“Is everyone all right? Everybody have everything?” Pandy asked.

  Homer wrung the river water from his garments.

  “I’m good.”

  “I’m excellent,” said Iole. “But a little tired. I have never talked so much in my life. Quite stimulating.”

  “Yeah, you and Omega One were blabbing the entire time. My dolphin made me be quiet,” said Alcie.

  “I have to talk to my dad,” said Pandora, retrieving the conch shell. “He was trying to tell me something.”

  She traced her forefinger down the lip, which she knew would activate her father’s shell.

  “Dad?” she said quietly. Even hundreds of kilometers from Greece, she knew that Zeus and Hera might be gazing down upon her at any time. Alcie and Iole raised their voices to cover Pandy’s whisperings. They knew there would be big trouble for everyone if the two most powerful gods caught Pandy getting help from her father.

  “Say . . . um,” Alcie yelled to Homer, “this is a very . . . uh . . . brown country, don’t you think?”

  “Uh-huh,” said Homer. Then he just stared blankly at Alcie.

  “Thank you, Homer! Iole, your thoughts?” Alcie called.

  “I believe the word you’re looking for is ‘ecru,’ Alcie,” said Iole, loudly.

  “Yes, of course, ecru . . . that’s it!” Alcie replied.

  In Pandy’s home in Athens, her father’s conch shell lay on the floor cushion where it had landed, vibrating furiously.

  “Ah, yes. Ecru. Of course now that I really look at that temple, for instance, I think it’s more of a dirt color,” Alcie cried.

  “It’s umber, mixed with taupe!” said Iole.

  “It’s an umber-y, taupe-y dirt!” Alcie was getting so loud, Pandy was certain that if the gods weren’t already looking in their direction, Alcie’s voice would make sure they did.

  “Guys . . . guys! You can stop yelling,” Pandy said, replacing the conch shell in her pouch. “He’s not answering.”

  “Well, couldn’t have been anything too important then, right?” said Alcie.

  “I don’t know. But he wouldn’t call in the middle of the day for no reason. My curiosity is tingling,” Pandy said.

  “He’ll call again, I’m sure,” said Iole.

  “Right!” said Pandy, surveying her new surroundings. “Okay . . . I’ve been thinking. Three hours ago, we were almost to Alexandria and the sun was overhead.”

  She began to pace forward and backward. Walking toward the ruined temple and back again.

  “Then the storm flung us that way and the DIASOZO picked us up and carried us that way. And the sun was there,” indicating a point overhead.

  “And we traveled this way and the sun is now there . . . which means that Alexandria is . . . is . . .”

  She paused, walking just a little closer to the temple, then Pandy turned back toward her friends.

  “Go on, Pandy, you’re doing great!” said Iole.

  “Thank you. Which means that Alexandria is . . . that way!”

  She flung her left arm defiantly (and with great flourish) off to one side.

  She seemed so confident in her decision that all eyes, even Dido’s, turned obediently toward the direction in which she pointed, as if the rooftops of the great Egyptian city would somehow be visible.

  “Way to go, Pandy!” said Alcie. “That’s the way I would have . . .”

  Alcie turned back.

  “Pandy?”

  “Pandy?” said Iole.

  Dido gave a series of short, sharp yelps.

  Pandy was gone.

  “Pandy!” Iole screamed.

  “Where did she go?” asked Homer.

  “Oh, Gods! Pandy!” yelled Alcie.

  Dido shot like an arrow toward the spot where, not one second before, Pandy had stood. But before he reached the precise spot, he skidded to a stop and began to whimper, as if there were a snake in the sand in front of him.

  Iole ran to his side.

  “Where is she, boy?” she asked, half hoping that Dido would be able to tell her. She looked hard at the place where Pandy had been. And then she saw something.

  “Do you think she’s playing a game? Pandy! It’s not funny!” Alcie bumped softly into Iole as she came to stand alongside.

  “Shh!” Iole said. “Don’t move. Look.”

  “Where?”

  “There.”

