Living in Threes (27 page)

Meru turned to stare at Vekaa. He leaned back in his seat, eyes shut. There was a distinct grey cast under the warm deep brown of his skin.

“You didn’t,” she said.

His eyes opened. He looked angry and guilty and triumphant all at once. He reminded her, just then, of Yoshi—who was regarding him in open and astonished admiration. “We needed a diversion,” he said.

“When they catch us,” she said, “they’ll lock us all up for the rest of recorded time.”

“Not if we save the world,” he said.

Under cover of the mass escape, the one shuttle that mattered to Meru soared from darkness into light. Then at last she saw below her the country that she knew as well as her family’s island, though she had never seen it before in this life.

People still lived among the monuments, just as they had four thousand years ago, and four thousand years before that. There was a shuttle port; there were walkways through the newest parts of the city.

Instead of a ferry there was a force bridge across the river, a nearly invisible arch. People crossing looked as if they were walking on air.

The land of the dead was still much the same: the Red Land, bare and bleak, with its stark cliffs and barren valleys. There were more temples than Meredith had known, and many more tombs, each with its marker on the web. But in the world of the living, where human eyes could see, most of them were still hidden. No one had to dig any more, to know where a tomb or an artifact was. They had instruments that could see.

The Guards were out chasing empty shuttles and hunting down false trails. Here in ancient Luxor, three strangers were hardly worth noticing, unless they wanted to buy a scarab or a scarf or a skewer of something savory and spicy.

Meru kept a grip on the scarab that was hers three times over. The starwing had taken to the air again. It danced for a while with a hawk that hunted the coverts on the east bank of the river, then darted off westward.

She and Yoshi and Vekaa followed much more slowly. They were safe in the crowds, invisible and unremarkable. When those thinned, out past the clutter of houses and shops and museums that hugged the riverbank, they were still only three of many.

Meru had not expected to find so many people here. A notable number of them came from offworld. This was a great place of pilgrimage, it seemed; and with Earth on lockdown, they had nothing better to do than explore old monuments.

The walkway carried them to the edge of the Valley, but from there it was its old self: sandy, dusty tracks leading to temples and tombs. The sun was well up, and the heat with it. Meru’s older selves well remembered the taste of it, sharp and dry.

She had relied on them to find the princess’ temple for her. But all the tracks they knew had changed. There were so many temples, restored or rebuilt, and so many tombs that neither of them had ever known.

Meru had to try the web, though it might be a very bad idea. Through the starwing at least, she was harder to track.

She paused at the top of the hill. Vekaa handed her a bubble of water and a protein bar. She almost refused them, but both of her other selves had more sense. “You need fuel,” Meredith said.

“And water,” said Meritre.

Meru sat with Yoshi and Vekaa on a flat stone and ate and drank, and looked out across the valley. From this height it was like a map on the web, but without labels or markers.

It was still recognizable, if she focused on it. Meredith called this the Valley of the Queens. She knew where some of the tombs were, and whose they had been.

It was Meritre who stopped Meru’s slow and almost despairing scan. “There!”

Meru blinked. She felt Meredith’s frown. “What? Where?”

“There,” said Meritre. She pointed, which was a strange sensation: like a shadow stretching out in front of Meru.

It stood a little apart from the other temples and the tomb entrances, near the sheer wall of a cliff. Someone had restored it: there were pillars and a roof. Gilding flashed in the sun.

“That is how it looks,” Meritre said. “The colors, the gold—that’s how it is.”

“It’s beautiful,” said Meredith.

Meru was not thinking of beauty then. She was thinking of what had come out of it, and what it had done to people on so many worlds, and now was doing to Earth.

She tucked her half-empty bubble of water inside her suit, took a last bite of protein bar and swallowed it as she walked. She was aware of the others starting to ask what she was doing, then giving it up and simply following her.

It was not so easy once she was down in the valley, in the maze of tracks and temples. She aimed roughly where the princess’ temple had to be.

The starwing hovered above her. It still could see what she had seen from the hill. With its help she mapped a course.

She was so focused on that that she forgot both of her companions. She remembered when Yoshi gripped her shoulder, stopping her short. “What is that? What are you doing?”

“What I need to do,” she said.

He frowned. She braced for a fight, but he let her go.

“Later,” Vekaa said, “you’ll explain. In detail.”

“Later,” she agreed. With everything else that she had done, that was hardly anything to be afraid of.

For now, she had a route to follow. The knots of people turned to stragglers and then to sun-dazzled emptiness. There were just the three of them and the starwing, turning onto a track that, at last, her inner selves recognized. That precise angle of the cliffs, that tilt to the land, they knew. It had not changed.

