by Annie Dalton
“I can’t just do nothing,” I whimpered to myself.
The cat blinked her moonlit eyes.
That’s right, you can’t, babe, and you mustn’t -that’s giving her total control of the situation.
It was almost like Lola was there with me. That’s so exactly what she’d say.
“But that means I’d have to go and find her?” I
whispered.
I’m truly not good at confrontations.
I could hear the kitty’s husky purr.
Don’t think, babe, just do it, my soulmate said firmly inside my head.
Yeah, just do it, Mel, I told myself shakily.
I’d clocked up a lot of shimmering experience on my last mission, morphing through inner city
London like a pro - but then I’d known where I was going! Since I had no idea where Maia was, I focused on the little Hell minx herself and sent myself wherever. SHIMMER.
The boat with its peaceful river sounds disappeared.
Drunken singing drifted from a scuzzy Egyptian bar. Even from outside you could tell it was a real dive.
She was sitting outside in the dirt with two other PODS teenagers. Between them they’d accumulated a large collection of empty bottles which I assume they’d brought with them.
The boy was got up like a crude look-alike of my buddy Reuben, down to the baby dreads, presumably a PODS idea of a joke. He gave off that type of Darkness you normally only meet in dreams.
I didn’t waste my energy on the girl. One glance at that evil Lola clone was enough.
The boy sussed my vibes without looking up. “Oh-oh,” he sniggered, “You’ve blown it now, Mazzie baby!”
“Yeah, carita,” drawled the girl clone, taking off Lola’s voice and failing big time. “Little Miss Innocent, she looks REALLY mad!!”
To my surprise, Maia went as white as a sheet. For once I’d done the last thing she expected.
She hissed something to her mates in a language that made my head hurt. There was a muddy ripple and suddenly they’d gone.
She jumped up, seeming genuinely agitated.
“Melanie, I know how this must look!”
I was shaking like a leaf, but I wasn’t going to let her see.
“Let’s see you charm your way out of this one, ‘Mazzie baby’!” I told her.
Then Maia did the last thing / expected. She threw her arms around me, crying into my neck like a little kid.
“It’s not like you think, Melanie! I wanted to come back to angel school, I really did,” she wailed. “But those kids won’t let me and now I’ll have to stay in the Hell dimensions for ever!”
I had never knowingly been cried over by a PODS, and I was fairly sure it wasn’t good for my health. I stealthily tried to prise myself free.
She took the hint and let me go. “I’m sorry I lied,” she wept. “I never met Brice, but we all knew about him. He had a massive reputation at my school.”
I bet! I could see him, slouching along in his ripped jeans, Hell fumes wafting from his Astral Garbage T-shirt.
“When you guys let him come back it rocked the whole school,” Maia said tearfully. “A rumour started up that it was all down to this really special angel girl who had helped Brice straighten himself out.” She darted a look under her lashes. “That was you, Melanie.”
“Oh, don’t insult me,” I protested. “Even I’m not that stupid.”
“No babe, listen,” she said wiping her eyes. “I know Lola’s been there for Brice, I do know that, but you’re the one who really showed him he was on the wrong path. When he walked in on you and the little girl - Molly, wasn’t it? - in the middle of that German air raid, you were so innocent and brave, you - you just blew him away.” Maia’s voice had gone husky with emotion.
She was saying something Lola often says herself. Of course that didn’t mean it wasn’t a trick. Plus as you can imagine I wasn’t too thrilled at the idea of my name being thrown around the Hell dimensions.
“I want to go back home, Mel!” she wailed. “I want to wake up to the smell of wild lilacs, like when
I started angel school. But I took the wrong path like Brice.” Tears and snot were getting mixed up on her face but Maia was so beside herself, she didn’t seem to care. “I made a huge mistake,” she sobbed. “Don’t you think I KNOW that? That’s why I need you, Melanie, to help me put it right!”
I was stunned. “Maia, I don’t have that kind of power—”
“You DO! You just have to let me help you with some really big case!” she wept. “Mission,” I corrected.
