Scorpion Scheme Read online

  I seized his hand, threw it in his lap, and stood up.

  The guy stood up too, laughing as he blocked me. He cupped his hands in the air like he was squeezing a pair of breasts or my rear end.

  "Try it and die," I said. "Now get out of my way."

  The guy chortled and air-squeezed again. Honk honk.

  Tucker growled something at him in Arabic, leaning toward him.

  The guy threw up his hands and oozed between me and Tucker, heading further down the aisle. "Sorry, sorry," he said to Tucker in English.

  Why should he apologize to Tucker? He hadn't grabbed Tucker's knee.

  "Fuck yourself," I told the douche, but not too loud. I didn't want to get tossed into an Egyptian prison.

  Tucker dropped into the seat next to me, piling the food in his lap. "You okay? He came out of nowhere."

  I rolled my eyes. "My knee will survive. I wish I could smash his face, though."

  "Me too," said Tucker. "We okay?"

  I shrugged.

  "Am I better than that guy?"

  "Marginally." I allowed, and when he offered to take my hand, I wrapped my fingers around his.

  "Maybe we should spring for a taxi or Uber-Careem next time. The two ride share companies merged," he explained, but that wasn't the crucial part to me.

  "What? You're suggesting taking a car?"

  "You're allowed, after an IED, an international flight, a toilet spray, and a full ER shift. Sorry, I'm worried about money."

  I nodded but remembered the cash he'd spent on food tonight. And the roses.

  "Every morning, I wake up and tell myself I'm not going to spend anything. But when I talk to Egyptian people about unemployment, I just … " He shook his head and stared at the bags in his lap.

  "I get it. And we have to eat. But I don't want to spend all night joking with your new friends on the street. I have to sleep, and I don't want you to shame me for it."

  "Shame you?"

  "Yeah. In medicine, you're shamed for eating or sleeping or going to the bathroom. It's crazy that we're supposed to take care of everyone else 24/7, but we're weak if we take a few seconds for ourselves."

  Tucker nodded. After a minute, he said, "I've got to think about this."

  "Okay." I squeezed his hand. "I'm sorry if I was hard on you. My head does hurt. And you did get rid of that douche bag."

  "You're welcome," he said, before he reverted to silence again.

  Fear welled in my chest—he's mad at me, he's going to leave me, I already lost Ryan, Tucker and I are fundamentally incompatible—but I breathed in and out and studied his face. He flashed me a quick smile that didn't touch his eyes.

  No, we weren't okay yet. Still, I didn't have to deal with a strange guy sing-songing fake Japanese and grabbing my knee.

  Part of me wanted to stay awake in case another IED hit.

  The other part of me thought, If a bomb hits, I'd better rest up first. And my body will shield Tucker's.

  Hope the douche gets it, though.

  I nodded off against the window, despite the loud conversations swirling around me. At least they weren't playing music this time.

  I jolted awake when the bus hit a bump.

  "You okay?" Tucker grabbed the bags and me, in that order.

  I blinked. "Are we there?"

  "Not yet." He patted my hair. "You can sleep some more."

  My mouth and eyes had both dried out, and pain still drummed a steady rhythm in my temples. "I guess I'm up now."

  "You want food?"

  I shook my head. "I'll eat when we get back."

  "You want a story to put you to sleep?"

  I smiled. "Kinky. Yes, but first you can tell me if that douche is still around, without making it obvious."

  "He got off on the last stop."

  "Thank goodness." I yawned and surveyed the bus, pleased by the lack of douche. "Okay. What's your story?"

  "I was looking up Serket, the scorpion goddess."

  "Why?"

  He shrugged and, for no reason, my heart melted. I kissed his cheek.

  He kissed mine, still subdued. "I love you."

  "I love you too." My eyes told him I wished we could touch more in public, and his eyes gleamed back before he changed the subject.

  "I read about Sarquet Industries, and I decided to research the goddess for clues. Did you know she's the goddess of medicine?"

  "Oh, that's cool. It also makes more sense why they'd name a medical record system after her."

  "And their whole corporation, yeah. Her name literally means 'she who causes the throat to breathe.'"

  "Kind of an odd way to phrase it when scorpions can kill you, right?"

