“Sure, I’ve heard of it,” said Cass defensively.
“So what are you saying—we got transported back to biblical times, and that’s him right there?” asked Max-Ernest.
“I’m not saying anything. This whole thing is crazy.”
“I don’t care who it is—we can’t just leave him like that,” said Cass, stricken. “We have to do something.” She started running toward the river.
Max-Ernest shook his head. “Hold on. Something’s not—it’s not real.”
“What do you mean?” said Cass, slowing.
“Babies don’t move like that. Trust me, I’ve spent the last year watching every move a baby makes, and a baby that little doesn’t have that much motor coordination. And even if he did, the movements wouldn’t repeat over and over—there would have to be a little variety, and then he would get tired. How ’bout that? I mean, babies are human beings. Sort of.”
“You’re saying it’s a fake baby?” asked Cass. “Like a mechanical doll?”
“Just like this plant,” said Yo-Yoji as they reached the river. He waved a papyrus plant around. It was plastic.
“And the sky,” said Max-Ernest, pointing to a spot in a cloud that hid a loudspeaker. The sky was a painted backdrop.
Everything around them was fake. It was as if they were walking on a giant stage set. Only the water was real. And when they looked more closely at the river, they could see that the bottom was not sand but stucco.
“So where are we, then?” asked Cass.
“Just where we thought we were going,” said Max-Ernest.
He nodded back at the temple. From this angle, they could see that one side of it was missing; it was a virtual stage set. Above the temple, neon letters blinked:
Clearly, this was the new home of the mummy exhibit.
In the middle of the sky was a sign:
“Las Vegas? Sick.” Yo-Yoji nodded.
Tired and hungry, they trudged through the sand toward the casino door, like refugees wandering the desert.
Given their exhausted state, it’s no wonder they didn’t notice the rustling in the artificial grass. Had their invisible stalker decided to pounce, he would have had the advantage of surprise. He decided to let them pass.
Here it would be too easy, he thought. This was Vegas. He wanted to gamble.
It was like walking from day into night without ever going outside.
In contrast to the surreal quiet of the artificial desert, their current surroundings were a noisy blur of ringing bells, spinning wheels, and flashing lights—and gleaming gold statues of Egyptian gods. This was the Cairo Hotel Casino.
“Whoa, this place is ridiculous,” said Yo-Yoji.
“It’s pretty big,” concurred Max-Ernest.
“Yeah, and its carbon footprint is even bigger,” said Cass. “Can you imagine how much energy is used in this one room? It’s disgusting.”
“Ever heard of fun?” asked Yo-Yoji.
Cass’s eyes narrowed. “It’s possible to have fun without wasting energy.”
Max-Ernest couldn’t help himself: “Well, technically, it’s not possible to do anything without using energy, and I’m sure a certain amount is always—”
“Max-Ernest! Aargh!” groaned Cass. “Which way is out?”
“Yeah, let’s motor,” said Yo-Yoji. “Where’s the bathroom? Does anyone else have to take a leak?”
They glanced around. The casino seemed to go on forever in every direction. There were no visible exits—or even any visible walls. Instead, wherever they looked, there was another way to gamble.
“We have to get home,” said Cass, growing anxious.
So far, she reflected, their mission had been the Worst. Fail. Ever. Not only had they failed to find the mummy’s finger, they’d been trapped inside a crate overnight and shipped far from home. They were suspected of stealing a mummy, and now the mummy’s finger. They almost certainly weren’t going to graduate, and they very well might wind up in jail. Meanwhile, Lord Pharaoh, wherever he was, had nabbed the finger and was well on his way to resurrecting the mummy and learning the Secret. Only one thing stood in his way: the fact that Cass had the Ring of Thoth. She felt around her neck for the ring. It was still there. But at this rate, she would lose it soon enough.
Cass thought of Pietro’s face when he’d learned that Dr. L had betrayed him again. Her heart sank. How much more disappointed would he be when he learned that Cass, his precious Secret Keeper, had lost the Secret forever to the Midnight Sun?
“Why don’t we try that way?” said Yo-Yoji, picking a direction at random. The others followed.
