You Have to Stop This

  “Owen! When did you get here?” Cass stepped up to the hobo, grinning wide. This time—finally—she had recognized him before he revealed himself. “You can stand up now and stop pretending. We found you.”

  The hobo looked at her. “My name is Mark, not that it’s any of your business.”

  The kids looked more closely. There was no resemblance to Owen.

  Cass’s ears reddened in embarrassment. “Oh. Sorry. I thought I recognized your hat.”

  “This hat is mine. I stole it fair and square. You go steal your own!”

  Cass nodded and hurried along. She was surprised at how disappointed she was. It had been comforting to think that Owen had come to Las Vegas in disguise to look after them, as he had so many times before.

  Alas, they had nobody but themselves.

  The first three pawnshops they tried were a bust, which is a colloquial way of saying that the pawnshop owners refused to give Cass money for her coins. The first two assumed the coins were fake, the third that they were stolen. Nobody believed that Cass had inherited them.

  Luckily, there are more pawnshops in Las Vegas than there are gas stations—and luckily, too, there are much stranger things in Las Vegas than three children trying to sell a rare gold coin.

  Not the third time but the fourth was the charm.

  The Poor Man’s Rich-in-Love Wedding Chapel and Pawnshop was a two-for-one business topped by an old neon sign. Every time the neon blinked, a heart would light up and a 1950s-style jitterbugging couple would kiss beneath it. The glass storefront was covered with so many plaques and posters that you couldn’t see inside.

  A loud buzzer sounded when they walked into the pawnshop. The store was crowded with everything from rifles to saxophones to an old jukebox playing a song that seemed to be about old jukeboxes. Through an open door, they could see the backroom: a makeshift wedding chapel decorated with plastic flowers and a pair of fake lovebirds in a dusty cage.

  A sweaty man in a purple robe and a black square hat walked out and gave the three kids a cursory glance. A name tag on his chest read: PABLO, THE PAWNBROKER-PRIEST.

  “A little young to be getting married, aren’t we? Well, I ain’t prejudiced. Long as you got a note from your parents.” He winked. “Now, which one of you boys is the lucky guy?”

  “Neither!” said Max-Ernest quickly, his face turning red.

  “That’s not why we’re here,” said Yo-Yoji, whose face was turning a matching color.

  “Yeah, as if I would ever marry either one of them,” said Cass with as much sarcasm as she could muster. She wouldn’t have admitted it, but she was just the littlest bit hurt by the alacrity with which her friends denied that they were marrying her.

  Max-Ernest studied the pawnbroker-priest. “Hey, isn’t that a graduation robe? And that hat, too?” Their class had just ordered their graduation outfits, so he was well aware of what they looked like.

  “So? The last priest who came in here—he had a winning streak and bought back his whole outfit. This is the only robe I got. Now what can I do you for?”

  Cass reached into her backpack, pulling out her three gold coins.

  The pawnbroker-priest laughed when he saw the coins. “Where’d you get these? From some pirate show down the Strip?” He screwed up his face, growling like a pirate. “Arrgh, matey.”

  “It’s real gold, I swear,” said Cass.

  “Is that right? May I…?” He took the coins from her and felt their weight. “They feel real, I’ll give you that.” He looked at them under a small magnifying glass. “Very high-quality workmanship—you don’t see counterfeit coins as good as these very often.”

  The pawnbroker-priest took a porcelain tile from his shelf. “Not much of a touchstone, but it usually works.” He rubbed the coin on the tile to see what kind of mark it made.* “Huh,” he said, noncommittally.

  Then he tried to scratch the window with the coin; there was no scratch. “Huh,” he said again.

  “Is that good? Or is it supposed to scratch?” asked Max-Ernest.

  He didn’t answer. But the kids could tell he was impressed.

  Finally, he reached under the counter and pulled a magnet off a small refrigerator. When he held the magnet over the coin, the coin didn’t move.

  “Huh,” he said once more.

  He bent over the counter and studied Cass and her friends as closely as he had the coins. Finally, he placed the coins carefully on a black square of cloth on the counter and offered his verdict:

  “All right, so maybe the coins are gold.”