  Sure enough, there was a gently sloping indentation in the sand, like a shallow funnel. Grains of sand were still flowing down into the center as if something had reached up and sucked Pandy down into the desert floor.

  “Oh, great Zeus, she’s drowning!” shrieked Alcie. “Get her rope!”

  “She’s got the rope!” said Iole.

  Alcie spun around.

  “Homer! Homer—help!”

  But Homer was crossing the barren sand with the speed of a chariot stallion. Alcie watched, mouth agape, as he raced up the broken steps of the temple three at a time.

  “Where are you going?” she shouted.

  “Come on!” he cried, his voice lost as he reached the top step.

  Of all the new sensations Pandy had experienced in the last few weeks, this was definitely one of the worst. The desert floor had simply given way under her feet. But unlike the momentary sensation of falling through thin air that she had felt up on Olympus, she was immediately surrounded by heaps of sand closing in on her. She’d heard of quicksand, but in real quicksand, one was actually drowned, suffocated slowly. Now, as she fell fast through the earth, the sand clogged her nose and scraped her skin. Inadvertently, she opened her mouth to scream as the last of the daylight disappeared and sand poured into her mouth. And still she was falling.

  Suddenly, instantly, the sand thinned around her and she was hurtling downward into blackness. In spite of her terror, she became aware of a putrid stench.

  Then she heard a loud rip of fabric and felt something solid pushing against her left hip as she fell, grating her skin.

  She crashed into something hard but brittle, slowing her fall as it shattered.

  And then she hit the ground. She hoped. Whatever she had landed on was sharp and jagged, like a pile of rough pieces of wood or rock. She lay there, drifting in and out of consciousness, fighting to stay awake. The stench was helping; it reminded her of the oil her mother would inhale whenever she felt “faint.” Pandy began to move slowly, lifting her head in the darkness and laying it down again. She moved her arms and legs, checking for any jolts of pain. There were none, which she knew meant that nothing was broken. She felt her hip; there was a stinging that made her gasp and it was wet. She brought her hand to her mouth and inhaled: blood. She spat out the last of the sand and tasted the wetness. She was bleeding, all right. Then her hand brushed again something hard, circular, and sticking straight up in the air. A pole? A thin column?

  Just as she began to sit up, she was aware of a flash of light behind her, which lit the chamber in which she lay. She turned her body slowly.

  An enormous object floated about twenty-five meters away. A glowing blue sphere surrounded a strange symbol of curved black lines in the shape of a terrible eye, almost like the eye of a bird, the whites on either sides of the black iris gleaming with pure energy.

  Then she heard a voice.

  “Ah . . . fresh blood!”

  Dido was already on the move as Alcie and Iole ran to follow Homer. They crossed the fifty or so meters in seconds and hurried up the steps. On top of the large front terrace, past thick carved stone columns, four enormous seated, decaying statues gazed out over the cracked flagstones onto the desert. Each had a strange headdress and a square stone beard. There was an opening in the wall between the ankles of each statue. Homer was darting back and forth between the four entryways, talking to himself.

  “Here—that goes into the temple. Or does this one go into . . . ? This might lead . . .”

  “Homer?” said Alcie.

  “Quiet please,” he replied. Then he raced forward into one of the two middle entryways. “Here!”

  Iole and Alcie and Dido followed silently. Shortly inside the passageway, Iole saw Homer waiting for them.

  “Hold my cloak; we don’t want to get separated.”

  Iole clenched a fistful of cloak in one hand and Alcie’s wrist in the other.

  Homer moved quickly in the growing dark, feeling his way along the wall, which sloped down at a sharp angle.

  “Stay close to the left wall.”

  “Trying,” said Alcie.

  “How do you know where you’re going?” asked Iole.

  “Field trips.”

  “Huh?” said Alcie.

  “When I was at gladiator school in Ethiopia, sometimes we’d get to go on field trips if we did really well in basic strategy or hacking class. I’ve been in temples like this before. They don’t treat their dead like we do back in Greece. Especially those they want to keep an eye on.”

  “Keep an eye on?” said Alcie.

