I didn’t want to sleep. I didn’t want to miss anything. But I realized my eyelids were incredibly heavy.
“All right, then,” I said. “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
I lay down to sleep, but my soul—my ba—had other ideas.
S A D I E
20. I Visit the Star-Spangled Goddess
I HADN’T REALIZED HOW UNSETTLING it would be. Carter had explained how his ba left his body while he slept, but having it happen to me was another thing altogether. It was much worse than my vision in the Hall of Ages.
There I was, floating in the air as a glowing birdlike spirit. And there was my body below me, fast asleep. Just trying to describe it gives me a headache.
My first thought as I gazed down on my sleeping form: God, I look awful. Bad enough looking in a mirror or seeing pictures of myself on my friends’ Web pages. Seeing myself in person was simply wrong. My hair was a rat’s nest, the linen pajamas were not in the least flattering, and the spot on my chin was enormous.
My second thought as I examined the strange shimmering form of my ba: This won’t do at all. I didn’t care if I was invisible to the mortal eye or not. After my bad experience as a kite, I simply refused to go about as a glowing Sadie-headed chicken. That’s fine for Carter, but I have standards.
I could feel the currents of the Duat tugging at me, trying to pull my ba to wherever souls go when they have visions, but I wasn’t ready. I concentrated hard, and imagined my normal appearance (well, all right, perhaps my appearance as I’d like it to be, a bit better than normal). And voilà, my ba morphed into a human form, still see-through and glowing, mind you, but more like a proper ghost.
Well, at least that’s sorted, I thought. And I allowed the currents to sweep me away. The world melted to black.
At first, I was nowhere—just a dark void. Then a young man stepped out of the shadows.
“You again,” he said.
I stammered. “Uh...”
Honestly, you know me well enough by now. That’s not like me. But this was the boy I’d seen in my Hall of Ages vision—the very handsome boy with the black robes and tousled hair. His dark brown eyes had the most unnerving effect on me, and I was very glad I’d changed out of my glowing chicken outfit.
I tried again, and managed three entire words. “What are you...”
“Doing here?” he said, gallantly finishing my sentence. “Spirit travel and death are very similar.”
“Not sure what that means,” I said. “Should I be worried?”
He tilted his head as if considering the question. “Not this trip. She only wants to talk to you. Go ahead.”
He waved his hand and a doorway opened in the darkness. I was pulled towards it.
“See you again?” I asked.
But the boy was gone.
I found myself standing in a luxury flat in the middle of the sky. It had no walls, no ceiling, and a see-through floor looking straight down at city lights from the height of an airplane. Clouds drifted below my feet. The air should’ve been freezing cold and too thin to breathe, but I felt warm and comfortable.
Black leather sofas made a U round a glass coffee table on a blood-red rug. A fire burned in a slate fireplace. Bookshelves and paintings hovered in the air where the walls should’ve been. A black granite bar stood in the corner, and in the shadows behind it, a woman was making tea.
“Hello, my child,” she said.
She stepped into the light, and I gasped. She wore an Egyptian kilt from the waist down. From the waist up, she wore only a bikini top, and her skin...her skin was dark blue, covered with stars. I don’t mean painted stars. She had the entire cosmos living on her skin: gleaming constellations, galaxies too bright to look at, glowing nebulae of pink and blue dust. Her features seemed to disappear into the stars that shifted across her face. Her hair was long and as black as midnight.
“You’re the Nut,” I said. Then I realized maybe that had come out wrong. “I mean...the sky goddess.”
The goddess smiled. Her bright white teeth were like a new galaxy bursting into existence. “Nut is fine. And believe me, I’ve heard all the jokes about my name.”
She poured a second cup from her teapot. “Let’s sit and talk. Care for some sahlab?”
“Uh, it’s not tea?”