Living in Threes (24 page)

Chapter 22

My world was breaking apart. I needed to be alone. Completely alone—all by myself, with no one yammering at me, inside my head or out.

I felt guilty, of course I did. Meru’s world was literally breaking, and she’d already lost the person who mattered the most to her. But I couldn’t help. I could barely help myself.

I should march out of my room and face down Dad and Aunt Jessie and Kelly and make them tell me the truth. I meant to. I just couldn’t bring myself to start.

I lay on the bed and stared at the knot of mosquito netting directly above me. I’d been crying off and on. Mostly off, now. My throat was raw. I was sick to my stomach.

Part of me kept spinning the story that might be real and might be absolute craziness. In that story, time was getting short. The princess’ tomb wasn’t going anywhere, any more than it had for the past four thousand years.

But I had this inescapable feeling that we had to find it now, and not wait till the next digging season, or whenever Aunt Jessie could get back here. The connection, the Triple, wasn’t so much like three points on a line as three wires twisted around each other. We were beads on those wires, and our beads were touching. If one moved, they all moved. If one refused…

My now and Meritre’s now and Meru’s now were happening, well,
now
. And I was the big fat wrench in the works.

Time-travel stories always gave me a migraine. Now I was trapped in one. I hadn’t written any stories of my own since I started slipping in and out of the past and the future.

I had my tablet in bed, with a book I’d been not-reading for I don’t know how many days. My laptop was shut down and my phone was buried in my knapsack, but when the tablet pinged, I remembered I’d forgotten to turn the wi-fi off. That meant Skype was on, and instead of a screen of text, I was glaring at a blurry, pixilated, and totally familiar face topped with a halo of short purple spikes.

“Ha!” said Cat. “Caught you. Where have you been? What’s wrong?”

She sounded so much like Yoshi and Djehuti that I almost let out a howl. Damn. Were we
all
cursed with people who cared about us?

“Hey,” said Cat. “Talk to me. Everybody else is going on about how you’re busy and you’re on the other side of the world and who has time for the folks back home any more. Except Rick. You know him. He just says you’ll get around to it when you get around to it.”

That was Rick. I didn’t mean to burst into tears again. God, no. But I couldn’t stop once I started.

Cat got it. Cat always got it—even when she only had a fraction of the data. “It’s your mom, isn’t it?”

Funny thing about meltdowns. Sometimes they go all Fukushima. And sometimes you find bedrock. Like when you’ve got a friend looking at you on a tablet screen from six thousand miles away.

I wished I could touch her. Just for a second. Just to feel the warmth, and be close to something real and solid and human.

“It’s Mom,” I said. “She’s in hospice. They didn’t tell me. They shipped me out and they didn’t—tell—”

“Bastards.”

Cat’s voice was cold murder. It made me yelp. “Don’t kill anybody!”

“I’m not ready for humans yet,” she said. “I can’t even pass the torturing-animals phase. I look into their little eyes and go all squooshy.”

“You are a miserable failure as a serial killer,” I said. My eyes were still trying to run over, but Cat had me laughing, even if it was a horrible bad excuse for a funny.

“Do you need me to go over to the hospice?” Cat asked. “Not to commit any violence. Just to, you know, find out for sure?”

I felt tension running out of me that I hadn’t even known was there. “I would like that,” I said. Then it all came rushing back. “But will they let you in?”

“I’ll figure it out,” she said. “You go dig up mummies. I’ll get the truth about your mom.”

She didn’t even know how close she was to the rest of what was wrong with me. I almost broke down again, but I managed to hold on. “Thanks, Cat.”

“You’d do the same for me,” she said. “Don’t worry, okay? Or not any more than you absolutely have to.”

Weird how a three-minute Skype can change the whole way you look at the world. I didn’t feel all that much better, and the tears still came and went, but my mind was working again.

Being my mind, what it was doing was figuring out how to get at the princess’ tomb. Not necessarily because I wanted to help Meru. Just because I wanted to know.

If I was going to do it, I’d figure out a way to get Aunt Jessie down into the tunnel in the morning. Then I’d get creative and convince her not to take days opening the door.

If I’d been in an adventure story as well as a time-travel story, I’d have sneaked out, stolen a boat, and done my own excavating that night. But that was stupid. It was also gawdawful archaeology.

I couldn’t sleep. I kept jumping awake, thinking I’d heard a ping from the tablet, and Cat was calling and she was with Mom and Mom was back home and it was all just a false alarm.

There wasn’t any ping. Cat didn’t call. Neither did Mom.

When the cat scratched and mewped at the door, I let her in. She jumped up on the bed and purred next to me until I fell into a twitchy doze.

After all that, I almost missed the alarm. The cat took care of it for me. She laid a paw against my face and ever so gently flexed it.

That woke me up. She butted her head against my chin and purred so loud it made my head rattle. I staggered into the shower, then down to breakfast.

I almost didn’t go to the site. I could say I hadn’t slept, which was true, and I was sick, which was close enough to true. I could go on hiding. Maybe I could hide so long and well, I completely disappeared.

I wasn’t that smart, or that lucky. I went through the motions I went through every morning, as if the world was still the same place it had been yesterday and the day before.

By the time we lurched onto the ferry, I was most of the way awake. Dad and Kelly weren’t with us today. I hadn’t said a word to Aunt Jessie. I was afraid that if I did, I’d start screaming; or worse, I’d start crying again.

My half-crazy plans to find the tomb had evaporated with the daylight. What did I need it for, anyway? It wouldn’t do Mom any good.

If I’d been thinking, I would have buried myself in the tent with the latest box of potsherds. I followed Aunt Jessie instead. Apart from a glance I couldn’t read, she didn’t say anything.

