The Chaos of Stars

  I look down the length of the room and then close my eyes. An image of my father’s hall pops unbidden into my mind: the carved stone, the patterns, the murals, Ammit in her eternal watch, his low throne at the end. The weight of age and the gravity of death.

  No.

  The Nile, then? A green-blue floor, the walls yellow and lined with rushes. A breeze, the ripe-but-comforting scent of things wet too long. Still not quite right. Not enough sun in the room. Maybe if we could install heat lamps to leave the air dry and baking, but somehow I doubt that’ll fly.

  Behind the darkness of my eyelids, lights trace lazy patterns as always, and I’m reminded of my stars. I cringe back from the idea because it would bring too much of my home here. But no. I’m over that. I will reclaim that idea. I’m going to remake my past so it can’t hurt me anymore. Just like the nursery I’ll do for Deena. I can remove the pain from these things instead of carrying it with me forever.

  “Got it!” I open my eyes, the plans for the room spinning out in front of my vision, already replacing this sad space. “Stars.”

  “Stars?” Tyler stands up straight, frowning.

  “Stars. So much of ancient Egypt was focused on life outside of this one—our dreams, our souls, our deaths, the afterlife. They knew more about astronomy than any other culture at the time, always looking forward and backward and outward. So we paint the room pure black, and—no, we don’t even have to do that.”

  I wander up and down, looking for outlets, studying the ceiling. “Here’s what we’ll need: huge sheets of plywood. It’ll bring the walls in a few inches on either side, but we can afford to lose the space. And lowering the ceiling a bit will help with the effect. The windows need to be blocked entirely. We paint the plywood all black and drill holes for LED lights. I can map out the star charts. My mother’s pieces will be staggered throughout, along the walls and in the middle, lit from beneath and by their own pedestals, so that they stand out in the middle of eternity.”

  Michelle looks at the room with narrowed eyes. “It sounds complicated. And expensive.”

  “It’ll only be the cost of materials, and we can do them cheap.”

  “What about the time? We don’t have much. I’ll have to get it approved before you can start, and it might take a week or two for clearance.”

  “I can do it. I know I can do it.” I bite my lip, hoping she’ll agree. Now that I’ve decided what the room should be, doing anything else will be a disappointment.

  Finally, she nods. “Okay. Prove what you can do. And if you do a good job, I might be able to let you redecorate some of our older exhibits that you seem to think need updates.”

  “Thank you!” I say, already racing with adrenaline and ready to work. I will own this room. I will own my past. I will own my future.

  “Isadora!”

  “Mother!” I sit straight up in bed, heart racing. This isn’t the tomb, or my bed, or my home.

  Deena stands in my doorway, hand on her nearly nonexistent hip. I swear, that baby is taking over her entire small frame. How she doesn’t split open down the middle is a mystery to me. “Your friend’s here.”

  “My friend?” I run my fingers through my hair, which is sticking out at crazy angles all over my head. “Tyler?”

  “The boy?” She leans into the room conspiratorially. “The incredibly, ridiculously hot boy?”

  I slap my forehead and flop back down. “What time is it?”

  “Eleven.”

  “Floods, who gets up before noon on a day when they don’t have anything going on?” I couldn’t sleep in the first few days, my well-trained internal alarm jolting me awake immediately. So I’ve started staying up as late as physically possible to force my body into needing the extra sleep in the morning. Who knew being lazy was such hard work?

  “He’s already in the room priming. He’s been here for over an hour, told me not to wake you. I figured it had been long enough.”

  With a growl I throw back the covers and stomp down the hall to the nursery.

  Ry’s in a light-blue T-shirt and worn-out jeans. Three-quarters of the room is already primed, and music plays softly from an iPod dock in the corner. When I demanded that Ry pay me back for advising him on his travesty of a bedroom, I hadn’t expected him to take me up on it willingly—or quickly.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I ask, squinting against the brilliant light streaming in through the blank, undressed window.

  “Hmm?” He looks over, and his face breaks into a smile—chaos, how does he do that? It’s like his whole body glows. It scatters my waking grouchiness, and I can feel a glow warming me, too. “Wasn’t I supposed to help?”

