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.