  He shrugged. "Not usually adults. I looked that up too. There are 1500 scorpion species, but only about 25 are dangerous to us. Breathing problems, arrhythmias, paralysis and death. Kids might die, and anyone who's allergic. Usually it's more painful than anything else."

  "Huh. Well, it still seems backward to name the scorpion goddess as the goddess of medicine, but I'm a fan of breathing." I no longer take my respiratory system for granted after people have tried to strangle me.

  "They used to paint her with the scorpion on her head, its tail standing erect and ready to sting. They didn't want their goddess to be powerless."

  "I'm a fan of power." And I knew what standing erect meant to him.

  "I know you are." He winked at me. "She's a good goddess for you."

  Well, I could handle being compared to a goddess. Even if—especially if—she did sting. I laughed. "Did you know my astrological sign? I'm a Scorpio." I turned 27 on November seventh.

  "See? It's fate. I don't know if Serket ties into Osiris and Isis, though. I didn't have a chance to read about them."

  I blinked, still adjusting to the light. "Oh, I can tell you that." I deepened my voice like a movie announcer. "When Set took over the throne with Nephthys as his consort, the desert winds blew. The land turned barren. Brother turned against brother, and the world collapsed into war."

  "Brother had already turned against brother." Tucker glanced at me. "Isis wasn’t able to turn it around?"

  "No. She was searching for her husband’s body, with the help of Nephthys."

  "Ah. The sister felt guilty?"

  "Super guilty. Maybe about having sex with her brother/bro-in-law, maybe about triggering Set, maybe both. Either way, interesting tidbit: Isis and Nephthys changed into falcons, or kites, to search for Osiris."

  Tucker frowned. "They asked someone to fly them as kites? What if someone let go of the string?"

  I giggled. "I thought the same thing. I had to look it up. ‘Kites’ is another word for falcons. Their cries sound like grief. And falcons are associated with Horus—"

  "Horus, the other brother that no one cares about?"

  "No. Horus, the next generation. Patience, grasshopper." He laughed. He calls me grasshopper all the time. I patted his knee. I'm less sleazy than the douche. "First thing. They found Osiris's casket. It crashed into a tree near Byblos."

  Tucker sighed in recognition. "That's the name of a great restaurant in Montreal. Tori wouldn't share any of her chicken. I still remember that it came with tarragon yogurt and saffron."

  Tori's a cool cat (not literally; she's a resident doctor like us) and the artist who made us the card with the Egyptian quotes, but I waved him back to my story. "Byblos was an ancient city in what is now Lebanon."

  "Yeah, I know."

  "Pretty incredible, right?" I showed him a map I'd loaded up on my phone earlier. "The casket would have had to float all the way from the Nile to the Mediterranean Sea, past what is now Israel, up to Byblos, which is north of what’s now Beirut." In other words, a really long way for any bird to fly or casket to float.

  Tucker read my mind. "It's a more interesting story that way. So, putting aside probability and p values, Isis found his body."

  "Well, first the king and queen of Byblos found the tree that the casket was lodged inside. The tree ha
d taken on the beauty and even the scent of Osiris. The royal couple cut down the tree and used it as a central pillar in the court."

  Tucker's nostrils flared. "And that's helpful how?"

  "Yeah. Drowned in a casket, crashed into a tree, and cut down as a tree. I thought, Welp, he’s dead x 3. But actually, he was kind of reborn into the tree."

  "Osiris was dead, but the tree absorbed his essence."

  I nodded.

  Tucker shook his head. "Then the king and queen of Byblos cut it down."

  "Right, dead x 3—but born x 4. He's still in that tree, whether it's been cut down or not." I yawned. What a day. "Isis disguises herself as an older woman and makes friends with the—Bybliotic?—queen’s handmaidens by the shore. That queen eventually trusts Isis to nursemaid her own sons. Isis decides to make the younger Byblos prince immortal by 'burning away part of his mortality' every night."

  "Uh oh."

  "Yeah, I don't know what that means, but it must've been bad because the Queen of Byblos catches her and freaks out, whereupon Isis reveals herself as the goddess. The King and Queen beg Isis to spare their lives, and Isis relinquishes them on one condition: she wants that central pillar."

