title: the universe in circles
author: mssrlawliet/llark
rating: T
word count: ~3.6k
characters: Wedy, Rem (mentions of L and Aiber)
summary: in which Wedy steals a bracelet, the Sahara reveals a secret, and an ancient curse is lifted.
author's notes: The urge to call this Merrie Kenwood and the Temple of Doom was so strong, I had to make a note of it here.
The Universe in Circles
"The universe is drawn in circles. The memory of chariot wheels clacking across small stones foreshadows the asp's death as he wraps himself around the wheel." — The Egyptian Book of the Dead
Merrie Kenwood arrives in Cairo on a Friday. By Sunday, she is the Egypt's most wanted criminal.
She learns this in a taxi hailed in Tahrir Square. It is a clattering Fiat that smells of motor oil and large crowds. She settles into the cloth seat, avoiding a patch of spilled cola, and rolls up the window. The driver's face appears in the rearview mirror. He assesses Wedy's brown wig, exposed legs, and the coiled snake bracelet pushed up her forearm.
"Where to?" he says, as she rummages through her purse for the clump of Egyptian pounds lifted from tourists at the museum's entrance. They'd been easy targets, sun sick and pink, sagging from the weight of their cameras.
"Maadi Towers. I'll pay you double if you don't talk," she answers in Arabic, enjoying the feeling of a trilled 'r' against her tongue. The cab driver turns up the radio and slides intro traffic, nearly colliding with a motorcycle on the roundabout.
A panicked newscaster reports the theft of a bracelet belonging to Merneith, the first female pharaoh of Egypt. Wedy tugs her sleeve down and pretends to take an interest in roadside vendors, selling plastic statues of baboon-headed gods with curled scepters. Protestors with apocalyptic signs chant on the sidewalk.
Her phone vibrates against her thigh. The name Tom Polhaus appears on the screen in italic letters. Wedy rejects the call and sends a text, typing laboriously with her index finger.
— not now please
— Saw you on the news. Like the hair.
— fuck off l
The Fiat turns into the hotel driveway. Wedy overpays the driver, and ignores two porters who try to take her bag. At the lobby's center is a heap of blue and gold furniture, pockmarked by cigarette burns. A woman in a burgundy hijab smokes by the open window, sending delicate white streams from her pursed lips. Wedy takes the elevator, feeling the cables strain from the pull of gravity.
She locks the door to her room and removes the bracelet. It is luminous against the violet sheets.
The heist had been flawless, but a security guard had managed to snap a cell phone photo as she'd fled the museum. She'd seen the image on a television in the hotel lobby. Her face is shadowed, in profile, and her newly blonde hair is pulled into a bun at the nape of her neck. It would be a flattering portrait, were she not now the subject of a nation wide manhunt.
Wedy finally checks the text from L, removing her itching wig and shimmying out of her pantyhose. She unhooks her bra without taking off her shirt, and smooths the puckered lines running down her legs.
I heard that bracelet was cursed. Go figure, L has written.
Wedy pays no attention to this until a death god appears in her room the next day.
The death god is making coffee when Wedy wakes up. Because of this, she assumes she has stumbled into a second dream and remains beneath the sheets, splayed like a ghost in a draft.
"That smells good," she says to the enormous creature offering her a Styrofoam cup. It has a jagged collar of bones held by crossed bandages, and must hunch to keep its head from scraping the ceiling. A single eye regards Wedy with an impressive amount of indifference, while a dollop of cream rotates at the coffee's surface.
"Take this. You're going to need it."
"Thanks," Wedy says. The coffee burns the roof of her mouth, but helps to rinse away the taste of tobacco and coriander. She'd fallen asleep without washing her face, and wipes at the greased layer of makeup with her forearm, yawning.
"You seem remarkable calm," the creature says, and Wedy swears it sneaks a glance at her cleavage.
"I'm in Egypt. I just stole a cursed bracelet. I'm dreaming of a giant mummy thing. It all kind of makes sense."
The god reaches out and pinches the exposed skin near Wedy's ankle. It hurts. For a moment, Wedy's vision swarms with grains of light, like she's jumped into a too-cold shower.
"Um," Wedy says, "I have to pee."
Wedy calls Aiber from the bathroom. He answers on the fourth ring, and Wedy hears a violent rustle over the line before his voice patches through. Aiber sounds distracted, stoned, and there is European electronica throbbing in the background.
"I'm a little busy," he shouts, although the music doesn't seem loud enough to warrant it.
"I think I'm going crazy. I just woke up, and there was an eight-foot-tall death god in my hotel room."
