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on her mother’s belly where her hand had been. A thought was growing in her, but she needed time to let it take root. “You rest,” she said. “The others will be home soon. I won’t tell them. Unless...?”
    Aweret laid a finger on Meritre’s lips. “It will be our secret for a while.”
    “Not too long,” Meritre said.
    “Oh, no,” said Aweret. “Even a man will notice eventually—and your father has a sharper eye than most.”
    “That’s the sculptor in him,” Meritre said. She claimed back her hand and made herself stand up straight. “Now I really have to go, or dinner will be late, and they’ll all ask too many questions.”

    Aweret’s secret was heavy inside Meritre, as if she had a baby in her, too, but one made of stone. While her mother slept on the other side of the roof, Meritre retreated behind the screen to the kitchen. She ground the barley into flour, made the bread and stirred up the stew of lentils and onions and salt fish. It was familiar work, and welcome, but her mind kept on spinning through it.
    Just after the bread was done, she heard the commotion coming down the street, a boisterous male noise that made her smile in spite of herself.
    The smile died. One of them was coughing. The deep, hacking sound brought back every memory and every nightmare of the plague: people coughing up blood, their faces turning black, their eyes rolling up in their heads as they wheezed and gagged and died.
    Meritre staggered and almost fell into the cooking fire. Sheer stubbornness saved her. She would not faint. There had been enough of that today.
    Her brothers tumbled up onto the roof, with her father bringing up the rear. He was still coughing, but not so hard now.
    “Stone dust,” he said when Meritre leaped toward him. She must have looked as panicked as she felt: he hugged her tight and kissed her, and stroked her as if she had been the cat. “There now. We’ve started the new statue, and the dust has been worse than usual. A jar or two of beer and I’ll be as good as new.”
    She wanted to believe it. She needed to. She brought him his beer and tried not to hover while he drank it.
    The boys were starving, loudly. While she fed them, she could stop thinking about her mother having a baby and her father coming home with a cough.
    It was going to be well. The plague had taken all the lives it meant to take. Meritre promised herself that.
    Whatever she had to do to make it so, she would do. She promised that, too, deep in her heart, where only the gods could hear.



Chapter 5
    The sun wasn’t even up when Kristen pulled into the driveway. I was ready and waiting for her, with my head still full of heat and sand and somebody else’s gut-grinding worry.
    That was the second dream I’d ever had that I not only hadn’t forgotten, I couldn’t get it out of my head. It made more sense, sort of. I’d gone to sleep with the Valley of the Kings in my head. But the whole thing was weird.
    Too weird for that hour of the morning. I almost forgot my phone—had to run back in and get it—but Kristen was too full of last night’s date to mind.
    She started talking as soon as I got the door shut and the seat belt fastened. Devon this and Devon that and Devon everything else.
    I never had got around to asking Cat who Kristen’s date was. Finally I got a word in sideways. “Devon? Devon Mackey?”
    She came down to earth for a second. “Of course Devon Mackey. Who did you think it was?”
    I hadn’t been thinking at all. At least not about that.
    “I know he’s captain of the wrestling team,” Kristen said. “He can’t help it if he’s built like that, really, can he? He’s got it. He might as well use it. He’s thinking about applying to M.I.T. His dad wants him to go to Stanford, but he likes Boston. Besides, can you imagine? A wrestling scholarship to M.I.T. Heads will explode.”
    My head was thinking about exploding, but not because of Devon Mackey, wrestling star and future rocket