“I’ll stand, thanks.” Sadie nodded at the little guy in back. “Who’s your driver?”
Amos acted as if he hadn’t heard the question. “Hang on, everyone!” He nodded to the steersman, and the boat lurched forward.
The feeling was hard to describe. You know that tingle in the pit of your stomach when you’re on a roller coaster and it goes into free fall? It was kind of like that, except we weren’t falling, and the feeling didn’t go away. The boat moved with astounding speed. The lights of the city blurred, then were swallowed in a thick fog. Strange sounds echoed in the dark: slithering and hissing, distant screams, voices whispering in languages I didn’t understand.
The tingling turned to nausea. The sounds got louder, until I was about to scream myself. Then suddenly the boat slowed. The noises stopped, and the fog dissipated. City lights came back, brighter than before.
Above us loomed a bridge, much taller than any bridge in London. My stomach did a slow roll. To the left, I saw a familiar skyline—the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building.
“Impossible,” I said. “That’s New York.”
Sadie looked as green as I felt. She was still cradling Muffin, whose eyes were closed. The cat seemed to be purring. “It can’t be,” Sadie said. “We only traveled a few minutes.”
And yet here we were, sailing up the East River, right under the Williamsburg Bridge. We glided to a stop next to a small dock on the Brooklyn side of the river. In front of us was an industrial yard filled with piles of scrap metal and old construction equipment. In the center of it all, right at the water’s edge, rose a huge factory warehouse heavily painted with graffiti, the windows boarded up.
“That is not a mansion,” Sadie said. Her powers of perception are really amazing.
“Look again.” Amos pointed to the top of the building.
“How...how did you...” My voice failed me. I wasn’t sure why I hadn’t seen it before, but now it was obvious: a five-story mansion perched on the roof of the warehouse, like another layer of a cake. “You couldn’t build a mansion up there!”
“Long story,” Amos said. “But we needed a private location.”
“And is this the east shore?” Sadie asked. “You said something about that in London—my grandparents living on the east shore.”
Amos smiled. “Yes. Very good, Sadie. In ancient times, the east bank of the Nile was always the side of the living, the side where the sun rises. The dead were buried west of the river. It was considered bad luck, even dangerous, to live there. The tradition is still strong among...our people.”
“Our people?” I asked, but Sadie muscled in with another question.
“So you can’t live in Manhattan?” she asked.
Amos’s brow furrowed as he looked across at the Empire State Building. “Manhattan has other problems. Other gods. It’s best we stay separate.”
“Other what?” Sadie demanded.
“Nothing.” Amos walked past us to the steersman. He plucked off the man’s hat and coat—and there was no one underneath. The steersman simply wasn’t there. Amos put on his fedora, folded his coat over his arm, then waved toward a metal staircase that wound all the way up the side of the warehouse to the mansion on the roof.
“All ashore,” he said. “And welcome to the Twenty-first Nome.”
“Gnome?” I asked, as we followed him up the stairs. “Like those little runty guys?”
“Heavens, no,” Amos said. “I hate gnomes. They smell horrible.”
“But you said—”
“Nome, n-o-m-e. As in a district, a region. The term is from ancient times, when Egypt was divided into forty-two provinces. Today, the system is a little different. We’ve gone global. The world is divided into three hundred and sixty nomes. Egypt, of course, is the First. Greater New York is the Twenty-first.”
Sadie glanced at me and twirled her finger around her temple.
“No, Sadie,” Amos said without looking back. “I’m not crazy. There’s much you need to learn.”
We reached the top of the stairs. Looking up at the mansion, it was hard to understand what I was seeing. The house was at least fifty feet tall, built of enormous limestone blocks and steel-framed windows. There were hieroglyphs engraved around the windows, and the walls were lit up so the place looked like a cross between a modern museum and an ancient temple. But the weirdest thing was that if I glanced away, the whole building seemed to disappear. I tried it several times just to be sure. If I looked for the mansion from the corner of my eye, it wasn’t there. I had to force my eyes to refocus on it, and even that took a lot of willpower.
Amos stopped before the entrance, which was the size of a garage door—a dark heavy square of timber with no visible handle or lock. “Carter, after you.”
“Um, how do I—”
“How do you think?”