“Home again, home again, jiggety-jog!” called Dr. Aditi, bringing the car to a lurching halt.

Ren’s eyes snapped open in the backseat. She and Alex had both conked out after they’d dropped off Luke, unable to overcome the combined effects of jet lag, sleep debt, and head trauma. She sat up and peered between the seats. The first thing she saw was a large blue sign affixed to the brick wall in front of them:

THE CAMPBELL COLLECTION

OF EGYPTIAN ANTIQUITIES

“You’ll be staying here for a while,” said Aditi. Ren liked the way she talked, dispensing her crisply accented words like a banker peeling new bills off a money roll. “Safer than the museum at the moment,” she continued, “though there’s been plenty of activity here, as well.”

Ren set her wheelie bag down on the parking lot pavement and looked up. The London sky was gray and gloomy, just like in a movie. She bounced her bag briskly up onto the curb. “What is this place?” she said to Aditi’s back.

“The Campbell used to be a private collection, but now it’s a sort of satellite to the British Museum,” said Aditi.

Ren looked up at the tall, skinny building in front of her: It looked like a bit of an “antiquity” itself. The paint was beginning to peel on the old-fashioned wood-framed windows, and here and there she saw little gaps in the bricks. At the very top, she saw an old chimney leaning away from the building at an angle that looked unsafe. It reminded her of a tall, broken-down old man, tipping his cap to no one.

“I’ve arranged rooms for you two here,” Aditi added.

Here? thought Ren. In this creaky old place?

Inside, the Campbell Collection was cool and quiet. An old man named Somers led them to their rooms and gave them a heavy iron skeleton key for the front door. Ren wasn’t sure if Somers was his first name or his last name, or if he was the caretaker, curator, or something else entirely. But Aditi said they could trust him, and that was a relief. They came to a stop outside two low, narrow doors at the end of a top-floor hallway.

“Here you are,” he said in a deep, scratchy voice. “The old servants’ quarters.”

He turned the doorknob in front of him with long, bony fingers. It opened with a brisk click, revealing a tiny room with one narrow bed, a table, chair, dresser, lamp, and nothing else.

“Both rooms are the same,” said Somers. “Doesn’t much matter which one you choose.”

Ren looked at Alex. “I’ll take this one,” she said and wheeled her bag inside.

On the floor next to the bed she saw a small metal basin and a water jug: a chamber pot, like in a Charles Dickens novel. Please let this place have a real bathroom, she thought. She felt like she’d taken off from New York in the twenty-first century and landed in London in the nineteenth. Once again she got the sense of being ever so slightly separated from reality. Mummies and magic will do that, but sometimes even the normal things seemed off to her now.

She thumped her bag down as Somers opened the next door for Alex. “I’ll let you two get some rest,” Aditi called from the hall. “Be back in the afternoon!”

Ren could hear Alex protesting in the hallway. He wanted to get started now.

“I think you’ve had quite enough excitement for one morning,” countered Aditi, her footsteps already heading toward the stairwell.

Ren took out her phone and looked at the time. Still too early to call her parents in New York. She pressed her hand into her bed, gauging its firmness. She thought maybe she’d take Aditi’s advice and get some rest. Then Alex ducked his head into her room.

“Hey, Ren,” he said. “Where’s that newspaper?”

And she knew she wouldn’t be getting that nap after all.

They spent that first, jet-lagged day doing what they could from the Campbell. Ren got a little burst of energy when they divided up the tasks, since that was the kind of thing she liked to do.

“Okay,” she said, “I’ll go online and look for potential Death Walkers. Missing mummies, busted sarcophagi …” She glanced over at the picture of the wrapped hand in the paper, now lying open on her bed. “Anything tightly wrapped and very evil.”

“Cool,” said Alex. “I’ll check out the collection here. See if there’s anything useful. I think I saw a Book of the Dead display on the way in.”