She nodded humbly, wiping her nose with her sleeve. “I was thinking something like the saving Egypt thing,” she said in a slightly calmer voice. “If I helped you pull that off, the Agency would have to see I’d changed, yeah? You said everyone deserves a second chance, right?”
As usual, Maia had totally spun me around. I wanted to believe her story about innocent Mel with the power to touch Dark angels’ hearts. I wanted to be that incredibly special angel girl she described.
“So why didn’t you tell me the truth right off?” I asked dubiously.
“That’s what I keep asking myself,” she wailed. “Like, just tell her the truth, you silly mare! Mel can handle it! I guess lying is too much like second nature now.” She blew her nose loudly - on a tissue I was relieved to see. “Sometimes I almost believe myself, you know?”
I felt a reluctant twinge of sympathy. Believing your own lies isn’t totally exclusive to Dark angels. But too many things still weren’t adding up.
“If you were so desperate to win yourself some brownie points with the Agency, why the sassafras didn’t you support me and the girls when you had the chance?” I heard myself ask.
“I know!” Maia said earnestly. “I SO let you down, but Melanie, truly, I’ve been under the most stress. Those kids you saw just now used to be my mates, but when they heard about my plan to switch Agencies, they went totally Dark on me: harassing me twenty-four seven, sending horrible texts threatening to expose me.” I saw her swallow hard. “Just before you showed up, they were saying I have to do this really evil dare or they’ll—”
“Or they’ll—?”
Maia gave a frightened whimper. “Don’t. I’m scared, Mel. I know I’ve been into some bad stuff, but Leela and Rufio are in a league all by themselves.”
Leela and Rufio. Even their names were creepy echoes of my angel buddies’ names.
“One chance, that’s all I’m asking! Just don’t make me go back,” she begged. “Please don’t make me go back to that place.”
I had a chilling flash of Sky walking off into the
dark.
Now I ask myself: would I have acted differently if Helix had been there to guide me? But when you’re all alone in the Universe, you sometimes have to take a risk and hope it will turn out for the best.
“One chance,” I agreed huskily. “But no more games.”
“I swear!” Maia promised, sniffing back her tears, and she gave me a sweet if wobbly smile.
“Omigosh,” she said suddenly in a wondering voice. “I guess this is like the first day of the rest of my life, right? This is where I finally get a handle on all that love and light stuff?”
“Yeah,” I said suddenly uneasy, “I guess it is.”
And we shimmered back to Cleopatra’s barge to begin Maia’s new life.
Chapter Sixteen
You know what I just realised?” I said to Maia one morning.
The barge was gliding past a typical Egyptian village, set among a patchwork of unnaturally bright green fields.
“Sorry babe, I was miles away. What?”
“These strips of land alongside the banks are basically Egypt! Like, ALL of it! The rest is just pure sand stretching on forever.”
“Wow,” Maia said in an interested voice. “I suppose that’s right.”
“I totally get now why Cleopatra admires those old-style pharaohs. They built that whole massive civilisation out of s
and and river mud basically.”
Like all the villages we’d seen, this one had a water wheel, kept turning by a plodding donkey, to ensure the villagers’ crops were well watered. In a country where it rains once in twenty years if you’re lucky, water is unbelievably precious.
“It looks so permanent, doesn’t it,” I said wistfully.
You couldn’t travel through Egypt in these times, and not know that the lives of ordinary Egyptians hung by a thread. Basically, everyone’s survival depended on the yearly floods. If the Nile rose too high, like Adjo said happened soon after Cleopatra became queen, seeds just rotted in the earth, and everyone went hungry. One year the waters rose so high that the crocodiles swam right into the flooded houses and snatched human babies out of their cradles.
But if the flood waters failed to rise at the right time, or they didn’t rise high enough again, Egypt went hungry. Since you never totally know what Mother Nature has up her sleeve, everyone just had to trust they’d be taken care of.
“I don’t know how they bear it,” I said, half to myself.