Almost as miserable as Cass, Max-Ernest looked down as they started walking. Beneath their feet was a seemingly endless blue and gold carpet with a pattern of scarabs and ankhs and other Egyptian symbols and hieroglyphs. Max-Ernest tried to make sense of what he was looking at, but it was soon clear to him that whoever had designed the carpet hadn’t known what the symbols meant.
“They’re oxymorons,” he muttered.
“Who are?” asked Yo-Yoji.
“Nobody. The things on the floor. They all contradict each other.”
“Shh,” said Cass. “Let’s try not to attract any attention.” She pointed to a sign: NO UNACCOMPANIED MINORS.
Yo-Yoji laughed. “Cheer up. This place is so loud you’d have to run screaming naked to attract attention. Nah, that wouldn’t even do it. See.”
He nodded to a long green craps table where a man was rolling dice while onlookers screamed in excitement and a nearly naked waitress served drinks.
Above the table, a sign blinked:
“Actually, all you really have to do to get attention is cheat,” said Max-Ernest. “See that glass ball?”
He pointed to a small upside-down dome of glass in the ceiling. “People look through it, watching for cheaters and criminals and stuff. It’s called the ‘eye in the sky’—which is pretty funny because one of the symbols on the carpet is the eye of Horus, and Horus is the god of the sky. So it’s like two sky-eyes staring at each other. How ’bout that?”
Yo-Yoji looked at him like he was crazy. “How do you know?”
“About Horus?”
“That thing in the ceiling.”
“I read about it. A lot of magicians and comedians work in casinos, so I know a lot about them,” said Max-Ernest. “Notice how there are no clocks or windows?”
“I know—it’s so weird,” said Cass. “You can’t tell what time it is.”
Max-Ernest nodded. “That’s on purpose. So you keep gambling forever. Think about it—it’s the morning, right? All these people have probably been gambling all night.”
“So if I put a quarter into this thing, I won’t be able to stop until I spend all my money?” asked Yo-Yoji, approaching the nearest slot machine. It was decorated with an image of gold coins and a pair of hissing cobras. The words BRAVE THE CURSE—PLAY TO WIN THE PHARAOH’S GOLD flashed on and off.
“That’s the idea.”
“OK, let’s see,” said Yo-Yoji.
“You can’t. It’s against the law!” said Max-Ernest, alarmed.
“I’ll bet kids younger than me do this all the time,” Yo-Yoji scoffed.
“Uh-huh. And they probably have people watching just for that reason.”
“Max-Ernest is right,” said Cass. “It’s not a good time—”
Too late. Yo-Yoji had already dropped a quarter into the slot machine. “C’mon, let’s live a little,” he said, pulling the lever.
As soon as the wheels of the slot machine started to spin, a man in a dark suit with a walkie-talkie on his hip walked up to them.
“Hi, kids. Your parents around?”
“Uh, just outside,” replied Yo-Yoji.
“Well, I suggest you go join them. If you’re looking for games, try the Adventure Zone.”
“That sounds great!” said Cass, with an I-told-you-so glare at Yo-Yoji. “But first—I know this is going to sound weird—how do we get out?”
>
“Just follow the Nile.”
The security man pointed across the casino.
What had looked from far away like more sparkling slot machines was, in fact, the continuation of the faux river Nile reflecting the lights above. The river led them almost magically to the restrooms and then to the main lobby of the hotel, where it momentarily vanished underground only to reappear outside the hotel’s front doors.
Once outside, they could see that the Cairo Hotel had been built in the shape of a pyramid—“the biggest pyramid in the world,” according to the hotel’s promotional brochures. Of course, unlike an Egyptian pyramid, the hotel had sides made of glass. The glass was tinted gold, and when the sun hit the hotel—as it was hitting the hotel now—the building lit up like a volcano.
