Jagger Jones and the Mummy's Ankh

by Malayna Evans

  Akhenaten, tall and gangly with an egg-shaped head and a bare belly bulging over his kilt, stared down at them. He wore a towering, rounded hat and a gaudy necklace. Four women lined up behind him. The queen was nearly as tall, with a transparent dress that revealed her arms and legs. Three princesses followed her, all wearing chunky necklaces like their dad’s and all bald but for ponytails that stuck out on the side of each girl’s head.

  “Why are you so interested in him?” Aria asked, staring up at the image. “I mean, there were loads of pharaohs. What’s so special about him?”

  “Lots of things,” Jagger said as he moved the light up, and inched forward. “Including this guy here. He’s the royal family’s sun god.” A giant sun disk dominated much of the wall. Its rays ended in claw-like hands that reached toward the family members, looking as though it wanted to pat them on the head, or, more ominously, catch them in its claws like toys in some vintage, arcade game.

  “That’s a god? I thought Egyptian gods were people with animal heads.” Aria reached out, and placed both palms against the etched rock.

  “You need to pay more attention in social studies. Egyptian gods—”

  Jagger Jones! Come!

  Jagger pivoted toward the voice. He wiped his sweaty hands on his pants, glancing at Aria. No reaction. But he couldn’t be imagining it. His imagination couldn’t have led him to a buried tomb! He aimed his flashlight down the hall, feeling jingly, like he’d just stuck his finger in an outlet.

  Aria nudged him, and he moved forward, holding his phone in one hand and pulling his sister with the other. Tomb discovery was equal parts thrilling and terrifying; he wanted her close. The air grew staler as they crept farther down the hall.

  “Noooo!” Jagger moaned when his phone’s flashlight illuminated a problem about fifteen feet in.

  A giant boulder blocked the hallway.

  He banged his hand against the oversized rock, his stomach churning with disappointment.

  Jagger Jones!

  She was on the other side. She must be in the tomb chamber. The mere thought of an undiscovered tomb chamber sent his pulse racing. Bracing his back against the wall, Jagger tried shoving the boulder to one side, and then the other. The rock wouldn’t budge.

  “Open already!” he muttered. He needed to get into the room that lay beyond this stupid rock.

  Aria flashed him her you’re-annoying-but-I-feel-sorry-for-you face. “Let’s go get Mom.” She yanked on his sweaty T-shirt, then grimaced and wiped her hands on her leopard-print leggings.

  He really must have been losing his mind if Aria sounded like the rational one. Still, he wasn’t ready to admit defeat. He’d have to take Aria back to Mom then return alone. He sighed. Resolved, he turned to light their way out, anxious to lose his sister so he could figure out how to get into the tomb chamber without the distraction of Aria buzzing around him.

  Jagger Jones!

  Jagger turned back to give the boulder one last glance. “Whoa!”

  It had shifted, leaving a gap big enough for them to sneak through. Darkness poured out from the other side. The velvety darkness seemed tangible, like something one could touch and taste. It even smelled dark.

  Jagger Jones! Come!

  Her voice drifted out, oozing toward him like renegade smoke.

  “Aria, do you see this?” He spun his sister around.

  “Creepy.” She budged closer to him. Then she leaned forward, drawn to the gloom. “Let’s go in!”

  Jagger held onto her, hesitating. He needed to keep going, but Aria should be back in the rental house with Mom.

  “Come on.” She yanked her arm, but he held her fast, weighing his options.

  The urge to see what was in that room, to meet the girl who’d been calling out to him, was too strong to resist. He pushed Aria behind him, took a breath, and slipped past the rock, shining his flashlight around and gasping in awe.

  The room glittered with gold. By some miracle, the tomb had escaped the notice of both ancient tomb robbers and modern scholars. He’d be a hero to geeks across the globe.

  His breath quickened as he inched forward, trying not to step on any priceless objects. There was a chair with lion’s paw feet, a gold chest, a broken chariot with gem-studded wheels, loads of gold and alabaster jugs, and more ancient knickknacks than his brain could process. Centuries of dust couldn’t hide the beauty or fortune stuffed into this small room.

