like it, and held it in her hand, during the game that she had thought was a dream.

Chapter 13

I had the scarab in my hand. I could put it back and walk away and avoid stealing it, and keep out of trouble. I could just sit there and let the world spin down the drain, too, taking everybody with it.

Or I could borrow it. All right, steal it, but I’d put it back when I was done. There were so many in that box, and hundreds more in storage. What difference did it make if one went somewhere else for a while?

I wrapped it in the napkin I’d brought and shoved it in my pocket. Then I got out of there.

I’d never done anything like that in my life. I could feel it in there, as if it was literally hot. Any minute I expected alarms to go off and buzzers to buzz and Aunt Jessie to leap out of a cupboard chanting
Thief! Thief! Thief!

The silence was almost worse. Somehow, before it broke and I got busted, I had to figure out how to get to the marketplace, bazaar, whatever they called it.

People would expect me to want to play tourist, at least I hoped so. I also hoped they wouldn’t ask too many questions about what I wanted to buy.

Some of it maybe wasn’t legal. Then there was the question I really needed to ask. Does magic work if you don’t believe in it?

I was afraid I already knew the answer to that.

Everything’s on the internet somewhere, and normally that’s the first place I would have gone to look. But artifact storage was right above the library, and I was going by the door when the questions started crowding in. Instead of diving for my room and my computer, I went really old school. Ancient. I dived for the books.

So many of them were in languages I didn’t know. The ones that were in English were all tangled up in their own words. I was ready to give up and head for the beautiful, simple, searchable internet when I found the box at the end of the shelf.

The label on it was typed, and so old it had gone yellow and started to peel. All it said was,
Misc. Notes on Magical Texts
.

Why not? I thought, pulling it out and lugging it to the table I’d staked out at the end of the aisle under the window.

The box was full of hand-written notes. There were sheets of hieroglyphs, drawn and painted with care that must have taken hours, and then there were the translations. They were scribbled and crossed out and rewritten all over the place, but they surprised me by being easy to read. Whoever wrote them—I couldn’t find a name anywhere—had round, clear handwriting. It was as careful, in its way, as the hieroglyphs.

Nobody writes like that any more. I was glad this person had, whoever he or she was, because when I started to piece it together, I realized what I was reading. It was Meritre’s book of magic.

I don’t believe in coincidences, either. My hands shook when I spread the pages across the table.

There it was, the spell Meritre was going to—had intended to—must have gone ahead and worked.

This time-traveling thing was making my head ache.

There it was, anyway. It was a recipe for wiping out evil. It called for a crocodile’s egg, crushed beetles’ wings, a jug of beer, and the dung of a white cow.

I pulled out my phone and took a picture of the translation. Then I took a picture of the original. And after that I snapped bits of the rest, more or less at random, until I stopped short.

“This is stupid,” I said.

I’d been thinking about how to make the spell work. Egypt isn’t ancient any more. Food has changed, though not as much as you might think. Spells might change, too.

I could get an egg, though it probably wouldn’t be a crocodile’s. Beetles were all over the place. Beer, no problem, though I’d have to sneak it out of the kitchen. The cow…well…

It
was
stupid. All the spell did was make the world’s worst plate of scrambled eggs.

I shuffled the papers together and dropped them back in the box. Just after it slid into its place on the shelf, Aunt Jessie opened the library door and squinted down the aisle. “Meredith, is that you?”

“Coming,” I said. “Sorry, did you lose me? I just couldn’t resist—”

“Of course you couldn’t.”

I held my breath, but it seemed I didn’t have either
Thief
or
Liar
painted on my forehead.

Aunt Jessie wasn’t really looking at me. She had an odd expression on her face. “You have visitors,” she said.

Now that
was
odd. Who in the world…?

Who’s the world traveler in the family?

Dad was waiting for me in the lounge outside the dining commons. It had a lot of leather chairs and couches and bookshelves full of anything and everything, a piano that Jonathan had told me belonged to Howard Carter—the man himself, the one who found King Tut’s tomb—and a television set so old it didn’t even have a remote, and a sound system so new I wasn’t sure if some of its components had been invented yet.

I wasn’t at all surprised to find Dad fiddling with the sound system. He had it playing a funky mix of Beatles songs, which was a totally Dad thing to do.

I love my Dad. When he can be bothered to be around, he’s more fun than anybody I know. He’s been everywhere and done everything, and there isn’t anything he isn’t interested in.

Mom used to be like him, everybody tells me. By the time Dad bought the sailing schooner and started running charter cruises out of Key West, I’d come along and Mom was ’way over her experimental phase. She bought the house on the mainland and joined the law firm, and Dad stopped by in between cruises.

The visits got further and further apart. By the time I taught myself to read, one of the first things I figured out was a postcard from Dad from the Bering Sea. He’d signed on for a season on a crab boat, then he was headed to Mongolia to run a trekking company. Ponies on the steppe, nights in a yurt—every horse kid’s dream.

That’s how I got into horses. I was determined to learn to ride and then go and help Dad with his company. Dad moved on; he always did. I stayed with the horses, and Florida, and Mom.

The last I heard, he was in India doing something high-tech. Or training elephants; his messages weren’t too clear. Now here he was in Luxor, looking just the same as always, long and tall and sunburned.

He didn’t have a beard this round, and he’d cut his hair. I liked him that way. His bright blue eyes hadn’t changed even slightly, or the wide white grin. He picked me up and hugged me so tight my ribs creaked.

I was getting old for that, but just before I started to go stiff, he put me down. “Fancy meeting you here,” he said.

“That was
my
line,” I said. “What are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be in an ashram or something?”

“That was last year.” I couldn’t tell if he was laughing at me or not. “I just got off a Greenpeace cruise in the Indian Ocean. Since I was so close, relatively speaking, I thought I’d stop by and see how you’re doing.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. Dad would think like that, for sure, but he never had just one thing going on.

“If you’re not too tired,” he said, “I’d like to take you to dinner. You up for it?”

I glanced at Aunt Jessie. She wouldn’t hesitate to tell either of us if she thought he was full of it, but she spread her hands. “Up to you,” she said.

I was tired and jetlagged and I had more on my mind than a sane person ought to have, but if Dad was up to something, I wanted to know it now instead of days or weeks from now. “All right,” I said. “I’ll go get changed.”

Trust Dad to stay in a hotel that looked as if you’d find Indiana Jones in the next room, or the kind of lady archaeologist who’d stow a sword inside her parasol. It had actual, modern air conditioning, but the big ceiling fans were still there and still turning, and the dining room was full of potted palms and people in khaki. There was at least one busload of German tourists, and the British accents were out in force.

The waiter was a disappointment. They wear the same uniform in Florida, white shirt and black pants. The fact he was drop-dead cute about halfway made up for it.

The table he took us to had someone sitting at it. She was tall and narrow like Dad, with short blonde hair and serious cheekbones.

I’d kill for those cheekbones. I could see her in a long white dress and a parasol, though what she had on was a light green sundress and clunky sandals.

The sandals made me like her in spite of the cheekbones. “Meredith,” Dad said with a funny little upward tilt in his voice, “this is Kelly.”

I’d expected her to be called Ute or Gretchen. She stood up and shook my hand and said in perfectly normal American, “Hello, Meredith. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

I couldn’t say the same. I smiled and said polite things, and waited for Dad to explain.

Dad didn’t take off because he was sick of Mom. He just couldn’t stay in one place for more than a few months at a time before his feet got so itchy he couldn’t stand it. It was Mom who filed for divorce.