The pyramid sat back from the street, behind a vast plaza, and was surrounded by the river Nile like a castle surrounded by a moat. On either side of the plaza sat two stone sphinxes about the size of pickup trucks. In the center of the plaza, the river ended in a large man-made lake that was dotted with lily pads, and in the center of the lake was a tall glass obelisk that turned colors every few seconds. (For those who remember, it looked not unlike the ancient multicolored flame that burned on top of the pyramid at the Midnight Sun Spa, but I would imagine that the obelisk was lit by ordinary colored lights and controlled by a timer.) Around the obelisk, tall jets of water spouted and “danced” in time to music.
“It’s like one huge environmental crime scene,” Cass exclaimed. “Look at all that water! We’re in the middle of the desert! How can these people live with themselves?”
She nodded to the throngs of tourists walking in and out of the hotel; she seemed to hold each of them personally responsible for turning a desert ecosystem into a glittering bastion of conspicuous consumption.
Giant gold-plated doors, each decorated with a giant eye of Horus, flanked the smaller, revolving glass doors that led into the hotel and casino. Guarding the doors were a half dozen men in white cotton skirts and Egyptian headdresses. Their skin covered with chalk, they were so-called living statues, and they didn’t blink when tourists snapped photos or kids taunted them.
“You think they would move if I yelled ‘fire’?” asked Yo-Yoji.
“The question is, would you move?” said Cass. “Come on. We need to get home.”
“Um, point made, but, uh, how?” asked Max-Ernest.
“How what?” asked Cass impatiently.
“How are we going to get home? You know, like planes, trains, automobiles?”
“Oh, that kind of how,” said Cass. In her rush to get out of the hotel, she hadn’t gotten that far in her thinking.
“We can’t exactly expect to find another crate lying around,” Max-Ernest pointed out.
“Hey, look who followed us to Las Vegas—” Yo-Yoji nodded discreetly toward the street, where the three Priests of Amun they had seen by the Natural History Museum were now standing in their robes and turbans, holding their protest signs. One of them had a drum of some sort and was hitting it slowly and rhythmically; it sounded ominous.
Cass squinted. “Are they looking at us?”
Max-Ernest reacted with alarm. “You think they want to take revenge on us for breaking the mummy’s finger? Maybe they think we have the mummy!”
Yo-Yoji laughed. “Now you’re really losing it.”
“Seems like if they were going to attack us, they already would have,” said Cass.
“Unless they’re waiting until there are less people around,” said Max-Ernest. (To be grammatically correct, he should have said fewer people, but I’m afraid he was a bit nervous.) “Then they’re going to drag us out into the scorching sun of the Nevada desert, perform some kind of ancient Egyptian curse ritual, and leave us to die of dehydration while scorpions sting us until we hallucinate about being eaten alive by an army of red ants crawling in and out of our eyeballs. How ’bout that?”
“Sick, man,” said Yo-Yoji as if he were watching the scene in his head. “Think maybe the hunger’s getting to you?”
“They didn’t come here for us,” said Cass, looking up at a point between Max-Ernest and Yo-Yoji. “Or not only for us.”
Yo-Yoji and Max-Ernest turned around, following her gaze. High above them, two construction workers were unveiling a huge pyramid-shaped billboard decorated with what looked like shimmering gold sequins:
THE CAIRO HOTEL
PRESENTS
LORD PHARAOH
THE INVISIBLE MAGICIAN
LAS VEGAS’S LATEST ENTERTAINMENT SENSATION
IN
THE GOLDEN DAWN: THE MUMMY RISES
AN EVENING OF MAGIC, ALCHEMY, AND ILLUSION
SPECIAL GUESTS—THE SKELTON SISTERS
“Lord Pharaoh, here?” Max-Ernest took a step backward.
“Lord Pharaoh, an entertainment sensation?” said Cass.
Yo-Yoji shook his head. “Not really keeping it on the low-profile tip, is he, Lord P?”
The three of them looked up again at the immense sign, larger than a small car, or even a big one—as, in fact, most things in Vegas seemed to be.
“What does he have to lose? Nobody can see him anyway. Which makes it pretty easy to do magic, by the way,” said Max-Ernest bitterly. (He had been practicing magic tricks for a few years now and was frustrated with his lack of progress.) “Anybody can disappear when they’re invisible—that’s cheating.”
