The Chaos of Stars

I SPRINT THROUGH THE OPEN DESERT, CLOUDS of dust the jet kicked up billowing behind me. The arid wind clears my sinuses, clears my fuzzy head, fills and focuses me. Ry runs, too, but I’m faster than him and I don’t wait. I can’t.

I make it to the stone steps that lead down to my house, then curse. Ry won’t be able to see them. I turn back but he’s still a hundred yards away, his uneven gait slowing him.

Floods! I rip off my long-sleeved pajama shirt, glad I wore a sports bra, and leave the shirt half in and half out of the entryway. Maybe the half that mysteriously disappears will clue Ry in to my mother’s magical barrier. It’s the best I can do.

I trip down the stone steps and burst through the front door into my empty, empty family room. “Mom!” I scream. “Mom! Dad!” I run through the room, down the hall into the old stone section toward her bedroom.

Someone steps out of the supply room into the hall and I slam into them, falling back. “Nephthys?” If she’s here, my mom’s probably still okay! I made it in time!

She looks shocked to see me. “Child! What are you doing here?”

“My mom’s in trouble! Anubis and Hathor are going to try to kill her!”

Her face, so like my mother’s—but softer, like she’s always a bit out of focus—goes white. “Oh, no.”

“Where is she? We need to tell her.”

“Hathor—I didn’t know—she went down into the tombs. With Isis.”

“No!” I turn back to the other end of the hall, to the door I spent so many years avoiding. The stairs seem to stretch into infinity, into the very bowels of the earth, and I nearly throw myself down them to go faster. The tombs and paintings are a blur as I run, shouting my mother’s name.

Finally, breathless with terror and surrounded only by the silent dead, I burst through into the main chamber, my father’s throne room. His chair is there, with statue-still Ammit in front of it.

Otherwise it’s totally empty.

“MOM!” I scream. I must have missed them. The tombs—one of the tombs—there are so many. I spin around to see Nephthys behind me in the entry.

“I didn’t see them! Did you?”

She cocks her head to the side, her black eyes calm, collected, clearer than I’ve ever seen them. It hits me that, in all my life, I’ve never seen her keep eye contact until now.

“What am I going to do with you?” she asks.

I move to run back into the hall, but she blocks me. I shake my head, desperate. She doesn’t understand how little time we have. “What are you—oh.” My whole body wilts, mirroring my soul. “Not Hathor,” I whisper.

She taps her chin thoughtfully, her eyes never leaving me.

“Why?” My voice is strangled, choked by my failure to figure it out the right way. My failure to protect my mother like she would have protected me.

“You have such spirit, such determination to create your own self free of Isis. Everyone should have that. I should have that. I’ve spent millennia atoning for the sin of wanting more than I was given, more than a powerless, contemptible husband who never loved me, who wouldn’t even stoop to giving me a child. Wanting more for my son, who has as much birthright as Isis’s. We are all forgotten gods, but I will claim what should always have been mine. Chaos created an opening after all this time, and I will end my sister and take her place. I will become Isis.”

“She loves you!”

“Don’t be naive. Isis loves nothing but her own greatness. This whole world is merely her mirror, and if it doesn’t reflect back her own distorted view of her magnificence, she breaks it until it does.”

I stand straighter. “She loves me.”

My aunt waves dismissively. “You are a toy. And I am done here.”

“I don’t understand!” I have to keep her here, talking. If my mother were already dead, Nephthys wouldn’t have sent me down here. There’s still time. “Why did you need Anubis?”

She finally looks away, down the corridor behind her at something I can’t see. “Cursing Isis with everything I had wasn’t enough.” All those times Mom sounded so tired—and talked about how Nephthys was helping her. I feel sick. It should have been me here. I would have helped. I would have known.

That’s not true. I wouldn’t have cared enough to see. But now I do.

Nephthys nods toward me, still looking at something else. “We needed the exact venom to kill a god, which Isis had very kindly recorded. Not just any snake. Apep.”

“You can’t,” I whisper, beg.