Ren had seen it, too, but it was just one panel. The full copy at the Met had taken up an entire wall: two hundred spells spread across papyrus scrolls and linen mummy wrappings. “I guess we only need one spell,” she said. “If it’s the right one.”

That was her job. Find out who the Death Walker was in life, so they’d know which spell would work on it in death.

But as the day wore on, Ren’s eyes got heavy and fuzzy as she bumped into one dead end after another. She couldn’t find any reports of mummies missing from the British Museum — and it was the kind of thing that people usually noticed.

She looked up every ancient corpse listed in their collection online — and even the ones on the websites of a few of the smaller collections around town. None of them seemed especially evil: minor nobility, a high priest here and there, and even one royal accountant. The Stung Man sounded like a Death Walker, she thought sleepily, but the Accountant?

Alex returned after a thorough search, reporting that the Book of the Dead downstairs was just “a few scraps from the beginning,” the Campbell’s one human mummy was still very much in residence, and Aditi had called to say she wouldn’t be back that day because something had happened at the big museum.

What neither of them knew was that, later that night, something was going to happen at the little one, too.

Puhh-THUUMMP!

There it was again. Alex looked around the dark confines of his little room. It was the middle of the night, and strange noises were coming from somewhere in the closed museum.

Whup-WHUMMP!

Farther away and louder? Closer and quieter? Alex couldn’t tell. He sat up in the narrow wooden bed and flicked on the small lamp on the bedside table. He checked the corners of the room. Nothing. He exhaled.

Puhl-TIKKK!

The sharpest sound yet … Was it coming from the hallway?

“Hey, Ren,” he ventured, turning to face the wall. “That you?”

Silence for a second and then: “No … I thought it was you!”

The walls were thin enough that they could have a conversation at more or less normal volume.

“Hallway?” said Alex.

Praang!

They were both quiet for a moment, analyzing what they’d just heard.

“It’s coming from downstairs, I think,” said Ren. “I think the floors are as thin as the walls.”

“Okay,” said Alex. “Meet you out there?”

“Yeah, just a second.”

Alex threw back the thin covers and surveyed his outfit. Pajama pants and a King Tut T-shirt his mom had brought back from a trip to Egypt. Good enough, he figured. If it was a would-be Order assassin making that noise — or the mummy from the second floor — the only item that would matter was the amulet around his neck. He pulled the room’s one chair out from under the door handle. Through the wall, he heard Ren doing the same thing. The doors of the old servants’ quarters didn’t lock.

He wrapped his left hand around the scarab and felt his pulse quicken, his senses sharpen. He pushed his door open and ducked his head out into the hallway. The only light came from a red EXIT sign above the staircase at the far end of the hall.

He saw Ren duck her head out a few feet away, her dark, not-quite-shoulder-length hair edged in red. She turned to look at him —

WHOMP!

The sound was louder out here, and he saw her eyes go wide with fear.

“What is that?” she whispered.

“I don’t know,” he mouthed.

Quietly, carefully, they both stepped out into the hallway. Ren was fully dressed, her sneakers tied in fresh, impeccable bunny ears. Alex looked down at his own bare feet.

He squeezed his amulet a little tighter. He thought maybe he could sense something, small and subtle, like movement at the very edge of his vision. “Only one way to find out,” he said, lifting his chin toward the old stairwell.

Ren hesitated and then whispered, “Okay.”

BWWAACKK!

The sound echoed up the stairwell. Ren pointed a single finger down toward the floor, and he nodded. They were on the fourth floor of the narrow building, and the latest sound seemed to be coming from the third.

Alex edged forward and took the lead. Grim images of what might be down there filled his mind, but he pushed against his fear as if he were wading into icy cold waves at the shore. A small part of him even hoped it was someone from the death cult. The familiar refrain flashed through his thoughts: Find The Order, find my mom.

He walked straight toward the garish red glow of the EXIT sign and the dark mouth of the stairwell beyond.