The Bent Pyramid

Egypt, 2600 BCE. The pyramids are rising. And the names of the dead are disappearing.

Nakht is an embalmer's apprentice, and he's never been afraid of the dead. Then one night, a dead man's name lifts off his tomb like smoke. By morning, everyone who loved the man has forgotten he ever lived.

Everyone except Nakht.

He isn't the only one who still remembers. Across the Two Lands, six other teenagers discover they can hold on to the forgotten too:

• a foundling scribe who reads signs no one has written in five hundred years
• a young builder who can hear the stones breathe
• an archer stolen from the south
• a marsh girl who talks to cobras
• a dancer from a hunted bloodline
• a lesser princess nobody has ever bothered to notice

Each of them carries an heirloom they can't explain. None of them knows why the others matter.

Long ago, their families bound a serpent older than the gods beneath the earth. Now someone with a blade cut from darkness is unwriting the world one name at a time. And the king's great mountain at Dahshur, the pyramid that bent halfway to the sky, is becoming a door.

To close it, the seven must do what no one has done in five centuries. They have to give a god back its stolen name. And someone will have to pay for it with their own.

From the embalming tents of Meidum to the scriptoriums of White Walls, from the papyrus marshes of the Delta to the heart of a pyramid that should never have been built, The Bent Pyramid is an epic of friendship, memory and the courage to be remembered. It begins the Children of the River series.

Recommended for readers 16 and up.