  “Well, yeah, but I thought I’d have to drag you over here or something.”

  He shrugs and goes back to the wall. “Nah, it’s kind of fun. Sorry for just showing up, but I didn’t have anything else to do this morning.”

  “No writing? Your muse isn’t speaking to you?”

  “She rarely does. International call charges and whatnot. Besides which, she’s flighty and nearly impossible to understand. And she says I always misinterpret her intentions.”

  “Muses. What can you do, right?” I run my fingers through my hair again, back and forth, making it stand up even more. I could use a shower. Then again, if I’m going to paint, might as well wait. And it’s not like I care what Ry thinks of my hair. Or my smell.

  I stretch and surreptitiously sniff myself in case. Not that you can smell anything over the itchy chemical scent of the paint, but there’s no reason to stink in front of anyone if you don’t have to. I can let my eye makeup go this once, but I refuse to smell bad, ever.

  “All right then,” I say with a sigh, “let’s do this thing.”

  The canvas is rough and bunched up under my feet, and I run back to my room to change into a grubbier set of pajamas. I’ve mostly got everything back in order from the break-in, but some of the drawers were damaged and won’t open anymore, so I’ve been using my suitcase as extra storage. Reaching into the corner of one of the gaping pockets, I frown. Burlap? I pull out the tiny package and stare dumbly at it until it sinks in.

  Ingredients. Pendants. My mom packed me an emergency magic kit, and these pendants aren’t broken. For some reason it makes me feel happy, safer. Which kind of annoys me.

  Skipping back to the nursery, I grab a roller and start at the opposite end of the last wall. I’m glad Ry’s a fast worker—I hate priming rooms. It leaves your whole body sore and accomplishes nothing except setting the stage for more work. Ry doesn’t talk, humming softly along to the music as he carefully and methodically paints.

  “What is this?” I ask. We both keep our eyes on our rollers, moving slowly but surely toward each other.

  “Hmm?”

  “This song. ‘Oh, hey, it’s okay that I slept with you and left the next morning without a word, because someday someone will love you.’ Seriously?”

  He laughs. “I dunno, it has a nice message: we’ll all find love eventually.”

  “That’s not the message at all! That’s the excuse! He’s saying it’s okay he used her because someday someone will actually love her, unlike him. Dude deserves to be castrated, if you ask me.”

  Ry chokes a bit, a strangled laugh. “Remind me never to piss you off.”

  “Whatever. See what I mean though? He’s using her; she’s crying and waiting for the day when someone won’t. What kind of a life would that be? Screw it. I can be whole without depending on someone else, thank you very much.”

  “You can’t really love someone romantically unless you’re already whole anyway, though. So you’re right on that count.”

  “But if you’re whole, you don’t need to love anyone.”

  “But how can you really be whole if you can’t allow that part of yourself its portion of your life?”

  “Romance is not a requirement for a happy life.”

  “I strongly and completely disagree. But however you feel about romance, love i
s definitely a requirement. Like your family. You can’t be whole without them, right?”

  They can be whole without me. All they do is pop out another baby, another battery to brainwash into worshipping them. I jam my roller furiously against the wall, too much paint oozing out of the pores of the roller and splotching my even stroke. “Families make holes. They don’t fill them.”

  Brilliant. Now I have to go back over that section to even out the paint. Before I’m finished, Ry’s made his way over and is standing right next to me.

  “I’m sorry.” His voice is soft and he stands there, waiting, until I finally look up into his face. “Do you want to talk about it?” I feel his eyes swallowing me, all kindness and understanding. I know I could tell him. Part of me wants to tell him, more than anything I’ve ever wanted, to spill out all the pain and betrayal and years of heartache, let it drop out of me and onto him and finally relieve all this pressure that I carry around until I feel like I’m going to burst from the strain of hurting so much and trying so hard not to care.

  I drop my roller onto the canvas. “How about some of that magic Ry restauranting? I need food.”

  He smiles, smoothing out the rest of my splotched paint. “That I can do.”