  “You know, like thieves, murderers, grave robbers. After they’ve been punished, their bodies are thrown into a large room called the ‘Chamber of Despair.’ It’s usually off to the side of the temple, underneath the desert. Pandy must have fallen through the ceiling. One of the four passageways up on the main portico would have led down to it. I just hope I picked the right one. We’ll know soon.”

  “How?” asked Iole. “It’s pitch black.”

  As if in answer to her question, the most horrible smell imaginable wafted into her nostrils. Alcie broke out of Iole’s grip and covered her nose with both hands.

  “What in Apollo’s name is that?” she cried.

  “It’s exactly what I hoped for,” said Homer. “When I said they just tossed the bodies in, that’s like totally what they did; one on top of another. That’s the smell of a burial chamber.”

  “Alcie, where are you?” Iole said sharply.

  “I’m here,” Alcie replied, fumbling in the dark for Iole’s free hand. “I can’t breathe, but I’m here.”

  “Cover your noses, breathe with your mouths,” said Homer. “I just hope she landed on a body and not anything else.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Iole.

  “Well, thieves and grave robbers and such were executed by . . . like . . . impaling. And often the stakes were still in the bodies when they tossed them in the chamber. Quiet—we’re almost there.”

  But Alcie and Iole were already silent as statues as they prayed to every god and goddess they could think of that Pandy hadn’t ended up skewered like a lamb roast.

  Suddenly the passageway lit up with a soft glow only a short distance ahead.

  Alcie glanced at the wall next to her: a human skull, set into the wall, stared back at her. She was about to scream when she heard a loud voice.

  “Ah . . . fresh blood!”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Chamber of Despair

  4:28 p.m.

  The entire chamber was now glowing murky white. Pandy stared at the unblinking eye, floating in midair. It was easily ten meters in diameter and the lines surrounding it gave it a fierce, enraged appearance. But after the first words echoed through the chamber, words Pandy did not understand in the least despite Egyptian 101 back at school, all was eerily quiet.

  Slowly, she began to look around, careful not to move too much should the eye see her and speak again.

  What she saw was terrifying. The chamber stretched into darkness on both sides, and there was a wall of dark bones about forty meters directly in front of her; finger, hip, and leg bones jutting out at every possible angle. But the floor of the chamber . . . that was something entirely different.

  Whole bodies. Thousands of them. Scattered. Piled. Stacked one on top of another forming dozens of small hills that faded into the black of the chamber. Most were already skeletons or severely decayed and as she looked, several leg and foot bones simply dropped off, crashing to the floor below.

  She closed her eyes tightly, wanting to block out the sight around her.

  Had she really just seen what she thought she’d seen? As a little girl, her father had told her stories of fierce battles, great scenes of destruction and death (before her mother had whacked him on the head and told him to stop), so she could pretty well handle the thousands of human bones strewn about. But had she really seen the . . . holes? Every body that she’d glimpsed, she thought, had a hole in its mid-section.

  She slowly opened her eyes and looked up. All over the chamber light radiated through the bones, causing spooky silhouettes. But in some places, small discs of filmy white, like little moons, could be seen as the light from the giant eye shone through the perfectly round circles in the bodies.

  Except, of course, for the bodies with huge wooden poles through the middle.

  Pandy gasped.

  Directly in front of her were the bones of a man lying twisted and curved around a thick wooden pole.

  There were hundreds of poles all over the chamber, their ends sharpened to fine points. Half had toppled over, but half were still upright. She had assumed that these were only support poles, shoring up the desert floor high above and keeping it from caving in. But each pole carried a human skeleton somewhere on its shaft. The pole she was lying against didn’t have a body. Then she realized the crunchy bits underneath her were the remains of a skeleton she had crashed into as she fell.

  Then, from off to her right, she heard the murmur of voices, very soft, but getting louder and talking fast. Turning her head she saw a small flash of white fur and three larger shapes burst into the chamber from a dark entryway.

  “Pandy?”

  “Kumquats! Pandy, where are you?”

  She was opening her mouth to answer when a pulse in the light made her glance back toward the horrible eye.