  “Are we rich? We’re rich, aren’t we?” Aria exclaimed.

  He ignored her, captivated by the open, stone box that stood at the far end of the room, flanked by two larger-than-life dog-headed statues. They were made of black stone and embossed with more gold. They gave him the heebie-jeebies. With a shiver, he shifted his attention back to the box. He knew it should contain a gold coffin built to house the tomb’s mummy. He also knew the dog-headed guards couldn’t possibly be watching him, but they felt alive, nonetheless.

  “It moved!” Aria pointed. “Did you see that dog thing’s eyes? They moved.”

  “It’s a statue.” He shifted closer to his sister. “It can’t move.”

  “Maybe we should get Mom.” Aria eyeballed the guards as if she expected them to wake up, and start searching for their next meal.

  Jagger Jones!

  The ghostly voice was coming from inside the stone box.

  “One minute, lil’ sis,” he croaked. “I have to see the mummy.”

  “Just do what you have to do, and let’s go. Mom is gonna kill us when she finds out we discovered a tomb while she was asleep. Maybe we should take this secret to our graves.” Aria jabbered when she was anxious. “Think we can keep it secret and still get rich off it?” Her eyes darted from a gold chest to a gold chair. “Because this looks like a serious Michigan Avenue shopping spree …”

  Jagger tuned her out, holding his breath as he moved past the statues. He peered into the box, stomach churning. The lid lay on the ground by his feet. Surprisingly, the lid of the golden coffin nestled inside the box was gone too, leaving the mummy exposed. The bandages were intact and still clean; they covered every speck of the small body, too big to be a child but not quite an adult either.

  “No way,” he mumbled, staring at the large, gold amulet sitting on the mummy’s belly. Jagger knew immediately that the amulet was the source of the mysterious voice. What he didn’t know was how.

  He gaped at the ankh, the Egyptian symbol of life, shaped like a cross with a loop at the top. The ankh was covered in gemstones that glimmered in the dim light. Something about the gemstones was off. They were transparent, more like holographic projections than real gemstones. And they seemed animated. Colorful lights rattled inside them, as if fireflies were trapped inside. But as unusual as they were, they couldn’t explain the voice. Could they?

  Wracking his brain for a scientific explanation, Jagger leaned in to get a better view of the fat, green chunk of malachite in the center of the ankh, bigger and sparklier than the other gemstones, just as Aria’s hand reached for it.

  He froze, terrified. He couldn’t have said why, but he knew they shouldn’t touch that thing.

  “DON’T!”

  His yell was drowned out by a strong wind that whirled, suddenly, around them. He grabbed his sister as a vortex formed. Colorful lights danced in the wind, as if they’d escaped from the gemstones.

  “What’s happening?” Aria clutched the amulet, eyes wide.

  “Let go of it!”

  He didn’t know if Aria didn’t hear him, or if she was ignoring him. Either way, it was too late.

  They fell!

  Jagger reached for Aria’s hand as their bodies spun, weightless, in empty space. Colorful lights swirled around them. The silence was deafening, even more profound after the voice had reverberated through his head for the past hour. Though Aria’s mouth was open wide like she was screaming, he couldn’t hear a thing.

  With a sudden bump, Jagger felt the familiar comfort
of solid ground beneath him as his stomach continued to tumble. Maybe he was sick, and this was all a dream. But how could that explain the plush carpet beneath him, or the bright light that streamed around him, or the unfamiliar smell wafting on the breeze that brushed his cheek?

  Daring a panicked look around, Jagger gasped. “What the …”

  “Breathe,” Aria whispered. That’s what Mom said when unexpected things happened.

  But this wasn’t unexpected. This was impossible!

  A ROYAL SHOCK

  They weren’t in the tomb anymore.

  And they weren’t alone.

  A girl, who looked a year or two older than Jagger, stood ten feet away, her back to a large, luxurious bed.

  She was the fiercest looking girl Jagger had ever seen, and she was dressed in ancient Egyptian clothes like the ones he’d seen in history books. Her white, linen, shift dress fell to her knees. Golden sandals wound up her calves, and thick, gold bands circled her biceps like snakes. Her skin was a honey brown, like his, and she was bald. Well, not entirely bald. A thick, black ponytail made up of three fat braids hung down one side of her face like a lopsided curtain.