  The three tried not to react, but the pawnbroker-priest bristled at their slightest stir—attuned, as he was, to the smallest detail of any transaction.

  “Maybe. But that doesn’t mean they’re really five hundred years old. And if they are, they’re obviously not yours. They’ve got to be either hot or fake, or both, but I like you guys, so I’ll take them. Also, three gold coins—it’s good luck for a pawnbroker.”

  He pointed to the design on his store window: it was the same as the design they’d seen on the other stores. What they’d thought were three gold berries hanging from branches were actually three gold coins, the ancient symbol of the pawnshop.

  “I’ve only got enough cash for one coin, but I can give you checks for the others?”

  They shook their heads. Checks wouldn’t do them any good.

  After a good ten minutes of haggling, during which the kids tried unsuccessfully to get him to give them more money, the pawnbroker-priest took one coin and gave them an amount approximately equal to one-tenth of its true value. Which, as it turned out, was quite a lot.

  In cash.

  “You want a bag for that?” the man asked as Cass tried unsuccessfully to stuff all the money into her backpack.

  “No, it’s fine,” she said as hundred-dollar bills floated down to the ground, crumpling and ripping beneath her feet. The man just shook his head and, reaching behind the counter, grabbed a small Ziploc bag. Snack-size.

  Cass looked from the bag to the pile of bills.

  The man sighed and shook his head again—painful as it was to part with all that nice green cash—and pulled out a larger bag. The quart size.

  Max-Ernest gestured, with his hands full of green.

  “All right, all right.” The pawnbroker-priest pulled out a gallon-size bag. “On the house. Now get out of here before I change my mind and call the cops. Or your parents!”

  The box office for the Pyramid Theater, where Lord Pharaoh would be performing that night, was located in its own kiosk between the Adventure Zone, the indoor kids’ theme park that our underage heroes had been hearing so much about, and the Sphinx Shops, the Cairo Hotel’s “famed boutique district,” where you could find everything from luggage (Luxor Luggage) to a nail salon (Nile Nails) to a pet salon (King Muttenkhamen’s Royal Beauty Parlor).

  As Cass led her friends to the ticket line for Lord Pharaoh’s show, they eyed the entrance to the Adventure Zone with a combination of envy and scorn.

  PARENTS AWAY! KIDS HOORAY!

  Bungee jump into the pharaoh’s tomb!

  Climb the rock wall with live monkeys!

  SING! DANCE! MAKE YOUR OWN RAP VIDEO!

  The longest zip line in Las Vegas!

  NOBODY OVER 18 ALLOWED!

  “I’ll bet a lot of parents throw their kids into the Adventure Zone so they can keep gambling,” said Cass disdainfully.

  Yo-Yoji laughed. “Oh, so now you think parents shouldn’t let their kids be by themselves? You disapprove or something?”

  “I think parents should be parents.”

  “What about your mom?” Max-Ernest asked. “Do you think she shouldn’t give you so much freedom?”

  “That’s different.”

  “How?”

  “It just is. Do I have to explain everything?”

  Yo-Yoji and Max-Ernest looked at each other and shook their heads.

  Cass dropped the heavy backpack to the mosaic floor in front of the
box-office window.

  “Three tickets, please.” She swallowed, looking at the poster behind the cashier’s head. The words ONE NIGHT ONLY seemed to jump out at her.

  “Balcony, orchestra, or premiere?” the cashier said without looking up.

  “I don’t know. What’s premiere?”

  “Front-row seats with a backstage pass.” The cashier—a woman whose nails were longer than her nose—peered over the edge of the counter. “Balcony will be cheapest, sweetheart. You probably want those.”

  Cass pulled a fistful of one-hundred-dollar bills out of her backpack. “I’ll take three premieres.”

  The cashier raised an eyebrow. “You kids weren’t playing the slots, I hope?”

  Cass shook her head.

  “Daddy’s on a winning streak?”

  “Something like that.”

  The cashier nodded wisely. “Well, spend it while you can, doll—that’s my advice. Trust me, he’ll want it all back by the end of the night.”