“Wait—The Mummy Rises?” Yo-Yoji looked up at the billboard again. “How can he do that without the ring?”
“He can’t,” said Cass simply. It was all becoming clear to her. “He’s waiting for us to bring it to him.”
Max-Ernest was confused. “Bring it to him? Where? When?”
“At the show.”
“Why would we do that?!”
“Think about it. This is our chance. All we have to do is put the ring on the mummy’s finger before Lord Pharaoh does, and we’ll learn the Secret—well, I’ll learn the Secret.” She felt an electric tingle in her ears. The idea that the Secret was so close to her now—in this same city, on this same block, in this same hotel, even—was almost intoxicating. “Lord Pharaoh knows we have no choice.”
Max-Ernest shook his head. “I knew it was too easy, the crate waiting open for us like that. Lord Pharaoh’s been playing games with us the whole way. For all we know, he had them put that big billboard up just so we would see it!” Max-Ernest could feel himself starting to panic. “And now you want to deliver the ring to him on a platter?”
“Well, maybe he shouldn’t be so sure of himself,” said Cass defensively.
“But how’re we supposed to get the finger from him in front of the whole audience? How do we bring the mummy to life before he does? How… how… anything?” Max-Ernest stammered in frustration.
“I don’t know,” said Cass. “We go to the show and we work it out when we get there. Just like we always do.”
“See?” Yo-Yoji grinned. “It’s all good.”
“You understand we could be killed,” said Max-Ernest. “Or worse.”
Cass nodded. “I doubt he would kill us in front of all those people, but, yeah, it’s a possibility.”
“Come on, dude,” said Yo-Yoji to Max-Ernest. “What do you want us to do—go home empty-handed? Then we’re as good as dead anyway.”
Max-Ernest shrugged. “We’ll need tickets.”
He knew when he was beaten. It happened quite often.
Three coins. That was all the money they had left after purchasing one small soda for the three of them to share. To make matters worse, they were ancient coins, no longer legal tender anywhere in the world, let alone in Las Vegas.
On the bright side, the coins were gold. And worth a fortune.
How to turn them into cash? There was the rub.
“A pawnshop!”
It came to Max-Ernest in a flash. He’d never been to one. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen one. But he’d read about them in detective novels.
; “You mean like in the movies, where a criminal sells off the stolen goods and then the police come looking for him at the shop that bought them?” asked Yo-Yoji.
“Right. It’s called fencing,” said Max-Ernest knowledgeably. “Only this time, we’re the criminals.”
“Great idea,” said Cass. “I’ve been in lots of pawnshops.”
Her friends looked at her in surprise.
“My grandfathers had an antiques store, remember?” Cass stepped up the pace. “I bet Vegas has a bunch of pawnshops. All these people going broke…” She gestured disdainfully to the crowds of tourists and gamblers around them.
They were walking down the famous Las Vegas Strip, which was a bit like walking through an atlas come to life, with cartoon versions of Paris, Venice, and New York right next to one another. Not to mention hotel roller coasters. White tigers. Wave machines. A life-size pirate’s galleon. And all-you-can-eat prime rib for less than five dollars. All lit up by enough lightbulbs to service all seven continents.
“Do you think we should go in the direction of the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty?” asked Max-Ernest.
“I think we should get off this street,” said Cass.
When you’re walking down the Strip, it’s easy to think that Las Vegas is all flashy casinos, fancy hotels, and oversize carnival rides. But only a short distance away, it’s possible to find a very different sort of place.
On the block where they now found themselves, drunks were lying on the sidewalk, and uncollected garbage spilled out of cans. The buildings looked old and uncared for.
“Are we sure this is the best place to look?” Max-Ernest, by the sound of it, was far from sure.
“I’ve spent half my life going into pawnshops with my grandfathers—this is exactly the right kind of place,” insisted Cass. Still, even she seemed a little nervous as she looked down the block.
Suddenly, she smiled and shook her head. “Look who’s here!” She pointed to a man leaning against a store window several feet ahead of them. He looked like a bum—or a hobo—and he was wearing a familiar stained fisherman’s hat with an old pigeon feather stuck in it.