"Jesus, Wedy, have you been taking Adderall again? You know how that shit makes you— "
"I haven't. I stole the Merneith bracelet, and I'm wanted for questioning, and now there is an eight-foot-tall death god in my room. I'm not exactly handling all this stress well."
The music on Aiber's end turns off. She hears Aiber palm the receiver, and mutter something to the person beside him.
"Well, what does it want?" he says, returning.
"What do you mean what does it want?"
"You said it's a death god. You're not dead. Obviously, it has another motive. Ask it what it wants," Aiber says, as if he were reciting a memorized fact. Wedy hears his lighter clicking with rapid snaps. "I'm worried about you, Wedy. Try to get some sleep. Call me when you're sober again, I want to hear how this whole delusion plays out."
Aiber hangs up. When Wedy exits the bathroom, the god is seated on her unmade bed, examining the bracelet in a channel of pink light from the window. Prayers drift from the minarets that transcend the rooftops. The air is heavy with industrial by-product, but for a moment, Wedy thinks she catches the dry leather smell of the Sahara.
"You can have it," Wedy says, too quickly.
"It wasn't mine."
"Oh. Well, you can have it anyway. It's worth a fortune."
"That's not why I'm here," it says, tapping a claw against the inlaid garnets at the snake's eyes. Wedy's abdomen gives a spasm of fear.
"Why are you here? Exactly? Because I hope you understand this is not a usual occurrence for me, and I haven't begun to assess the damage your presence is doing to my interpretation of reality."
"Get dressed," the god says, glancing at the seawater bruise on Wedy's left thigh and the healing stiches beneath her belly button. There is peeling blue polish on Wedy's toenails and the grey silhouette of a cat, tattooed on her hip in a Russian prison. She looks like a woman patched together from several lives, each tested briefly and discarded.
"We're going for a ride. First, you'll need to buy a shovel."
The cab driver does not seem to notice the shovel, or the eight-foot-tall monster that folds into the backseat. Rem's elbow digs into Wedy's ribcage, while the sun blasts through leaning palms that line the road. Rem mutters directions, squinting over the driver's head, as if she recognizes the streets from distant memory.
They drive to the edge of the Great Pyramids, past the ticket complex, where Bedouins in checkered headscarves drag camels through the horde of tourists. Wedy steps out to find Rem pointing towards one of the beasts trudging in the sand. It makes a grotesque sound, lips flapping like a bird's wings.
"Pay the man two hundred pounds and tell him you want to go to Umm el-Qa'ab," Rem says. She pauses for a moment, frowning towards the bobbing head of a vendor passing through her torso. "He probably won't want to take you. Actually, he definitely won't want to take you. If he argues, offer him five hundred."
"Five hundred pounds?" Wedy says, pulling the brim of her hat down to block sunlight springing off the pyramids. There is sweat gathering at the ridges of her dark wig. She waves away a tout shoving a t-shirt in her direction. "That's everything I have. I'll never get out of here if I spend it. I'm a fugitive, you know."
"I'll kill you if you don't."
"Yes, yes, I figured," Wedy says, and approaches the Bedouin.
"Umm el-Qa'ab," he repeats, once she manages to explain what she wants in uncertain Arabic. His eyes are nestled in deep brown canyons. "I don't think you know what you're asking for, miss. Do you want to take a camel ride or not?"
Wedys tries her best sultry gaze, but her mascara has congealed into one enormous mass. "Oh alright, three hundred."
"That place is dangerous, miss. There is no reason for you to go there."
"Four hundred?" Wedy says, as Rem's shadow falls over her with its own gravity and mass. Wedy turns her head as a police officer passes by her right, scolding a pair of boys who've climbed onto the rocks.
"You don't understand, miss. That place belongs to the dead. No one can go there."
"Five hundred?"
"I'll take you within a quarter mile."
Wedy has never ridden a camel before, but she's sure it's not meant to be done in pantyhose. Rem flies a yard above her, blocking the sun with enormous wings, translucent and fortified by a network of shriveled capillaries. Wedy's shoulders are burnt, and the Giza Pyramids are little more than gold specks on the far horizon.
"This is where we stop, miss," the Bedouin says and lifts his arms to help Wedy off the camel. "Walk fifteen minutes towards the rise in the sand. I'll wait here for one hour."
Wedy waits until she is out of earshot and asks Rem, "Do you think he'll stay?"
"For your sake, I hope so. You have no water or shade. It'll be a miracle if you can make it back to Giza on your own. But if you don't do this, I'll kill you, so neither of your options are good. We're going there," Rem finishes, pointing to the lump of earth in the west.
Wedy walks.
She removes her wig after twenty steps and her cardigan after thirty. A line of sweat crawls over the knobs of her spine. By the time she reaches the hill, Wedy is lightheaded. She feels Rem's hand clutch her shoulder and shove.