Maia went quiet, gazing over the orchards and fields, resting her chin on her hands. “I guess that’s why they love their gods so much,” she said at last. “They know they can’t bear it, without, you know, divine help.”
I was gobsmacked. Maia was turning over her new leaf so fast it literally made me dizzy. Less than two days had passed since I agreed to help her get back to Heaven, yet she was already thinking like a true angel.
And she had totally kept her promise. These days she took equal turns minding the girls. And when Khamsin went down with a bad tummy bug, Maia actually asked humbly if I’d remind her of the approved Agency technique for sending vibes! She said she’d hate to do it wrong and accidentally make Khamsin worse.
She still went walkabout most days, but she was usually back after an hour or two. She said her wanderings helped her to get her head together, and I chose to believe her.
But I felt like Khamsin’s cat, with her tail-tip tensely twitching.
I didn’t trust Maia, not deep down.
You’d always be wondering, is Maia for real? Maia said that first night.
I still didn’t know the answer to that question. I just knew if I left her alone with the girls, I’d get a panicky urge to check up on her.
Once I rushed up on deck, with a terrible premonition that something had happened to
Khamsin. Maia explained later that Khamsin just had a momentary wobble; she was scared her mum only thought she’d recreated Nefertiti’s magical blend.
But when I showed up, Maia was totally on it. She had an arm around each girl, murmuring encouragingly. Her expression was so calm and caring, she could have been an angel in a picture book.
I felt incredibly ashamed of my nasty suspicions, yet no matter how hard I tried, they never totally went away.
For some reason Khamsin was taking ages to recover from her bug, despite Maia and me taking turns to pump healing vibes into her every hour on the hour, not to mention the strong herbal potions Lady Iras prepared with her own hands.
Sometimes after I’d been beaming vibes Khamsin would actually seem to perk up. But next time it was my turn I’d find her feeling as bad as ever.
Maia pointed out that Khamsin had been through a lot in a very short time. “We shouldn’t be surprised if she’s having a reaction,” she said calmly.
But it disturbed me to see feisty Khamsin losing more of her sparkle every day.
When Lady Iras gave the girls an exquisitely elegant hand-painted glass bottle to hold the finished fragrance, Khamsin hardly glanced at it. It was Amisi who carefully decanted the blend from its old humble container.
One hot golden afternoon we sailed past the partially ruined buildings of an abandoned city. I heard Lady Iras tell the girls that Queen Nefertiti and the Pharaoh Akhenaten originally had it built to be their new, v. grandiose, capital city. They had left their old city behind at around the same time they decided to ban Egypt’s old religion and declare themselves sun gods. (Khaled did say they were a bit mad.)
After Nefertiti died - or was murdered, no one seemed too sure - the old-style priests angrily pulled most of their new-style city down, and tried to have Nefertiti’s name obliterated from history for ever.
Khamsin seemed really down after she heard this. I know I was. We’d both been thinking of Nefertiti’s perfume as a magic potion which would solve Egypt’s problems at one stroke - or one sniff.
Well, it clearly hadn’t solved Nefertiti’s problems, I thought, as we gradually left those depressing ruins behind.
It dawned on me that the girls and I had all been living in a kind of beautiful daydream and pretending it was real. Khamsin and Amisi didn’t have too much life experience, but I was an angel. I had no excuse. How exactly had I imagined that one little bottle of perfume could save Egypt forever?
At that moment, Khamsin turned white and crumpled to the deck. Amisi ran to her with a cry.
Lady Iras held smelling salts under Khamsin’s nose, quickly bringing her out of her faint.
“Everything went so dark,” Khamsin kept saying shakily.
Lady Iras laid her hand on Khamsin’s forehead. “You have a very high fever,” she exclaimed. “You must get out of this hot sun and rest.”
Amisi helped Khamsin back to the cabin. “I will sponge your face,” she said gently. “That will soon bring the fever down.”
Khamsin looked at Amisi as if she didn’t know who she was.
“I wish I hadn’t brought you now,” she burst out in a strange high voice. “You’re always following me around like a stupid little puppy. Sometimes I feel like I can’t breathe.”