  Tucker's mouth twitched between a smile and a frown. "The Osiris tree."

  "Exactly. Somehow, that tree gets converted to human form, and Isis and Nephthys embalm his body and carry out funeral rituals. Osiris is considered the very first mummy."

  Tucker snapped his fingers. "I read about that!"

  "Right. They carry his mummy home and hide it in the marshes of the Nile Delta. Isis needs more ritual herbs, so she sets out, leaving her sister to stand guard—"

  "Nuh-uh!"

  "Uh huh. Set persuades Nephthys to tell him where Osiris's body is. Then he hacks it up and throws all the pieces into the Nile."

  20

  Saturday

  Dead x 4.

  I woke up in our hotel bed, my head still aching. I hate to admit it, but that's a souvenir from a concussion on the world's worst flight a month ago: occasionally, when head pain skewers me, I wish someone would shoot me in the brainstem and get it over with.

  Tucker's legs spasmed. He'd stolen most of the covers, and his sweat smelled like onions. I snagged the top cover, rolled on my back, and tried to sink into sleep.

  Something else had woken me up. But what?

  Dead x 4. I was dream-musing about super-slayed Osiris. Drowned, smashed into a tree, chopped down as a tree, and dismembered as a mummy. Can't get much deader than that.

  I tried turning on each side and even on my stomach while Tucker snored.

  Finally, I gave up and checked my phone. Even though I'd turned off notifications, my Spidey sense must have kicked into overdrive. Ten minutes ago, at 5 a.m., I'd received a message from Noeline Momberg.

  Dr. Sze, could you please make sure Gizelda Becker gets her red book? She's not answering her phone. She checked out of her hotel. Her flight's not until Thursday morning.

  We're flying to ZA to see a surgeon.

  I think she'll like Jaco and Fleur's drawings.

  I sent it to your hotel. Many thanks.

  The red book. Could this be Mr. Becker's notes?

  The notes Gizelda had refused to give me?

  If Gizelda had made friends with the Mombergs, maybe she'd let the children draw in the pretty red notebook to distract them from their dad's eye and to cheer them up before their urgent flight.

  I jumped into some clothes and popped down to the lobby to present my passport as ID. The elderly desk clerk handed me a palm-sized notebook covered in imitation red leather, and I remembered to tip him.

  "Thank you, Madam."

  "Did I just miss the woman who brought this? Maybe a whole family of four?" I asked him.

  He shook his head. "An Uber-Careem dropped it off, madam."

  The Mombergs must have headed straight to the airport. The drop-off would have cost more than the notebook was worth, something their family could ill-afford.

  Still, what a break for me.

  I shut myself in our bathroom and flipped on the light and fan, my heart already thudding in anticipation. If Gizelda had let kids play with the book, I didn't consider it top secret.

  I flipped past the childish pen scrawls inside the front cover, praying that they hadn't obscured anything vital further in.

  Gizelda Becker's neat, spare handwriting barely covered two pages. The remaining pages were either blank or filled with more Momberg baby art. She must not have been too thrilled with her father's pearls of wisdom. Still, I pored over the few words:

  Osiris

  Isis

  Set

  The eye of Horus

  Hathor

  golden disc

  My heart thrummed. The Becker notes actually made sense to me.

  Tucker and I had pieced together the rest of the legend last night before we'd fallen asleep. It goes a little something like this.

  Nephthys helps Isis find all the pieces of quadfecta-dead mummy Osiris, except his penis. Some say that a fish ate it. ("Ouch," from Tucker.)

  Still, they resurrect 99 percent of Osiris. Isis flies around him in falcon/kite form and miraculously becomes pregnant.

  Osiris can't rule without a dick—female leaders like Hatshepsut must've come later—so he descends to rule the underworld.

  Isis gives birth in the marshes of the Nile, the same area where she’d hidden Osiris’s body. This time, Nephthys keeps her secret. Isis and Osiris's son, Horus, survives and eventually challenges Set for the kingdom.

  Nine gods agree that Horus wins, but the sun god can't decide. Horus and Set fight for another 80 years, including one battle where they take the form of hippopotami.

  Set always plays dirty. He steals Horus's left eyeball while he's sleeping, and a goddess named Hathor has to restore his vision.

