The Chaos of Stars

“I can.” She looks back at me and smiles, but her smile has none of the warmth my mom’s has. “Good-bye, child.”

She turns, and I jump forward to tackle her but another body, lean with cruel sinew and reeking of desiccation, blocks me.

“Your mother is about to deliver her very last mewling whelp,” Anubis says. “And then my mother will deliver them both to the underworld.”

I scream and claw at his face, gouging long trails of crimson before he throws me to the ground. He says a word I don’t know, and it echoes through me and around the room like the sharp crack of thunder from dry heat lightning.

Something moves behind me.

“Meet the lovely demon Ammit.” His teeth cut a vicious smile. “She doesn’t much care for this world, but I’ve woken her especially for you. Now I’ve got some tombs to prepare.”

I stand, trembling, too scared to turn around. With a snarling laugh Anubis walks away, calling over his shoulder, “Try not to upset her stomach.”

I slowly spin to find myself staring at each of Ammit’s sharp, yellowed crocodile teeth, her mouth a gaping black void. Her breath washes over me, and it smells like blood and judgment and death.

Ammit snaps her long, scaled, gray-green mouth shut, turning her head to the side and fixing one huge slit-pupiled yellow eye on my chest directly over my heart. I wish I were wearing a shirt. I wish I were wearing armor.

“Don’t eat it don’t eat it don’t eat it.” I shut my eyes and think of all the times I played around her legs as a child, the picnics I had with my back resting against her strong hippo feet, the desert flowers I’d bring to decorate her with. Shouldn’t she know me?

A voice as old and as hungry as time rings through my head. That is no longer your heart. I devour untrue hearts.

I squeeze my closed eyes so tightly it hurts. My heart is stone. My heart is the desert. My heart is a horizon stretching on forever, sand and sky and empty beautiful perfection.

An untrue heart, she declares, and I feel the warm, sticky breath of death and I never wanted to die and it will hurt and without my heart I can’t be complete in the underworld no matter what my dad does. There will be no afterlife for me.

“Isadora!” Ry’s voice bounces off the walls, and my heart leaps because he called my name. He’s here, and he won’t find this room in the labyrinth of tombs so he’ll be safe, and he can help my mother after I’m dead. I’m flush with relief and holding on to my name as Orion says it, holding on to the bright, steady hope my stars-made-human fills me with.

There is your truth. Her laughter—part lion’s growl, part hippo’s bellow, part crocodile’s hiss—tumbles through my head. I open my eyes, shocked, and she sits down on her hippo haunches.

“You aren’t going to eat me?”

She yawns, and a new view of the teeth that nearly ripped away both my life and afterlife sends me scurrying out of the room and right into Ry’s arms.

“Isadora! In there?” He looks toward the throne room.

“NO! She’ll eat your—” I pause, then roll my eyes. “You’d probably be fine. My mom’s not here. Back upstairs!”

I run down the winding corridor and take the stairs three at a time. “Watch out for Anubis and Nephthys!”

“I thought Hathor.” He gasps from behind me as we come out to the main hallway.

“No! Just—black hair, not pregnant, secretly evil.”

“Got it!”

A growl sounds from the stairs behind. I turn to see Anubis charging up the steps after us. He must have been in one of the side tombs. Ry slams the door shut and braces himself against it, jamming one of his legs against the wall at an angle.

“Go! I’ve got this!”

“Don’t let him touch you! Run if he gets out!” My feet pound on the rug and I slam my shoulder into my mom’s heavy wooden door, exploding into her bedroom.

I take it all in with a glance. My father, calmly at my mother’s bedside, holding her hand. My mother, in bed, her raised knees contoured under a white sheet, her face sweaty and flushed. And Nephthys, bending over a covered woven basket in the corner.

Our eyes meet. Hers flash with the malice of millennia. She snatches the basket and rips off the lid, jerking the basket toward my mom and flinging the long golden demon snake through the air.

“No!” I scream, launching myself in front of the bed, hands raised.

The snake, coiled body twisting and fangs wide, comes down.