"Dig. There," Rem says, pointing towards a set of grey rocks, arranged in a semi-circle. Wedy doesn't know if she can. The shovel's handle sears the skin of her palms, and the bag that contains the bracelet is knocking against bruises on her thigh. The ground is harder than she'd expected and after two heaves, she can feel the muscles in her shoulders seeping lactic acid.
"Keep going," Rem says and Wedy does, because she has no choice.
She cannot know how much time passes until the shovel hits the wooden latch, hidden beneath the sand. It is pale and cracked from dehydration, adorned by a bronze handle shaped like a jackal's head.
"I suppose I'm going down there," Wedy says, glancing at Rem's silhouette above her. Rem's expression is remote, unreadable, but she nods.
"Be careful. The ladder is five-thousand years old. It may be rickety."
Wedy's flashlight shoots an oval on the space beneath her. She sees the room though isolated frames. A cluster of canopic jars in the corner, a sunboat with outstretched sails, a lapis hippopotamus, yawning into the darkness. The room smells of preservative salts and building pressure. Wedy coughs into the crook of her arm, and watches Rem force her body down the narrow chute that leads to the tomb.
"I'm going to die here, aren't I?" Wedy asks, as a pair of rocks fall from the ceiling, narrowly missing her shoulder. She wonders how much of the dust are the cells of a dead woman, sneaking into her mouth and nostrils.
"Very probably. Do you have the bracelet?"
Wedy removes it from her bag. The snake's garnet eyes catch the strip of sunlight from above and for an instant, the room is filled with red light that reminds Wedy of a security alarm. There are heiroglyphics on the walls, but none like she has ever seen. They show a woman in a royal headress presiding over a kingdom of corpses — dark bodies, twisted and piled beneath sun rays that end in reaching hands.
"Push the slab aside."
"Um. I am a hundred percent sure there is a dead body in there," Wedy says, feeling a peculiar tremble travel from her solar plexus. As a child, she'd been the one to find her mother's hens, pulled apart by foxes in the night. Since then, she cannot look at death. The thought of a corpse, white and crumbling, makes her throat twitch.
"Yes."
Wedy pushes at the tomb until the lid gives way and drops, cracking as it meets the floor. Inside, the sarcophagus waits with open eyes, wreathed in black. Its headress is framed by bands of gold and blue copper. Wedy places the bracelet on the sarcophagus's chest, expecting it to roar to life, but nothing happens.
Rem says. "You have it put it inside."
Wedy breaks a nail trying to force the sarcophagus open, and her acrylic tip bounces into the shadows. The lid finally gives with an explosive pop. Wedy knocks away the particles swarming before her, and stares down into the open coffin.
Inside, is a woman. She has brown skin, and a nose that ends in a plump bubble of flesh. Two thick brows arch over her closed eyelids, like careful brushstrokes. The woman's hair is collected into a myriad of thin braids, tipped by gold caps, and her hands cross over a leather book on her chest. Wedy slows her breathing, so as not to wake her.
"That isn't possible," Wedy says, but the thief in her can't help but evaluate the woman's rings and choker, shaped like snakes, coiled into protective stances around her fingers and neck. "There's no way —"
"Put the bracelet on her wrist."
Wedy doesn't want to touch the body, but she lifts the woman's arm. The queen's skin reminds Wedy of a marble statue, dense and locked in a poetic posture. She pushes the bracelet up the queen's wrist and, for a moment, thinks she feels dead muscles twitch beneath her palms.
"Nothing happened," Wedy says eventually. She leans to examine the words scralwed across the queen's notebook. The pictographs are ancient, but Wedy recognizes the ankh, the Egyptian symbol of death, and the ibis that represents Thoth, the god of writing, of judgment, of names, of —
"Don't touch it," Rem says. "That is mine."
Rem plucks the book from Merneith's corpse, and slips it between her belt and torso. She then sweeps a finger over the queen's eyelashes. As Rem makes contact, the corpse seems to divide into its most basic units. For a moment, Wedy thinks she sees a mess of atoms in the shape of a woman, finally rupturing their bonds and drifting into the space around them.
"Get out," Rem says, "I'll be right behind you."
The Bedouin is, thankfully, waiting for her.
He does not seem surprised by her stricken expression. The sun is settling between the pyramids to the west, and the desert is awash in radioactive light. He offers water, and helps her onto the camel.
"You shouldn't have come. You don't belong here," he says, and leads Wedy back to Cairo while Rem follows, obscured by the cloud rising from the camel's hooves. The sun sets, as it always has. Flickering lights in the unfinished high rises seem to generate darkness each time they flare and dim.