  Chapter 9

  Set had worked too hard murdering Osiris to let a magically conceived heir take the throne he had rightfully stolen. While Set was older and stronger, with far more power on his side, Horus had something he didn’t:

  Isis.

  Isis stole Horus away in the middle of the night, hiding him from danger, biding her time until he was old enough to inherit the throne. She enlisted the help of seven scorpions to protect her son. When a local village denied them sanctuary, the scorpions were enraged. Combining their poison, they stung the young son of one of the villagers.

  He was near dying, his mother beside herself with grief, when Isis descended onto the scene, using the names of the scorpions to save the boy from the very gates of death. His mother was so overjoyed that she gave all she had to Isis.

  Of course, no one dared point out that it was Isis’s fault the scorpions were hanging around in the first place.

  “OH, SHUT UP.” I LAUGH AROUND A MOUTHFUL of gyro. Yesterday Ry took me to the “best” sushi around. I didn’t care for the eel, but the California roll grew on me. I don’t get seaweed, though. Texturally and tastewise, it makes no sense.

  Today’s food, however, is effortless to enjoy.

  “No, really,” he says.

  “You do not love that statue. It’s an atrocity.”

  “I absolutely love it.” Ry’s face is straight but his eyes betray him, merry dancing sapphires. “It’s tasteful, understated. Like the life-size bust of my mother in our entryway.”

  I snort, barely able to keep my last bite from spraying out. We’re sitting on the grass at the harbor, surrounded by trees, in front of one of the strangest statues I’ve seen in my life. It’s a sailor, tipping back a woman in a passionate kiss. But it’s huge. Swallowing, I say, “I probably come up to the top of her shoe. From far away it looks kind of normal. Until you get close, then it’s bam, humongous giants making out on the grass. In fact, I think that may be the title of the sculpture.”

  “If it’s not, it should be.” Ry leans back happily as we watch tourists take pictures beneath the behemoths.

  “And why that pose? Her spine must be killing her after all these years of being tipped back.”

  “It comes from a really iconic photograph.”

  “Huh. Probably worked better as a picture.”

  “Yup. How’s the gyro?”

  “Meh, you know. So-so.”

  “Really?”

  I shrug. “I’ve had better.”

  “And that’s why you’ve inhaled it.”

  I lick the remnants of cucumber sauce off the waxed paper. “I don’t like to waste food.”

  “Mmm-hmm.” He watches me suspiciously, and I try to avoid giving away how amazing the gyro really was. He wasn’t kidding—this is the best Greek food I’ve ever had. Which isn’t saying too much, since my mom would never have consented to make it, but still.

  “Okay, fine,” I say. “I love it so much I might agree to skip past friends and dating and have its little gyro babies. But you can’t take credit for this food, anyway.”

  “No?”

  “Nope. The spicy meat? The cool cucumber sauce? Totally stole it. You Greeks and your culture theft.”

  “Is it theft if you take something and improve on it?”

  “Let’s add delusions of superiority to the list of things that are wrong with you.”

  “Me me, or Greeks in general?”

  “You you. I’ll try not to hold you against your people.”

  “Fair enough. Though you do know your name is Greek, right?”

  I gasp. “It is not!”

  “Is so. Look it up online. Isadora means Gift of the Moon.”

  “No, it means Gift of Isis, who was also goddess of the moon on occasion. And it’s from when the Greeks went ahead and stole worship of Egyptian gods, so technically it’s Egyptian, not Greek.” Also evidence of how desperate my mother has been getting lately to find names that are versions of her own or Osiris’s after having so freaking many kids. Two hundred years ago she wouldn’t have touched anything even mildly Greek in origin.

  But wait. Ry looked up what my name means? He can’t have just known. That’s something a friend would do. Right? Right.

  A strange, muffled chirping sound goes off in the background, and I think nothing of it until Ry nudges me. “Is that your phone?”

  “Oh, yeah.” I frown, pulling it out. I’m still not used to getting calls. Then I see the caller ID and my stomach clenches. Speak of the moon goddess. “Floods,” I mutter, hitting connect. “What?”

  “Hi, Little Heart.”

  “Mother? The connection’s bad. You need to speak up.” I can barely hear her—her voice sounds weak.