  The eye had turned slightly, rotating toward the new sound coming into the chamber. A beam of light shot out from the center of the eye toward the four figures and the same loud voice shouted again.

  “Enter not, dogs! You will wait until you are needed!”

  Suddenly, it seemed to Pandy that her friends had slammed up against an invisible wall. She could see Iole’s arms outstretched, her hands pressed flat against an unseen barrier. Alcie, trying to find some way around, was only succeeding in smashing her nose on something she just couldn’t see. Homer was throwing his entire weight against . . . whatever it was . . . again and again. Dido, Pandy saw, was rigid, barking furiously, his white eyes focused on her lying on the pile of bones.

  The eye turned back toward Pandy, now almost on her feet.

  “You disturb the chamber. You are of flesh. This is not allowed.”

  Silence.

  Pandy looked again to her friends, scuttling noiselessly like beetles inside an invisible jar. Could she get to them? Could she free them . . . or herself?

  “You disturb the chamber. You are of flesh. This is not allowed.”

  “I . . . I . . . don’t understand what . . . ?”

  Pandy stood, half hiding behind the pole, and accidentally grazed her left hip against the wood, causing a sharp spasm of pain. She twisted around the pole to peer out from its other side. As she did, she caught sight of a figure, ducking down behind a pile of corpses about thirty meters away.

  “Hello?” she cried before she realized that calling attention to herself in front of someone who may or may not want to kill her just might be the most idiotic thing she could do.

  The light around the eye pulsed again and again. Each burst getting brighter.

  “Speak not, desecrator,” the voice boomed. “Prepare to join those who have gone before!”

  Suddenly, the sound of several voices filled the chamber, repeating a single phrase again and again.

  “What is this thing?” cried Iole behind the invisible barrier.

  “What is that thing?” said Alcie, pointing to the huge eye, now focused on Pandy.

  “Homer? Homer! Stop it!” said Iole, stepping in front of Homer as he prepared to charge again. “You obviously can’t break through. We’re trapped. This thing, this invisible wall, is magic of some kind . . . or the work of the gods.”

  “Hera’s found us,” whispered Alcie.

  “Hera wouldn’t be able to act this fast, at least I don’t think so,” said Homer, panting hard as he slumped against the barrier.

  “What do you mean?” asked Iole.

  “This is Egypt. The people have their own gods. Like . . . different ones.”

  “I know that part,” said Iole.

  “But . . . like . . . if Hera wanted to get to you, she’d have to get permission from Isis, or Osiris, Nut, Ka, Geb. Maybe even Anubis. Our gods can’t just come in and take over. They have to ask.” Homer suddenly charged the invisible wall again. “Ugh . . . I think there might even be paperwork.”

  “It’s glowing brighter again!” said Alcie, looking at the eye.

  “Nephthys prepares a place. Kneel before Nephthys,” the voice said, the sound ricocheting off the walls of the chamber.

  “I can’t . . . I can’t understand! Something about kneeling in place,” cried Iole, listening intently. “I dropped Egyptian 101 for Basic Chinese!”

  “It’s a chant. It’s saying ‘Nephthys prepares a place. Kneel before Nephthys,’ ” said Homer.

  “Who’s that? What’s that mean?” asked Alcie.

  “The Egyptian Goddess of the Dead. They pray to Nephthys before they sacrifice or execute someone.”

  “Great Apollo!” gasped Iole.

  “But it makes no sense,” said Homer, pacing and pointing to the huge eye. “That’s the Eye of Horus. It’s a symbol of healing and protection. The Egyptian students at school wore it around their necks. It doesn’t destroy anything!”

  Dido began whimpering, turning in small circles then putting his paws up against the invisible wall.

  “Figs,” said Alcie, turning, “look!”

  Pandy’s knees buckled under her, as if someone had hit the back of her legs with a rod, and she lost complete control of her body. Her head was thrown back, her arms were flung up then thrust violently forward as her body was bent so her face and arms hit the floor. Then, still on her knees, her upper body was raised up and thrown back, then slammed forward again into the ground.