Free Tut by P. J. Hoover Page B

was destroyed.”
    â€œNo, Great Master,” Colonel Cody said. “Many items were saved. And among these items are scrolls created during the reign of the gods. They’re kept in a secret room, below the basements.”
    That didn’t surprise me. Everything in D.C. was built on top of something else. There were basements and subbasements and secret passages below those. It was like a giant underskeleton of the city.
    â€œWe need to go now.” I looked in the direction of Gil’s room. Light flickered from under his black door. He was on his computer.
    â€œWe must bring the proper scroll.” Colonel Cody jumped down from my shoulder and onto the coffee table without making a sound. He rifled through the Book of the Dead and grabbed the scroll with spell number sixty-eight, passing it my way. I folded it and tucked it under my shirt.
    â€œReady?” I asked Colonel Cody.
    Colonel Cody snapped his fingers and four shabti majors joined him. “Ready,” he said.
    â€œThen we better hurry before Gil notices I’m gone.”
    *   *   *
    I dressed in black so I could blend into the night, and snuck out trailed by five of my shabtis. I hadn’t seen Colonel Cody this excited since he’d found me in Egypt back in 1922. Every other block or so, he ordered his majors to halt and drilled them on their weapons’ use. I guess a hundred years of cleaning up scarab beetle shells for an ungrateful cat wasn’t hard to top. It was past ten, so the streets were empty. Since we were way into October, the air was chilly, but all the energy running through my scarab heart was making me sweat, so I took off my sweatshirt and gave it to some homeless guy on the corner. He was begging next to a row of restaurants. They all had giant signs taped to the door that read:
    Closed due to Failed Health Inspection
    I’d eaten at most of those places. It was a good thing I never got food poisoning.
    We passed by the obelisk near the Convention Center. Since the one at Dupont Circle had exploded, there were only four left. I almost reached my fingers out and touched it, just for a little bit of the scarab heart energy that ran through it, but I stopped myself. Had the Cult of Set really built them? I didn’t want it to be true because they were so perfect, but as much as I hated to admit it, Horus was rarely wrong.
    â€œWe must go, Great Master,” Colonel Cody said.
    He was right. I wasn’t here to recharge my scarab heart. It was pumped full of energy anyway. What I needed was to find out where the knife was. I turned my back on the obelisk and continued on until the Library of Congress came into view.
    Spotlights shined on the library, illuminating the massive stone building in all its literary magnificence. Marble steps led to the front doors, but iron gates had been drawn closed for the night. I knew it was way past visiting hours, because I’d spent thousands of hours at the library. Not researching projects for school—I researched the world. I read history books to see what was fact and what was fiction. Because that was the thing about history—nothing you read could be believed. Like, for example, everything from my reign. History had me on the throne until I was nineteen. Nineteen! I’d been cheated out of five good years. The books didn’t say anything about Horemheb casting me from the throne or colluding with the Cult of Set, either. All they focused on was the gold. And the “boy king” thing. I hated that.
    The shabtis could easily have picked the locks on the iron gates, but every alarm in the place would have gone off. I’d never get to the secret room that way.
    Colonel Cody snapped his fingers, and shadows cloaked the five shabtis. They couldn’t turn invisible or ever change the colors they were painted, but they could bend light around themselves so normal people wouldn’t notice them. And I thought being