The Chaos of Stars

He looks at me for a long time before smiling. “I’m thinking a color scheme of browns with accents of hunter green.” He holds out a hand to help me up from the couch, and as I take it and feel his hand around mine in a shock of human contact and something more, that part that warned me of trouble is proved absolutely right.

Sobs rack my body as I slam my door shut behind me.

They don’t want me.

They don’t want me.

It’s a tomb! I’m going to die! They’ve known it this whole time!

Exhausted from rage and grief, I do what I always do when I need to calm down, and kneel in front of the altar in my room.

“No,” I say, filled with horror. Because as I stare at the altar, I realize that no one prays to me. No one prays to my brother Sirus, or my sister Essa, or any of us. Because we don’t matter.

I fall back, feeling like the altar has punched a hole in my chest. Of course they don’t need me to last forever. My mother has a baby every twenty years. A new one to train up in the ways of worshipping herself and her family.

We’re not children. We’re power sources.

Screaming, I stand and kick the altar. It doesn’t move. I brace myself against the wall and kick against it as hard as I can, and it slowly leans until gravity takes over and it crashes to the ground, breaking into three pieces.

I sniffle, wipe my eyes. An inky darkness, like oil and fog, seeps out of the broken pieces, getting bigger, wider, darker. It oozes toward the door, toward where my mother waits on the other side, asking if she can come in.

“Mom?” I whisper, all my anger frozen into fear.

She doesn’t answer.

Chapter 8

“Take my son,” begged Nephthys, voice a whisper, eyes down. “Shield him from the wrath of Osiris.”

Isis looked at the boy, the son of her husband and her sister. She looked at her sister. She held out her arms.

Anubis was the son of Osiris. Isis protected him the way Nephthys couldn’t, then sent him to the underworld to take a place by his father’s side. She found him an inheritance, a role, a domain to be a god in.

But she wanted more for Horus. Horus would have the crown of all Egypt.

Maybe she used up all of her maternal energy on him, because the rest of us just got dead cats in jars.

“THIS IS THE MOST STRAIGHTFORWARDLY named restaurant I have ever seen.” I stare up at the sign declaring we are about to eat at Extraordinary Desserts. There’s a funky, bright brushed-metal latticework glamming up the outside of the one-story building, and I already love the look of the place. It’s day two of my Official Friendship with Ry. I think these things should always be declared officially. It makes it much less complicated when he invites me to go get food. Friends do that, and I know we’re friends. No reason to overthink.

“It’s not false advertising,” Ry says. We walk in through a huge black door and are greeted by display cases of the desserts, which, floods, look extraordinary.

I lean over the glass. Even the names of the desserts taste like sugar in my mouth. Flower petals adorn the most beautiful plates of food I’ve ever seen. Some even have gold-flake accents. I will spend my entire daily allowance here. “I want everything.”

“Bread pudding,” Ry says.

I raise an eyebrow, dubious. “Bread pudding. We’re staring at rows of cheesecake and chocolate and fruit tarts and cake, and you want to eat bread . . . mixed with pudding.”

Ry nods. “Trust me. We’ll get a few other things, but once you’ve had the bread pudding, you won’t ever want anything else here.”

I don’t trust him on that at all. We sit down outside and order. I get a pot of tea, the afternoon chill from the clouds barely enough to justify it.

“How do you feel about Indian food?” Ry asks, toying with his napkin. He’s wearing a heather-gray tee today, and I like it but I prefer him in blue.

I mean, I have no preferences. I don’t care what he wears. Just the aesthetics, that’s all. “I’m game for anything. I grew up on about five different meals rotated on an eternal basis, so this is all good.”

“You’re lucky we’re friends.” His dimple is the exclamation mark to his cocky grin.

I shake my head, but I smile, too. “I could find restaurants by myself. I do know how to use the internet.”