Walt raised his hands. “Neith, that’s great, but Apophis is rising tomorrow. He’ll swallow the sun, plunge the world into darkness, and let the whole earth crumble back into the Sea of Chaos.”
“I’ll be safe in my bunker,” Neith insisted. “If you can prove to me that you’re friend and not foe, maybe I’ll help you with Bes. Then you can join me in the bunker. I’ll teach you survival skills. We’ll eat rations and weave new clothes from the pockets of our enemies!”
Walt and I exchanged looks. The goddess was a nutter. Unfortunately, we needed her help.
“So you want to hunt us,” I said. “And we’re supposed to survive—”
“Until sunset,” she said. “Evade me that long, and you can live in my bunker.”
“I’ve got a counteroffer,” I said quickly. “No bunker. If we win, you help us find Bes’s shadow, but you’ll also fight on our side against Apophis. If you’re really a war goddess and a huntress and all that, you should enjoy a good battle.”
Neith grinned. “Done! I’ll even give you a five-minute head start. But I should warn you: I never lose. When I kill you, I’ll take your pockets!”
“You drive a hard bargain,” I said. “But fine.”
Walt elbowed me. “Um, Sadie—”
I shot him a warning look. As I saw it, there was no way we could escape this hunt, but I did have an idea that might keep us alive.
“We’ve begun!” Neith cried. “You can go anywhere in my territory, which is basically the entire delta. It doesn’t matter. I’ll find you.”
Walt said, “But—”
“Four minutes, now,” Neith said.
We did the only sensible thing. We turned and ran.
“What is macramé?” I yelled as we barreled through the rushes.
“A kind of weaving,” Walt said. “Why are we talking about this?”
“Dunno,” I admitted. “Just cur—”
The world turned upside down—or rather, I did. I found myself hanging in a scratchy twine net with my feet in the air.
“That’s macramé,” Walt said.
“Lovely. Get me down!”
He pulled a knife from his pack—practical boy—and managed to free me, but I reckoned we’d lost most of our head start. The sun was lower on the horizon, but how long would we have to survive—thirty minutes? An hour?
Walt rifled through his pack and briefly considered the white wax crocodile. “Philip, maybe?”
“No,” I said. “We can’t fight Neith head-on. We have to avoid her. We can split—”
“Tiger. Boat. Sphinx. Camels. No invisibility,” Walt muttered, examining his amulets. “Why don’t I have an amulet for invisibility?”
I shuddered. The last time I’d tried invisibility, it hadn’t gone very well. “Walt, she’s a hunting goddess. We probably couldn’t fool her with any sort of concealment spell, even if you had one.”
“Then what?” he asked.
I put my finger on Walt’s chest and tapped the one amulet he wasn’t considering—a necklace that was the twin to mine.
“The shen amulets?” He blinked. “But how can those help?”
“We split up and buy time,” I said. “We can share thoughts through the amulets, yes?”
“Well…yes.”