  “OK, there are two hours left before the show,” said Yo-Yoji as they walked away with their tickets. “We could spend that time carefully planning how to deal with Lord Pharaoh, knowing that it probably won’t make any difference and we’re going to be killed anyway. Or we could spend our last two hours on earth having fun.” He nodded in the direction of the Adventure Zone. “What do you say?”

  “I don’t know—planning can be fun,” said Max-Ernest.

  Yo-Yoji eyed him askance. “That was a joke, right?”

  Cass looked at the signs covering the Adventure Zone, battling her conscience. “Well,” she said finally, “maybe it wouldn’t hurt to try the zip line. I mean, it could be good training… for, you know, if we have to, like, swing from the pulleys and stuff on the stage tonight.”

  “Exactly what I was thinking,” said Yo-Yoji emphatically. “What we need right now is a serious training session.”

  But first things first. As soon as they walked into the Adventure Zone, the still-starving kids treated themselves to hot-fudge sundaes at Osiris’s Ice Cream Oasis. The sundaes were huge—like everything in Las Vegas—and built to their custom specifications. Cass ordered the Ra, which came with ribbons of caramel sauce and peanut butter chips. Yo-Yoji’s Oasis Special was served inside a pineapple and was surrounded by tropical fruit. Max-Ernest, of course, ordered the Chocolate Pyramid: chocolate ice cream, chocolate fudge, and chocolate chips. All the sundaes came with mountains of whipped cream, toasted almond slivers, and clown-nose-red maraschino cherries on top. Max-Ernest hesitated about the whipped cream, fearing it would dilute the strength of the chocolate, but ultimately he gave in, deciding that sometimes more is more. He was not disappointed.

  Halfway through her sundae, Cass stopped with her spoon in midair, realizing how fast and greedily she’d been eating. Not only was it disgusting, she reprimanded herself, it was unhealthy. It was bad enough to consume so many carbohydrates on an empty stomach—her blood-sugar level was going to spike—but if she kept eating so fast, she was going to make herself sick, and she needed to be in top form for the battle ahead.

  She looked up at her friends, thinking she should caution them to slow down, and saw a frightful sight: Yo-Yoji and Max-Ernest, crazed looks in their eyes, faces smeared with whipped cream and chocolate, were holding two spoons each. They were in such a frenzy, both of them were eating with both hands, double-fisting their sundaes.

  “I… think… maybe… I… might… just… possibly… get… another… one,” said Max-Ernest, who literally was licking his bowl clean to get the last bits of fudge.

  Shaking her head, Cass ripped the spoons out of her friends’ hands. It was time for their training session.

  It’s amazing how many activities you can fit into a single hour if you have enough motivation and enough cash. After hurtling themselves, screaming, across the “longest zip line in Las Vegas,” the kids climbed one hundred feet and bungee jumped into a “pharaoh’s tomb.” (Well, Cass and Yo-Yoji jumped. Max-Ernest, it would be more accurate to say, was pushed.) They floated in zero gravity (actually, a wind tunnel) until they were ready to regurgitate their sundaes; they rode mechanical camels until they were thrown off into artificial sand dunes; and they played skee-ball until, well, they got a little bored. Yo-Yoji even managed to persuade his friends to try their luck at the “Dance like an Egyptian” hip-hop dance steps arcade game. (They made him promise not to tell Amber.) But Cass drew the line at making her own rap video. Not only did she not believe in such egregious acts of digital self-aggrandizement, but there was something else she wanted to do. She told them she would meet them outside the Adventure Zone thirty minutes later.

  “Knock yourselves out,” she said, handing Yo-Yoji a one-hundred-dollar bill.

  She could hear her friends practicing as she walked away:

  “Don’t be a fool, yo, Lord Pharaoh will put you in the ground for life. / That’s cool, yo, if I go home, my parents will ground me for life.”

  A moment later, Cass looked over her shoulder to make sure Yo-Yoji and Max-Ernest weren’t watching as she walked into Nile Nails. It was silly, maybe, but she couldn’t help being embarrassed about what she was doing. No doubt they would make fun of her later, but if they made fun of her now, she feared she wouldn’t have the nerve to go through with it.

  She’d never been to a nail salon before.