  “I’m sorry, dear. I’m so tired these days. You haven’t emailed me.”

  I roll my eyes, grateful she can’t see it through the phone. I wasn’t allowed to roll my eyes at home. So I do it again for good measure. “I haven’t emailed because there’s nothing to tell.” The phone hangs in dead silence for a few moments. Of course she’d call me and then not even talk. I should tell her I’m in a park with a Greek boy, eating Greek food. That’d get her talking. “Mother? You still there?”

  “Yes.”

  There is something off about her voice, though. “Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know. Things feel different with this baby. Off. I wish you could come home and help me. But the dreams haven’t stopped, and I won’t place you back in harm’s way.”

  I want to be annoyed at her for calling to make me feel guilty, but I really never have heard her sound like this. “What about Osiris? He needs to do more for you. And you should call your sister.” Nephthys helped me out, and I think she knows most of the spells and charms my mother does.

  “She’s already here. She’s been a great comfort and help, unlike Hathor, who won’t even let Horus visit. She has been acting very strange lately.”

  “Well, I’m glad Nephthys is there. You’re going to be fine. Right?”

  “Oh, I am sure I will be. I don’t want you to worry about me.”

  She’s a goddess. How could I worry about her? I don’t like hearing her sound so . . . normal, though. And I can’t help but remember the twisted memories I’ve been dreaming, what happens to her in them. But no. She’s immortal.

  I’ve never seen her pregnant, is all. This must be business as usual. “Have Nephthys make you some of that honey tea. We still have all of the stuff in the pantry. I’ll email you tonight, okay?”

  “Okay. Good-bye, Little Heart.”

  “Bye.” I slide the phone shut and sigh. I don’t need to worry about her. She’s a goddess. Her goddess sister is there helping her out.

  “Everything okay?” Ry asks.

  ??
?It’s fine.”

  He gives me this look that says he knows it’s not and he wishes I’d tell him why. Then it relaxes and he leans back, a cocky smile on his face. “I know what you need. Come on.” He takes my trash and throws it away, then we walk back along the harbor, lined on one side by old, slimy-green overgrown concrete holding back the water, and on the other by old, not-slimy people selling all manner of nonsense, mostly revolving around the idea that tie-dye is an acceptable vacation purchase. A massive aircraft carrier looms above us like a floating skyscraper. A few other ships bob gently just out of reach, all museums now, and then we come to a dark, weathered-wood restaurant built into the pier out over the water. It is positively crawling with people.

  “Good food? I’m pretty full.”

  “Wait right here,” Ry cautions solemnly.

  Folding my arms and giving him a pointed look meant to let him know that I am nothing if not impatient, I turn and watch as bike taxis pedal by, their drivers chatting to each other in Eastern languages, mostly complaining about the heat that day and the customers who don’t tip.

  My phone buzzes in my pocket and I hold back a sigh as I pull it out, expecting my mother again. Instead it’s a text from Tyler, asking if we’re still on for a movie night tonight. I even manage to punctuate everything correctly as I tell her yes, and I’m excited to see her. We’re still waiting on approval for the museum room, and our shifts haven’t been matching up as often. I finish the text right when Ry comes out holding two cups.

  “So,” he says, beaming, “which flavor do you want? Bright-blue sugar, or bright-orange sugar? They had pink-sugar flavor, too, but it didn’t strike me as your style.”

  I reach for the cup full of blue stuff. My fingers brush his and it makes me feel so strange I almost spill the cup yanking it back. “What are these?”

  “You’ve never had a slushie?”

  “Nope.”

  “Pretty much the best thing in creation. Take a sip. Go on.”

  I do, and tiny pieces of flavored ice run along my tongue and coat my throat with freezing sweetness until they settle in my stomach with an odd, burning sort of cold. I laugh, delighted. It was all I could do to persuade Isis to let me get a fridge and freezer for the kitchen when I redid it. She’s still convinced that eating things colder than room temperature makes you sick. Ice was always out of the question. “This is my mother’s worst nightmare! I’m drinking freezing-cold sugar and I’m with a Greek boy!”