Amisi gasped and ran out of the cabin, staying away all the rest of the day.
Next day Khamsin didn’t seem to remember the hurtful things she’d said, but I could see Amisi retreating into herself. Maybe she’d always thought their friendship was too good to be true.
That day we were due to pass Giza. Adjo and Baraka had promised to take the girls to see the pyramids - they’d been talking about it for days. But when it came to it, Khamsin felt too weak to leave the boat. Khamsin and Amisi just sat watching the famous skyline silently slide past, as if they were watching all their fabulous dreams for the future gradually float out of reach.
Next morning, I woke before it was light to hear wild drumming and hundreds of voices singing some kind of joyful song of praise.
I rushed up on deck to find Maia peering through the morning mists, looking distinctly spooked.
People were emerging from their cabins, having grabbed wraps or bed sheets to make themselves decent. Even Khamsin made it up on deck. Everyone wanted to know who was singing in the mist. Whoever they were, they adored Cleopatra! I heard her name being sung over and over, and something about her being a living goddess and ruling Egypt forever.
A gap suddenly opened in the mist as the first rays of light streamed down to Earth. Everyone gasped.
The river was crowded with small papyrus boats, so thickly decorated with flowers they literally looked like little floating gardens!
Each fragile paper boat carried several villagers. One carried three bony old priests and a golden statue of Hapy, the river god.
Baraka called out to them, wanting to know who they were and what they wanted. It turned out these were villagers Cleopatra had helped when their homes were flooded out, soon after she became queen. She had arranged for new houses to be built, set further back from the Nile, and ordered grain to be sent from the royal granaries, enough to feed everyone until next harvest.
Hearing rumours of a mysterious royal barge travelling down their stretch of the Nile, the grateful villagers had brought gifts of food, flowers and precious spices; they even brought handmade toys for Cleopatra’s little boy.
The villagers poured on to the barge, still drumming and singing Cleopatra’s praises. They slung a garland of fresh lotus blossoms around Mardian’s neck (I know!) and t
hrew handfuls of marigolds, jasmine and coloured rice as if they were at a wedding.
Everyone seemed to catch the party spirit! Baraka and Adjo produced musical instruments. The slaves brought extra platters of food and jugs of wine. Even the kitty joined in, chasing after grains of rice, and allowing the village children to pet her.
Kha msin and Amisi seemed as enchanted as everyone else, though Khamsin still had shadows like dark thumbprints under her eyes.
Mardian was smiling and nodding to the beat. Thanks to everyone’s hard work, a growing caravan of carpet-makers, jewellers and whoever was slowly snaking along the edge of the desert towards Alexandria. Mardian was probably thinking it wouldn’t hurt to let their hair down for a few hours.
I noticed one of the priests on the edge of the party he’d helped to create. Silent and frowning, he seemed to be watching something the wildly celebrating villagers couldn’t see.
I moved in front of him, wondering what was making him look so disturbed. To my horror, he was looking straight at Maia.
She had her arm around Amisi. I heard her whisper softly. “Pick up the lotus flower, sweetie, that’s it, pick it up and put it in Khamsin’s hair, let her know you’re her friend.”
Maia’s voice was so sweet and lulling, I was suddenly finding it hard to think.
The Universe went into slow motion as she raised her forefinger, sketching a strange symbol in the air.
The flower was no longer a flower. It was black and scuttling with a spiked tail like a cartoon devil. In front of my eyes, Maia had turned a lotus into a scorpion.
Like a sleepwalker, Amisi slowly stretched out her hand. She was maybe two centimetres from picking up the deadly creature, when Khamsin’s cat made an urgent warbling sound in her throat and broke the spell.
Amisi gasped, seeing what she’d been about to do. Snatching off her sandal she flipped the scorpion into the river.
Her face had gone chalky with shock. Amisi had only inherited snake magic from her ancestors, I remembered, not scorpion magic.
“The dark gods wanted to play a trick on your friend,” the priest told her in his thin old man’s voice. “But I knew the little cat would protect you both.”
