Taziri decided not to ask about the cats. “And what do you do? You and your family? Do you…answer prayers?”
Bastet laughed.
Taziri smiled, feeling foolish. “Sorry.”
“That’s okay. I mean, back in the beginning, we lived here in the city and did all sorts of things where people could see us. We were more like high priests than gods, I guess. I had a lot of fun back then with my cousins. But eventually my uncles and aunts decided to move into the undercity where they could rest and study and do whatever they wanted away from all the people. People can be pretty tiring after a while.”
“You keep mentioning your aunts and uncles. What about your parents?”
The girl shrugged and looked at her feet. “I don’t remember them. I think they died when I was little. Grandfather isn’t really my grandfather. He just found me and took me in, started calling me his granddaughter, and said the others were my aunts and uncles. And when he made the steel hearts, he made one for me too. So I’d never be alone again, he said.” She looked up. “I miss him.”
“What about the others? Do you get along with them?” Taziri asked.
“More or less. They’re my family now. What can you do?” She smiled. “I mostly play with my cousins though. We still have fun, even though we’re still playing the same games we did before we became immortal. That’s why I like things like trains. They’re new. New is good.”
“Yeah, I like new things, too.” Taziri smiled. “That’s why I build them. I could teach you to build things too, if you wanted.”
“Maybe later.” Bastet turned and pointed at the trash. “Hey, is that a cowl?”
Taziri wandered back into the garbage. “This?” She pulled out a large basket with a small hole ripped in the bottom. The inner frame of the basket was wicker, but outside it had a water-tight skin of oiled leather. “Yeah. This’ll do nicely. Now we just need a hose. Where can we find some rubber around here?”
“Can’t. Rubber only comes from the New World, right? Well, there’s been a quarantine for a couple years now. They’re all afraid of some plague or something. You need rubber to make a hose? A hose is like a pipe, but bendy, right?”
Taziri nodded.
Bastet grinned. “I have an idea.”
A few minutes later they were standing in a dark street looking at a small, closed shop. Taziri frowned. “I think that’s a butcher shop.”
“It is. You need a long bendy pipe, right?”
Taziri grimaced. “Really? There isn’t anything else in Alexandria that we can use?”
Bastet crossed her arms. “Well, I’ve only lived here four thousand years, so maybe I’ve missed something. If you want to go looking around somewhere else, be my guest.”
Taziri sighed. “Fine. Let’s just get this over with.”
Bastet walked up to the door and vanished in a swirling cloud of white mist. A moment later the door opened and Taziri walked in. The girl pointed to the ceiling. “I think that’s what you want.”
Taziri grimaced again and started breathing through her mouth. “What is it? Cow?”
“Horse, I think.”
With a bit of stumbling in the dark and a few eye-watering gasps, Taziri pulled the coiled intestines down and looped them over her shoulder. As she turned to leave, she dug into her pocket and pulled out a fistful of Mazigh coins, which she slapped on the butcher’s counter as she walked out. Bastet closed the door and walked beside Taziri all the way back to the rail yard with a playful whistle on her lips. Taziri focused on not breathing too deeply.
Four thousand years old, and still a little girl? I…I just can’t imagine… Lorenzo never said anything about divided souls or living forever. I wonder what else he didn’t know about ghosts and aether.
When they returned to the Halcyon, she stowed her makeshift cowl and hose in the back of the cabin. “All right, now it is definitely time for some sleep. Can you wake me up before sunrise? We need to start working before the sun gets too high and our hose starts to rot.”
Bastet nodded. “I’ll see you then.” And she vanished through the closed hatch.
Taziri lay down on her tarp on the floor with her feet toward the coiled guts. A minute later she was settling in for the night up in her flight chair. It wasn’t comfortable, but it was a few inches farther from the rear of the cabin. She was asleep in moments.
Suddenly a hand was shaking her shoulder and she was mumbling and there was pale sunlight streaming in through the windscreen onto her lap. Taziri blinked and sat up.
“Good morning!” Bastet held out a piece of flatbread cupping a handful of dates. “Did you sleep well?”
“Good morning, thanks.” Dates again. Taziri ate slowly. “It felt like the night just flew by. Did you get much sleep? Do you sleep?”
“I did. But first I had to visit my cousin. I sent him on a little errand for you.”
“For me? Well, I hope your cousin didn’t mind the late visit.”
“He didn’t.” She smiled but said no more.
Taziri wiped her hands on her pants and climbed out of her chair. “All right then. Time for us to build something. Are you going to help or just watch?”
“Uhm. I think I’ll just watch for now.” The girl winked and flopped down on the nearest passenger seat.
Can’t say I’m entirely surprised by that answer from a girl who says she still wants to be a princess.
Taziri went to the back of the cabin and picked up her leather-clad basket and coil of horse gut. “Do you think it will be safe for me to work outside? Will anyone come looking around back here if they hear me working?”
“No, my four-footed army is sleeping on the freight cars and the rails and platform,” Bastet said. “No one will be bothering you today.”
“All right then.” Taziri climbed out the hatch and found the early morning sun bright but still cool. She tossed her gear on the ground, rolled up her sleeves, and popped open the little compartment on the bottom of her arm brace to get a wrench. She climbed up on the nose of the Halcyon and started loosening bolts. “First I’m going to reverse the propeller to turn it into a fan.”
Bastet stepped out onto the gravel. “Do you ever get a bad feeling right before something terrible happens?”
Taziri kept working. “All the time. Why? Are you getting a bad feeling right now?”
“No. But I think I will in a little while.”
Taziri removed the propeller, flipped it over, and bolted it back on. “All right, now hand me the basket, our new cowl.”
For the next quarter hour, Taziri fumbled with her shining steel tools and her flimsy wicker basket to fix the cowl over the propeller to catch the blasting air and funnel it into the hole in the bottom of the basket. The next half hour after that was a foul-smelling pantomime as she tried over and over to tie, staple, and bolt the end of the slippery horse intestine over the hole in the basket. Time and again she would step back and pronounce the job done, only to watch the pale pink gut slip free and fall to the ground. When it was finally attached, Taziri’s shirt was plastered to her back with sweat and she could feel the sun’s heat radiating up from the gravel through her shoes. “First part’s done!”
Bastet sat up, blinking and yawning. “Oh good. Now what?”
Taziri pursed her lips.
Four thousand years old and she’s still a teenager.
“Go back to sleep. I’ll wake you up when I’m all done.”
“Okay!”
Chapter 25. Shifrah
Lying on the rooftop, they had an unobstructed view of the universe. A million stars on the left and a million more on the right. Shifrah sighed. A colorless blur was invading the eastern sky, swallowing up the stars beyond a gray veil.
“Are you awake?”
She smiled. “No.”
“You had me worried for a while back there,” Kenan said. He lay an arm’s length away on the hard roof tiles. The slope of the roof was very slight and they had both stretched out with their heads near the peak of the roof and their feet pointing down to the stone lip where the roof ended. “It must have been hard, fighting with just one knife.”