  “Nice hairdo,” Aria deadpanned.

  “It means she’s still a kid,” he whispered back without looking at his sister. His eyes were stuck to the girl, but her background—a bedroom drenched in ancient Egyptian artifacts—was just as astonishing.

  The girl shook her head, and the colorful amulets hanging from her braids jingled like armor. “How did you get here? Why do you look like …”? She bared her teeth. Was she angry? Her glare was aimed at Aria, as if thirteen-year-old boys fell out of the sky every day, but eleven-year-old girls were as unexpected as little, green aliens.

  Jagger struggled to process the room. The wall beyond the bed was open to the outside. Columns, striped with bold bands of color, separated the internal space from the outdoors. He caught a glimpse of the Nile River flowing past, beyond palm trees that waved in the wind next to golden chairs with lion’s paw feet. Inside, the room was stuffed with gold chests, alabaster vases, cedar chairs, and rich rugs. A blue ceiling with gold stars stretched over Jagger’s head, and a painted fish poked its head out from the rug beneath his feet, as if it were swimming across the marble floor. The walls were painted with ancient Egyptian trees and animals; a blue goose flew across the wall above the girl’s shoulder. The smell of cedar and cinnamon filled Jagger’s nose, reminding him of Mom’s favorite candle, mined from the shelves of an outdoor market in Bangkok.

  The girl shifted her eyes from Aria to Jagger. “I cast the Meseneh Rek spell to summon you, Jagger Jones.” She folded her arms and blew a puff of air. “I require your help.” She was definitely the girl who’d been in his head. Her voice was low and musical. And familiar. “Whether you know it or not, you need mine too. We’re both in grave danger.”

  Danger?

  “We’re in danger, because you kidnapped us!” Aria shot back. Jagger was too scared and confused to even make it to mad. What was going on here?

  The girl scowled at Aria, as if his little sister was a dung beetle doing the backstroke through her favorite soup. “I don’t know how you got here. I summoned only Jagger Jones.” She lifted her chin. “And I assure you, the Princess of the Red and Black Land does not steal children. My family is in danger. And this boy shares our danger.” She pointed a bejeweled finger at Jagger.

  The Princess of the Red and Black Land?

  Jagger knew that title. He knew that ancient Egyptians sometimes referred to their country as the “Red and Black Land.”

  “I don’t care if you’re Santa Claus,” Aria retorted. “You’ve somehow brought us to this … this place. We’re going to call our mom. And the police!”

  The girl flashed a crooked smile, as if she felt genuinely sorry for the overwrought child before her. “If you’re looking for authority figures, you’ve landed in the right place. I’m Princess Meretaten, eldest daughter of Pharaoh Akhenaten and Queen Nefertiti, may they have life, prosperity, and health.”

  Meretaten? That name was familiar. He’d read about the royal princesses of Amarna. But she couldn’t be the Meretaten. “What do you mean?” Jagger asked.

  “Who cares what she means?” Aria rounded on him. “There has to be a trap door on the floor of that tomb. We need to get back. And we don’t even know where we are!”

  Jagger listened to his sister. He watched her mouth, focusing on the words. He imagined the letters hovering above her head in bold font. They were wrong somehow. Off. He closed his eyes, picturing the words as cryptograms. Cryptograms could be decoded. He just needed the cipher.

  Red and Black Land.

  Meretaten.

  Velocity equals distance travelled divided by time.

  He took a deep breath. Okay, so Einstein’s theories about time travel must be right. But this? He opened his eyes. He couldn’t believe the words he was about to utter.

  “I don’t think where we are is the problem.” Jagger raised his voice to compete with the sound of his own heartbeat. He couldn’t begin to calculate just how unlikely this was, and that was saying something—Jagger could calculate just about anything. “I think the problem is when.”

  “When?” Aria stared at him like he was an eight-tentacled, flying octopus. But the girl gave him a solemn nod, as if Jagger was a pet that had just performed a clever trick.

  “Yeah. When.”