  Her mother, who complained frequently about the state of Cass’s fingernails, had repeatedly tried to get Cass to have a manicure, but Cass struck back by barraging her mother with statistics about the various types of infections you could pick up in nail salons. (Fungal infections, yeast infections, staph infections—the list was long and hideous.) She was so persuasive that her mother had given up on going to nail salons herself, and now her mother’s fingernails were almost as bad as hers.

  “Hi, I’m Felicia,” said a smiling woman in a smock. She was dressed like a dental technician, save for her long, gold, rhinestone-encrusted fingernails and matching gold-and rhinestone-beaded cornrows.

  “Are you ready to be pampered like a queen? We’re running a special on a full mani-pedi—oh, dear,” she said, getting a look at Cass’s fingernails for the first time. “It’s sort of a code-red situation, isn’t it? Your cuticles have grown all the way over your nails. Please don’t tell me your toenails are just as bad.”

  “Well, I haven’t been chewing on them, if that’s what you mean,” said Cass, her ears flaming red.

  Cass tried to refuse the pedicure outright; she was afraid that if she took her shoes off, she wouldn’t be able to run out of the room on a moment’s notice. In the end, however, she consented to the super-deluxe treatment—the Nefertiti Special—which included a hand-and-foot massage and soak, cuticle “relief” (a euphemism, it turned out, for painful cuticle butchery), fingernail and toenail trim and buff, three coats of polish, and a choice of “authentic” Egyptian nail decals.

  She fought Felicia the whole way, insisting that all instruments that touched her fingers or feet be not only sterilized but brand-new. Even when Felicia had to switch out the standard emery board for industrial sandpaper to sand down the calluses on her heels, Cass insisted on only the freshest sandpaper imaginable. (The tall pile of dead gray skin that formed a pyramid of its own under each of her heels was a testament to how hard both Felicia and the sandpaper were working.) When it came time to choose a nail polish, Cass asked for clear—but when urged repeatedly to try a color, she relented and agreed to Cleopatra blue, which reminded her of the lapis lazuli on the Ring of Thoth.

  She was drowsily admiring her new nails—the blue gave them a space-age, almost alien quality that she didn’t entirely dislike, as well as complementing nicely the baby pink of her newly sanded skin—when Felicia returned with a spiral notebook.

  “And now’s when we turn you into an Egyptian princess!” She opened the notebook to a page of sparkling peel-off Egyptian symbols. “Do you want to choose, honey?”

  “No, just surprise me.?
??

  The first three decals were predictable: a scarab, an ankh, and an eye of Horus. The fourth, however, made Cass sit up, suddenly wide awake.

  “What’s that?” she asked as Felicia carefully applied the decal to Cass’s pinkie nail.

  “Just another sticker, honey.”

  “No, I mean, it’s a hieroglyph, right? Does it mean something?”

  Made up of three wavy lines, one on top of the other, the hieroglyph was very simple, and Cass had seen it many times in her hunt for the hieroglyphs of the Secret. But seeing it now curving around her nail made her realize she’d seen it before—on papyrus. It was the fourth hieroglyph of the Secret. She was certain. It had almost been staring her in the face all along. Since so much of the original hieroglyph had been smudged, she’d always assumed there was more to it—that the three lines were part of a grid making a building or something of that nature.

  “That hieroglyph?” Felicia laughed. “Yes, I know it. That one’s right on the window.”

  In fact, it was on the window of the very salon Cass was sitting in.

  “This is Nile Nails, right? That’s the sign for the Nile, but a customer told me it usually just means river or water. Hey, you’re not a water sign, are you? You seem more like an Aries. But you could be a Cancer, maybe….”

  River. Water. Nile.

  Because what ibis/Thoth river/water/Nile walk/run/cross…

  That was the Secret—as far as she’d been able to make out.

  What did it mean? That the Secret was something about Thoth walking next to a river? Or over a river? Maybe through a river? Could it be something like the parting of the Red Sea?*

  And what was the what? Was the what the thing that allowed Thoth to walk the river? Was the what the secret of the Secret? It was still so confusing.

  She hoped the Ring of Thoth would reveal the answer. How? She had no idea.

  “Cass! There you are! We’ve been looking all over.”

  “We were worried, yo.”

  Max-Ernest and Yo-Yoji were walking toward her.