“Boyfriend?” I ask. I hope she doesn’t decide to have lunch with him instead. I definitely don’t feel brave enough to go buy something on my own.

Tyler laughs. “No. In fact, I feel a little dirty because of my occasional lustful thoughts, since I’m taken. Still, I can appreciate beauty, right?” She leans forward, so far that I worry she’ll lose her balance and topple right off the bridge. “Hey, RY!” Finally he looks up.

Floods, I have never seen such eyes.

They’re crystal blue, a shade that shouldn’t exist on the human body, a shade I immediately crave, a shade that makes my heart beat a little faster—almost as if I recognize it. I want to steal it, paint it, throw it into every room I ever decorate. It’s the most perfect blue I’ve ever seen. Even from this distance his eyes are simply remarkable.

He pulls out his earbuds and smiles, a dimple on one side but not the other, though it looks like he’s not quite focused on us, like his eyes are seeing just past us. He waves, and I have to admit Tyler is right about “appreciating beauty.”

“What’s up, Tyler?” His voice is a pleasant tenor.

“We’re heading to lunch. Want to come?”

His eyes glance off me, again not quite focusing. Maybe he has bad vision, though I can see him just fine.

“Oh,” Tyler shouts, “this is Isadora. She started at the museum today. She’s from Egypt!”

He looks back down at his notebook, tapping his pen against the page. “What part are you from?” he calls in flawless Arabic.

I narrow my eyes. Didn’t see that one coming. “You wouldn’t know it,” I answer in English. He probably wants to show off that he speaks Arabic, but I don’t like that he assumes I don’t speak English well. I speak English perfectly. I speak everything perfectly.

He smiles, still not looking up, and Tyler finally leans back so I can stop worrying she’ll fall over the side. “Coming or not?”

I hope he doesn’t. If he does, I’ll have to spend the whole time figuring out how to pull from his color scheme for a room. Black, brilliant blue, olive tan. And then the lips for an accent. Maybe the bedroom.

I blush. No bedrooms. Stupid. I should go back to the museum. I’m not even that hungry. Tyler clearly already has a social life and doesn’t need me. I have no idea how to make friends.

“Rain check?” His eyes flit up and then back down, and relief floods through me. He makes me uncomfortable, and I don’t know why.

“Sure. Later!”

Eyes still on his notebook, he waves at us.

I follow Tyler across the rest of the bridge. “Ry’s great,” she says. “We’ll have to all hang out! You’ll meet Scott, my boyfriend, sooner or later. He’s a total nerd. Not as pretty as Ry, but fortunately for him I’m only mostly shallow.”

I shrug and smile. Doesn’t matter to me whether her boyfriend is as pretty as Ry. I don’t care about Ry. But that doesn’t stop me from obsessively recreating his eyes in my memory, and trying to figure out if there’s any sort of noncrazy way to take a picture of him.

Just for the color palette.

I try to balance the cow-horn headdress, though my head still isn’t big enough for it and it keeps slipping down over my eyes. I’ll bet when I’m eleven it will fit.

I hold it on, looking at myself in the burnished copper of my mother’s mirror. In the blurred image that stares back at me, I can almost see myself as her, and it makes me feel pretty. I wonder what I’ll be the goddess of when I’m old enough for it. I think I’d like to be the goddess of animals. Maybe then Ubesti would purr more for me.

I stand, walking around the room with my back as straight as I can make it, holding the headdress and staring solemnly ahead.

“What are you doing?” a voice snaps, and I jump, startled into letting go of the headdress, which clatters to the ground.

“I was just—hi, Hathor. I was just . . . umm.” I blush, humiliated. My brother Horus and his wife, Hathor, are visiting, and even though he’s my brother he feels more like an uncle, because he’s old. Hathor is beautiful, but in a different way than Mother. Mother’s beauty is warm and safe. Hathor’s makes me feel small and ugly.

“That’s mine,” she hisses.

“No! I would never take anything of yours! It’s my mother’s.”

“Stupid girl. Your mother is the one who took it in the first place. It was mine. It is mine. I will never forget what Isis took from me.” She leans over and picks it up by the horns, the single polished disc of gold between the horns gleaming dully in the lantern light. “Mine,” she whispers, placing it on her own head, and I stumble back. Seeing it on her head makes me realize how stupid I must have looked, trying to wear it.

“Hathor,” my mother’s voice says, in the angry tone that gives me a headache. I turn around, waiting to get in trouble, but where my mother should be standing in the doorway is nothing but an outline, darkness blacker than night, emptier than the desert sky.

I close my eyes. I don’t want to see it. It shouldn’t be there, and I don’t want it to see me, either.

5

Set murdered Osiris. Isis and Nephthys brought Osiris back from the dead, but once dead, he remained god of the underworld.

Set killed Horus. Isis used magic from Thoth to revive him.

Isis poisoned Amun-Re, only healing him once he divulged his true name and gave her and Horus power over him.