  Aria bit her lip, looking around like she expected an exit sign to flash on the wall next to one of the flying birds.

  “Don’t freak out,” he continued. “Some legit scientific theories suggest time travel is possible. Even Einstein thought so. You’ve heard of Einstein, right?”

  “Einstein? Seriously? We need to get you to a hospital!” Aria put her hand on Jagger’s head like Grams did when checking for a fever. “Something’s wrong with you. You don’t believe in anything that’s not science-y. And you think we’ve travelled through time?”

  “Time travel is science-y, lil’ sis.” Jagger sounded calmer than he felt. “And this place is too authentic to be fake. Think about what’s happened to us in the past hour. I followed a voice into the desert, and it led me to a tomb. You touched an amulet, and, bam! You felt that … thing that happened to us. And here we are. None of this makes sense. But the empirical evidence …”

  Aria shook her head. She wasn’t buying this.

  Jagger sighed. Time to point out the pyramid-sized elephant in the room. “Some evidence can’t be discounted. Think about the language you’re using right now.”

  Aria crinkled her nose like she did when Grams tried to explain fractions.

  The princess huffed. “We don’t have time for this. We must proceed—”

  “Wait!” Jagger interrupted her, sticking out a hand out like a traffic cop before he turned back to Aria. “Okay. Let’s try this. Repeat after me.”

  One eyebrow crawled up, but she didn’t argue. With Aria, that was a win.

  “I have the best big brother in the world.”

  She rolled her eyes but played along. “I have—”

  “Think of the words you’re saying.”

  “… the best …” Aria’s hand flew to her mouth as she realized they were both speaking a language they’d never even heard before, a language no one had heard for centuries.

  This fall back through time had gifted them with the ability to speak ancient Egyptian.

  It was so natural he hadn’t even noticed at first. Jagger had to admit, even Einstein, Stephen Hawking, and Marie Curie combined couldn’t have come up with a scientific explanation for that.

  Aria wound her fingers behind her neck and sucked in a few deep breaths. Then she shook her head and released a nervous giggle. “And you thought Mom’s travel plans were bad! How far back are we?”

  “About three thousand years,” Jagger replied. He wanted to cry, but he felt like he should act tough for Aria’s sake, which was r
idiculous since they both knew she was tougher than him.

  “Aaaaand we’re still breathing,” Aria said with a stupefied grin, before turning her attention to the girl. “Did she say her name was Merry Hot One?” she whispered to Jagger.

  A sense of relief washed over him. Aria was always up for an adventure, but her tantrums were legendary. Happy she was going to hold it together, he whispered back, sounding out the princess’s name: “Mare-et-ah-tun.”

  Aria put her hands on her hips and shook her head. “No. I just can’t with that. I’m gonna call you …” She stared at the ceiling. “Tatia!”

  The princess tapped her fingers against the gold bands encircling her upper arms, lips pursed. Jagger knew the feeling—his sister could be exhausting.

  “So, Tatia.” Aria grinned at the girl. “Let’s start over. I’m Aria Jones. This is my brother, Jagger. He woke up whack-a-doo in the middle of the night and, voila, here we are. So what’s your story?”

  Jagger rolled his eyes. He hated it when she acted older than him—or worse, smarter.

  “Sister?” The girl’s incredulous glance shifted back and forth from Jagger to Aria. “I see.” Her posture—stiff and perfect—melted. Even her face seemed to relax. “I’m sorry, Aria Jones. I didn’t summon you. I summoned your brother at the behest of the old gods. But the Meseneh Rek spell is powerful magic, and powerful magic can be … fickle. I didn’t intend to put you in danger. But in truth,” she said, shaking her head. “Both of your lives were at risk whether I summoned you or not.”

  “What are you talking about?” Jagger leaned toward her. “What do you mean our lives are at risk? And what Time Travel spell? You’re telling me you can bend time? How?”

  “Let’s focus on the danger part.” Aria poked him.

  She had a point, but questions were swimming through his head like fish through the Chicago River. He wanted them answered. All of them. Now. “And what’s this about ‘the old gods?’ Shouldn’t you be loyal to your family’s sun god, the Aten? I thought your dad banned all the old gods.”