She always checked on the tunnel crew first before she went to whichever part of the site she felt needed her most. The crew was down there already. I’d thought they were supposed to stop where they left off yesterday, but either someone didn’t get the memo or they’d decided to give it one last try.

Maybe Aunt Jessie had a feeling. What I had was ’way more than that, even without the other two riding inside my head.

The sound of chipping and scraping came up from below. They must have found the clues I’d left.

When we got there, there were just three men working, including Sayyid the foreman. They’d opened up a bit more from where I’d been with the trowel last night, then started in higher, right about face height. Sayyid was working away at the bricks.

He looked back when he heard us. Aunt Jessie raised her eyebrows at him. “Anything?”

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not. Have a look.”

She moved in beside him, took his hammer and chisel and started chipping. She wasn’t in any hurry. Her hands weren’t shaking. But she was working fast.

One of the workmen brought a face mask for her, and one for me, too. The whole thing about the curse of the pharaohs—that’s just crap. But there are things that live in tombs and other places that have been closed in for thousands of years, molds and bacteria—viruses, too, maybe—that can kill anybody who plows in without protection.

The mask was hot and confining, but I made myself put up with it. I wanted to go on breathing after we got done here.

I wasn’t coherent enough to be excited. I had to see, that was all. I had to know.

While Aunt Jessie worked away at the bricks, the foreman fiddled with a metal case. The others were watching. Nobody was talking. You know how they say you can feel tension in the air? This was thick enough to cut like butter.

Aunt Jessie worked a brick free. Sayyid finally got the case open and took out what was inside.

It was a camera. It had a long snaky coil that could go down drains or into rubble after an earthquake or a building collapse—or into a tomb.

Nobody ripped walls out any more until they knew what was inside. They couldn’t officially do that anyway without permission from the Board of Antiquities—and for this, I would bet pretty much anything that the Director would insist on being here when it happened.

What we were doing now was just this side of legal. We had to look, right? We had to be sure this wasn’t another blind alley.

Aunt Jessie looked over her shoulder at me. “Come here.”

I could hardly breathe, and not just because of the mask. This was the moment every Egyptologist prayed for. And she was sharing it with me.

I suppose it was an apology. I didn’t know about accepting it—some things you can’t just pay off with the discovery of the century. But I wasn’t turning it down, either.

Aunt Jessie’s hand gripped my arm. It held me together.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” she said. “There could be nothing on the other side but empty space.”

“If that’s what’s there, at least we’ll know.”

She nodded. She was wound tight, but she was keeping it under control.

While Aunt Jessie set up the camera, I stood on tiptoe and peered through the hole. I didn’t expect to see anything. It would be pitch black in there.

The way the lights were hung, one shone right past me. I looked straight into a pair of heavily painted Egyptian eyes.

I’m not a screamer or a fainter. I freeze. By the time my heart stopped hammering so hard I was afraid it would shake itself right out of my chest, I realized what it had to be. I was looking into the niche where the
ka
statue stood.

It was doll-sized—maybe two feet high. It looked exactly the way it had when Meritre was alive, yesterday, four thousand years ago.

I stepped back carefully. I wanted to say something, but there weren’t any words.

I shivered. The tunnel had been hot and close with all of us in it, but now it was cool again. It felt almost cold.

Maybe it’s true what I’ve heard, that when ghosts are walking through, they take the heat out of the air. Though if there was a ghost here now, who was it? The princess? Or Meritre?

Maybe it was me. I was dead, too, in Meru’s time.

Aunt Jessie got the camera working. I had to move over so she could thread it through the hole.

There was enough space for me to stand next to her and see the screen. I had a flash, a memory of standing with Bonnie, watching Dr. Kay do the ultrasound. It felt pretty much the same. Breathless. Hoping. Not hoping. Praying, maybe.

At first there was just a blur: a wall, a fuzz of color that was the statue, another wall—that one was painted all over, everywhere. Then there was brightness.

Gold. It didn’t matter what shape it took. It was there.

Robbers didn’t leave that much gold in a tomb. This was what Tut’s tomb was like—why it was so incredible. It hadn’t been robbed.

The camera caught on something and stopped moving. Pure luck, if there is any such thing, put it at just the right angle to see the length of the tomb.

It was a vault with painted walls and a ceiling covered with stars. The sarcophagus filled most of the middle. It was hard to tell how big it was.

Big. That much we had to figure. But the amazing thing, the incredible thing, even more than the golden treasure that lay everywhere, was the flowers.

The place was full of them, piled on the floor around the hoard and heaped up around the sarcophagus. A carpet of them lay over the top of it.

They’d withered—in four thousand years, that was hardly a surprise. Deep inside, cut off from the air, they’d kept their color. They looked as if they’d been picked yesterday.

As soon as the tomb opened, they’d puff to dust. We were the only ones who would see them the way they’d been left.

“Organic material.”

I started. My eyes darted everywhere. Then I realized. It was Meru’s voice. She was back inside my head.

So was Meritre. “Oh!” she said. “
Oh
! We don’t need the scarab. I was so afraid—I thought—”

“Maybe at first,” Meru said, “but not any more. We know what we are. That’s all we need.”

That, and me in the middle. With the tomb in front of me, and all those beautiful, impossible flowers, I’d forgotten to keep blocking the others out.

“Beautiful, deadly flowers,” Meru said. “Masses of them. A body underneath, riddled with infection. But how could it survive eight thousand years? In ice, maybe, but in dry heat and after seventy days of embalming?”

“That would have to be one determined virus,” I said in my head. I was glad I had a mask on—though if this was as bad as Meru thought it was, a full hazmat suit wouldn’t be enough.