  In their final and strangest battle, Set dominates Horus by jacking off between his nephew's legs. In their culture, defiling a man with your jizz ensures victory for Set. Horus is only able to trap his uncle's semen in his hands.

  When Horus asks Isis for help, she screams and cuts off his hands, which mitigates the bad juju. She tosses Set's nasty spunk into the marsh. Then she takes a sample of Horus's semen and sprays it on Set's lettuce, which Set eats.

  So when Set brags to the gods that he "performed the labor of a male" against Horus, the gods light up Set's sperm to show the proof, only to discover his swimmers in the marsh.

  Then, thanks to his mom, Horus summons his semen from Set's head in the form of a golden solar disk. Horus places that disc on his own head, crowning himself.

  Thus Ma'at, or cosmic balance, is restored. The right king, or at least his offspring, takes the throne. Plus it sounds like he got his hands back.

  Obviously, this legend had spoken to Phillip Becker. He made his daughter take dictation on it during their vacation.

  But why?

  What was the clue in this legend, if any?

  Tucker snored so loudly that I could hear it over the bathroom fan.

  My heart leapt as I scanned the next page, trying to make sense of it before he woke up. Yep, call me petty, but I wanted to crush this while Tucker got his Z's.

  Cat

  ☥

  Antiquities

  Anubis

  Bata

  Wife

  Beer

  Flower

  Bull

  Carnarvon

  L 12:15

  Wow. Pretty good drawing of a cat. Who knew Gizelda Becker had artistic talent.

  The ankh, I recognized. I still had mine in my thigh pouch. I should move it somewhere safer and/or buy a chain for it.

  I moved on to Anubis. I remembered his jackal's head, and the fact that he had a role in the underworld. Turned out Anubis was the original god of the dead before Osiris. Some said he was the son of Bastet, the cat-headed god; others believed he was the son of Ra and Nephthys; still more said he was the illegitimate son of Osiris and Nephthys
; some melded Anubis and Osiris together.

  I started pacing. Quietly. So far, Phillip Becker had seemed to have a predilection for the afterlife. Did he know he was going to die?

  I mean, all 87-year-olds should be aware of their mortality. Still.

  When I entered "Bata" in my phone, it pointed me to shoes, but my search engine soon spat out the Tale of Two Brothers, Anubis and Bata.

  Anubis is the older, married god, and Bata is the younger, hunky brother. Anubis's wife tries to seduce Bata. He refuses. Out of vengeance, she lies to her husband that Bata came on to her and beat her. Enraged, Anubis sets off to kill his younger brother.

  Bata prays to Ra, the sun god, who magics up a crocodile-filled lake between the two brothers. With this protection in place, Bata calls out the truth to his brother, and as proof of his sincerity, Bata cuts off his own equipment and throws it in the lake, where it's snapped up by a catfish.

  (At this point, I stifled a laugh. What's with all the dick cutting and consumption? Then I tiptoed out of the bathroom and kissed Tucker's knee through the sheet. Sorry. Poor dudes.

  My own dude snored on.)

  Bata says he's off to the Valley of Cedars. He'll hide his heart in a blossom on top of a tree. If Anubis ever receives a jar of beer that froths over, he should come find his brother.

  Anubis believes his bro and returns home to slay his wife.

  Eesh.

  "Hope?" Tucker rasped.

  My heart tried to leap out of my chest as I shoved the notebook under the bed. I took a deep breath. I was lucky to have a heart in my chest, unlike Bata. "Yep?"

  "What are you doing up?"

  I should tell him that I finally got a hold of Becker's notes.

  He patted the bed. I climbed in, coaching myself. Two heads are better than one. We're a team. Tell him.

  His body felt almost too warm against mine. Now the onion smell mixed with his bad breath. I could still hear Tucker's voice in my head, with a faint sneer.

  I got this.

  We all know you're the "detective doctor," Hope.

  Nope.

  Nope on all of that.

  Technically, I told him the truth. "I'm reading about Anubis and Bata. Can you believe another god got this cut off? He did it to himself, though." I slid my hand along Tucker's morning wood, and if he got a little distracted, well. I could always tell him later.