La piràmide vermella

Listen carefully. If you're hearing this story, you're already in danger. Sadie and I might be your only chance. It started the night our dad blew up the British Museum. My name is Carter Kane. My home for most of my fourteen years has been a suitcase, traveling the world with my dad, Dr. Julius Kane, the Egyptologist. My sister, Sadie, lived with our grandparents in London. We only saw each other on visitation days, and that Christmas Eve was one of them. Dad was nervous, clutching the workbag I was never allowed to look inside. He argued with a strange man in a trench coat, then rushed us to the museum for a “private tour.”

He led us to the Rosetta Stone, his eyes frantic. “I'm going to make everything right again,” he promised, before locking the curator in his office and telling us to stay put. Of course, we didn't. We found him chanting before the stone, drawing glowing blue hieroglyphs in the air with an ivory wand. “Osiris, come,” Sadie whispered, translating instinctively. But it wasn't just Osiris who answered the call. The Rosetta Stone exploded, and from the dust rose a terrifying man wreathed in flame. “You were not summoned!” my father roared, but the fiery man only laughed. He called himself Set. He turned Dad's magical serpent staff to ash and, with a flick of his wrist, trapped our father in a golden sarcophagus that sank straight through the marble floor.

Just as Set turned on us, two robed figures - a man with a forked beard and a girl with a curved knife - burst through the wall. Set vanished, and the newcomers found us just as we passed out. We were rescued - or kidnapped - by the man Dad had argued with earlier, a man who called himself Uncle Amos. He spirited us away from London on an Egyptian reed boat that sailed through a misty, whispering realm called the Duat, arriving in New York in a matter of minutes. His home was a mansion perched atop a Brooklyn warehouse, a headquarters for magicians called the Twenty-first Nome. It was a bizarre place of talking baboons, magical statues, and a pet crocodile named Philip of Macedonia. Amos explained the truth: our family was descended from pharaohs, part of an ancient order of magicians called the House of Life, and our parents had broken their most sacred law by meddling with the gods.

That night, my soul, my *ba*, left my body as I slept. I flew in the form of a bird-headed spirit to a desert mountain in Phoenix, Arizona. There, I saw Set overseeing the construction of a massive red pyramid. He spoke of unleashing a storm on his birthday - the third of the five Demon Days, only a few days away - that would destroy the continent. When I awoke, Amos confirmed my vision was real. He left to investigate, warning us not to enter his library. So naturally, Sadie blew the doors off it. Inside, we found Dad's workbag and a scroll that proved our lineage: we were heirs to the blood of two pharaonic houses, Narmer on our father's side and Ramesses the Great on our mother's. We were just beginning to understand what this meant when the mansion was attacked.

Two monsters with the bodies of leopards and the necks of serpents crashed through the terrace doors. Our crocodile, Philip, sacrificed himself to drag them into the river, but they returned. We were cornered, helpless, until our cat, Muffin, transformed. She became a woman in a leopard-skin jumpsuit with knives in her hands - the goddess Bast. She had been our guardian for years, a promise she'd made to our father after our mother died releasing her from an ancient prison. Bast explained that the attack was a sign: the House's magical protections had been sabotaged. Someone wanted us dead.

We fled into Manhattan with Bast, pursued by four copper-skinned demons carrying a magic coffin. As we raced across the Williamsburg Bridge, Bast finally told us the whole truth. When Dad shattered the Rosetta Stone, he didn't just release Set. He released five gods, and two of them - Horus and Isis - had chosen hosts to survive in the mortal world. They had chosen us. My head was suddenly filled with another voice, ancient and arrogant. *Well, it's about time,* Horus said. *Hello, Carter.* Sadie felt it too; she was now a reluctant partner to the goddess Isis. We were godlings, an abomination to the House of Life, and our only hope was to master these new powers before Set destroyed us all.

Our journey took us through a magical portal to Egypt, to the headquarters of the House of Life. We were brought before the ancient Chief Lector, Iskandar, by the girl from the museum, a stern young magician named Zia Rashid. The leaders of the House saw us as a threat to be eliminated, but Zia was tasked with testing our abilities. In the ruins of Luxor Temple, I was forced to duel Sadie. In a moment of desperation, I summoned a golden avatar - the warrior form of Horus, complete with a falcon head. The display of divine power terrified the magicians. Just as they were about to destroy us, we learned that Iskandar had died, and his second-in-command - the ruthless Desjardins - had ordered our execution. Zia, defying her master, helped us escape.

We had one last hope. Bast believed the god of wisdom, Thoth, might know a way to defeat Set. After a mad chase through Paris to steal a particular book from Desjardins's library, we found Thoth living as a wild-haired professor at the University of Memphis. He agreed to help us, but only if we passed his test: retrieve a magical item from the tomb of a great magician - Elvis Presley. Thoth sent us to Graceland, where we were ambushed by two powerful clay magicians. We survived, and Thoth revealed the secret of the book. To defeat Set, we needed two things: his secret name, and a feather of truth from the Land of the Dead.

We took a ghostly steamboat down the River of Night into the Duat. At the Hall of Judgment, I was helpless, but Sadie faced the god of funerals, Anubis, alone. He was a handsome, brooding boy who guarded the broken scales of justice, and he agreed to give her the feather, but only after asking her a terrible question: if it meant saving the world, was she prepared to lose her father? With a heavy heart, she answered yes. We raced to Phoenix, where our uncle Amos reappeared, claiming to have escaped Set's prison. But it was a trick. In the heart of the red pyramid, Amos's body was consumed by red light, and Set himself appeared before us, having used our uncle as his host. The final battle had begun.

I fought Set as the avatar of Horus while Sadie, channeling the magic of Isis, searched for a way to help. She unleashed a desperate spell, teleporting the entire pyramid and everyone in it from the desert to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., cutting Set off from his source of power. As I held him at bay, Sadie began the binding ritual. But at the last moment, she saw a vision of a greater enemy - the chaos serpent Apophis, trying to use Set's storm to break into the world. Instead of destroying Set, she bound him with his secret name and forced him to swear an oath to help fight chaos when the time came. In the aftermath, we found our father's sarcophagus gone, and Zia - who had sacrificed her magic to help us - crumbled to dust, revealing she was only a *shabti*, a magical clay duplicate of the real Zia, who was hidden somewhere safe. We released the spirits of Horus and Isis, choosing to learn magic on our own terms. Now we're back in Brooklyn. The gods are free, chaos is rising, and our father, as the new Osiris, rules the Land of the Dead. Our work has just begun. We have to find others like us - other descendants of the pharaohs. Maybe that includes you.