Wedy makes it back to her hotel room with only sunburnt cheeks and a halting limp. She pushes off her shoes, and searches through the nightstand for complimentary lotion, wincing as she spreads a layer across her calves and triceps.
"Are you going to kill me now?" Wedy finally snaps, tired of watching Rem sway in her peripheral vision.
"No."
"Then, why are you still here? I did your gross bracelet thing."
"I'll be leaving shortly."
Rem is staring out the window, eye focused on a point beyond the low smudge of pollution. Wedy wonders if gods see every layer of time, stacked like a ziggurat. Rem pulls the notebook out of her waistband and tears a page out. She sets it on the bed, and the yellowed sheet curls in the draft from the air conditioning.
"Don't use it unless you have to. Be careful. You remind me of her," Rem says and gestures towards the window, where layered chatter from the roadside speaks of theft, and dangerous women, and the curses preserved by the desert.
"Who was she?"
"A queen. She was cruel and beautiful and powerful. It destroyed her in the end. Her priestess cursed the bracelet and trapped Merneith in a place where she could affect no one."
"You knew her?"
"Too well, at times. It doesn't matter now."
Wedy recognizes the hitch the Rem's voice. It is the same tone Aiber uses to speak of his ex-wife, raising their two children alone in a Parisian suburb. It is the voice of nostalgia, and resentment, and too much love, and also not enough.
"You should leave Egypt. You don't belong here," Rem finishes and disappears. Literally disappears. Like she's been sucked into the gaps between atoms. The curtains sway. Somewhere, Wedy's cell phone vibrates at the bottom of her purse.
"I really have to stop taking Adderall," she says, and drags a pillow over her face.
Wedy does her best to forget. She flees Egypt to America, where nothing is old and curses do not stick.
She cannot sleep, but America is a landscape of lonely diners, glowing on the curbside. Wedy drinks coffee and flirts with waitresses, and develops an affinity for shoofly pie with whipped cream. She distracts herself with easy jobs, and keeps her roots bleached. She only once surrenders to curiosity, and searches for Merneith in the Egyptology section of a rural library in Illinois.
There is no mention of the queen's unusual fate, but Wedy finds a footnote mentioning Merneith's consort, a one-eyed priestess from the mortuary chapels along the Nile. Wedy makes black-and-white photocopies of the accompanying illustrations, describing the passage into the afterlife — a man with the head of an ibis recording names in a slim black book, a bloody heart dropped on to the scale of justice.
All of this means something, she thinks, but cannot tell if the missing truth has been lost to the past, or has yet to be formed in the darkness of the future.
Three years later, L will call her and speak of heart attacks and shinigami and children with boundless power. Wedy will feel the nerves against her spine fire all at once.
"I'll come to Tokyo," she says, and hangs up the phone to text Aiber. The last she has heard, he has retired on a hidden beach in Thailand. He once sent Wedy a postcard of a shipwreck, rotting on the coastline.
This is more important than you know, she writes, and disconnects the line permanently. Wedy has learned you cannot be too careful. There are unseen horrors, hiding in the blips between seconds. Dead women sleep, suspended in time, while death gods wait in unseen corners of reality.
She drives to her storage unit and finds the sheet of paper hidden between a stack of receipts from the late eighties. It has been months since she's been to the warehouse. There is an unframed Renoir, bound with twine, sticking out of an umbrella stand. A messenger bag overstuffed with USB drives containing classified government documents gathers mold in the corner. The skull of a Russian saint grins at Wedy as she searches for the key hidden in her bra.
"You never used it," a voice says, from somewhere above her. Wedy had half-expected to find Rem here, but her ankles feel weak. She pushes her heels into the concrete floor.
"Murder is not really my thing."
Rem shrugs and floats down from the ceiling, wings ballooning with air.
"You're going after Kira," Rem says, gesturing to the leather suitcase by Wedy's feet.
Wedy is quite sure she is about to die, but feels a certain stillness, as if her heart has tightened into a fist. Her nerves twist into loops. She cannot tell if this is fear or tremendous peace.
"Good," Rem finishes. "Let's make sure he is forgotten, like Merneith."
Wedy expects Rem to disappear, but she doesn't. Rem remains still and terrifying, like a temple statue. For a moment, Wedy feels as though she has leapt from her place in time. She sees the desert, and the electrical skyline of Tokyo, and a Tudor estate in the snow. She sees blue roses unfolding in a cemetery, and a woman in a dark veil, hiding her face between cupped palms. She sees Aiber. She sees L, growing translucent in the rain, and a boy with eyes like the infinitesimal core of the universe.
"Well," Rem says, "Are we going or not?"
"Yes," Wedy says. "We're going."
Fin.