The temple was smaller than Meru had expected. It was also closed off behind a force field. The seal of the Department of Antiquities was on it.
By permit only,
it said.

“Damn Department of Antiquities,” Meredith said.

Meru laughed, because she wanted to cry. She could get in, but if she did, Vekaa would know how. And so, eventually, would Consensus.

It was all over for her anyway. She called the starwing down.

There was a brief, terrible moment when she was afraid it would not come; then when it came, that it could not shield all of them.

It stretched to cover them. Through it she felt Vekaa’s shock and sudden burst of understanding—as if this answered a whole throng of questions. Yoshi was simply lost in the wonder and delight of it.

The force field hummed and crackled behind them. The temple stood open in front, with its gaudily painted façade and its court full of sunlight and shadow.

Meritre guided them all now. Through her memory Meru saw workers and scaffolding and heard the sounds of hammering, and saw a shadow kneeling in the corridor off to the right: slight, brown-skinned, with a smoothly shaven skull above a fine-boned face. He had a brush in his hand and a palette beside him, dotted with vivid colors.

He faded as Meru drew closer. The passage was empty.

She had no fear of shadows, but she shivered. It was deeply strange to live in three times at once.

Strange, and wonderful. She paused where the painted writing ended, and drew out the filter she had brought. Vekaa and Yoshi had already activated theirs, a slight but visible blurring of their features.

The scent of old stone and sunlit dust vanished. Meru breathed air scoured clean of any contaminant, down to the smallest virus.

She was glad of that safety, but sorry, too. So much of Egypt was in the air, in its smells and tastes. She missed it.

She would get it back. She walked down the passage, tracing Meredith’s steps, and Meritre’s before them.

She imagined that she could hear them walking with her, the sound of their feet magnified inside the square sandstone walls. She looked back, just as the light from above cut off, and one much harsher shot its glare down at her.

Consensus had found them.

Sanity would have stopped her there and made her wait docilely to be arrested. She was long past that. She spun and ran.

The other two were close on her heels. They could never outrun the Guards, and there was no exit, nothing below but, if her memory was true and not delusion, the princess’ tomb.

She had come to find the tomb. She would find it. After that, nothing mattered.

Chapter 25

It was a long way down. Lights came on when the light from above gave out, soft and pale, just bright enough to guide Meru’s feet.

The Guards seemed to have given up the chase. Why should they bother? She had to come out in the end, and they would be waiting.

Meru half wished the others would stop, too—but only half. The rest of her was glad to have them with her. It was unexpectedly cold down here, and dark, and dimmer than it should be. Even through the filter, the air felt heavy.

“Breath of the dead,” Meritre said.

Meru had not needed to hear that. She pushed onward, grimly.

When it seemed that there would never be any end to that tunnel in the earth, it ended. Meru would not have been surprised to run into a blank wall, as Meredith’s people had.

That was long gone. The stasis field was old, nearly as old as Meredith’s time: it had an actual keypad, and physical controls.

Meru made no move to touch them. There was the
ka
statue, as bright and beautiful as the day it was set in its niche. There was the chamber, the ceiling of painted stars, the sarcophagus with its mask of the princess.

And there were the flowers, withered and faded, laid like a coverlet over the coffin. The rest, the banks of them that Meredith had seen with the camera, had disappeared. Scattered to the stars? It would seem so.

Meru drew out the one her mother had left for her. It lay in its own tiny stasis field, just as dry and just as withered as the ones in the tomb. “This is it,” she said to Vekaa. “This is what you’ve been looking for.”

She could still be wrong—hopelessly and catastrophically. She did not think so. Which was maybe arrogant of her. She was too tired to care.

He had instruments with him, not many, but enough to gather samples without breaking stasis. He had the web, too, with all its resources—and the Guards, when he called them down.

Officially they were all under arrest. In the circumstances, that meant little. Meru was glad this time to be taken off to Containment, because it meant a bath and clean clothes and real food, and a bed in which she could sleep like the dead.

When she woke, the sun’s angle had hardly changed at all, but the web gave her a new date. She had slept straight into the next day.

The starwing was there, curled up next to her. Meritre and Meredith were awake inside her. When she searched the web for Vekaa, she found him nearby, in a lab, deeply engrossed in his work.

Yoshi was in the room, lying in a bed by the opposite wall, sound asleep. As she listened, she could hear his gentle snore.

“So I was right,” she said to his oblivious back.

“You were right,” Lyra said. She was sitting at the foot of Meru’s bed, surrounded by the shimmer of the web. “Your mother guided you well.”

It was not only her mother, Meru thought. Not at all. But she nodded. She did not have to feign the welling of tears. “Don’t punish my uncle and my friend,” she said. “I kidnapped them. I made them use my uncle’s clearances. It’s not their fault.”