As you may recall, while Mau was wondering how to get the wooden door open, there was a big noise which scared everyone away. Eventually, Grace came back with Sona and the doctor, to find MeMe standing all alone. One of those big bronze soldiers had toppled over on the floor, making a horrible crash, which was why all the cats had run away.

Sona batted her paw against the statue’s long spear laying on the floor.

“Maybe we can use this thing to pry open that door.”

“Careful, Sona,” Grace warned. “It may still be alive.”

Although Grace knew perfectly well the statue was made out of metal, she recognized the object’s spirit. Most spirits are benign, but some shout danger, which was what this one was screaming to Grace, because the spear understood living cats had no business trying to enter the realm of phantoms.

Nevertheless, Grace and MeMe helped Sona and the doctor to roll the heavy bronze spear into the other room.

Khui peeked around the doorway. “I didn’t mean to knock it over, it was an accident!” he pleaded.

“It was a stroke of genius, Khui,” Dr. Mina assured the nervous cat “Now help us pry open this door.”

After a while, Mau slinked back from his hiding place far up a side hallway. Entering the room, he saw that the cats had managed to get the wooden door open almost wide enough for them to slip inside. Mau helped heave and the door creaked wider with a groan.

Grace and the doctor both sneezed in the stale air.

Mau had heard of serpents and other dangerous creatures, especially about that famous asp who’d finished Cleopatra, so he gave Khui the honor of going first. Sona and Dr. Mina went in next, then MeMe and Grace. Mau waited in case anyone screamed or ran back outside, before he cautiously slipped through the door, casting a furtive glance back into the mysterious darkness with frightened eyes.

The mummy of an Egyptian soldier stood at attention in his wooden coffin, propped against the wall by the door. The lid had fallen to the floor long ago, along with much of the mummy’s dignity. As MeMe and Grace carefully stepped around his remains, MeMe gazed up at his tattered linen wrappings hanging in shreds around his dried-up bones.

“Looks like he doesn’t want anyone to enter this place.” MeMe observed with a shudder.

Grace glanced sideways at the grim figure.

“I don’t think he wants anyone to leave.”

Along the floor of the long narrow room lay thirty or forty thin linen-wrapped objects, each about a cat-length long. They were artfully decorated in interlacing geometric designs, some painted, others woven in criss cross patterns of rattan. The tops of most were capped with little ceramic cat heads.

MeMe patted one with her paw. “What’s inside these things, Gracie?”

Grace shook her head sadly, “Those are the mummies of the departed cats, the ones the blue cats came here to find.”

“CATS?” MeMe was appalled. “You mean this room is full of CATS?”

“All that’s left of them. Their bones and their ghosts”

MeMe looked about with wondering eyes. “Ghosts? You think?”

“They’re everywhere around us, MeMe. We’ve disturbed their rest, we are unwelcome.”

Suddenly aware of the spectral forms, now that Grace had pointed them out, MeMe looked around the room in solemn wonder. Spanning wide wooden shelves that towered to the ceiling, rested hundreds of small mummies where ghosts of the forgotten cats ardently caressed their Earthly remains: large and small, standing up, leaning over, stacked on their sides, and tumbling off the shelves.

MeMe and Grace heard a light humming sound as Dr. Mina’s tablet flew toward them like a drone, soaring along the room, searching among the shelves, back and forth, back and forth. Grace tried to swat it down, but the tablet deftly swerved away, its flat actinic light casting fuzzy dancing shadows around the room.

Occasionally the device would dart sideways in between the mummies as agile as a humming bird. A moment later, it would float out again to continue its robotic quest up and down the shelves. Finally finished, the tablet darted back the way it came, to fly into the next room.

Afraid to be left behind in the dark, MeMe and Grace drifted like moths toward the crew’s circle of light as the four blue cats followed the drone down a few steps into the next lower chamber.

As soon as the tablet glided back to Dr. Mina, she studied its screen, while Mau impatiently watched over her shoulder. Grace overheard Mau ask the doctor. “How many of them have blue fur?”

“None of them,” Mina shook her head. “They’re all just ordinary cats.”

“That’s impossible.” Mau sputtered, “The Egyptians would have interred the crew members with special honors in respect for the color of their fur.”

Drawing the doctor aside, Mau whispered confidentially, “You must carefully search for the one called Raya. Tell me the instant you find the Pearl, and don’t mention this to anyone else. I don’t want them to know the real reason why we came here.””

MeMe whispered, “Gracie, the Egyptians thought all cats were special. Why do these cats think they’re so great, just because they’re blue?”

“I don’t know, MeMe, but I sure hope we don’t meet any more of them.”

“A cat who’s not blue belongs in a zoo, my friend.” Khui recited.

“I’m not your friend.” Grace snapped.

Sona shook her head at Khui. “Those hurtful words only make you look small. You should be ashamed.” Looking Mau in the eye she said, “My father taught me that everyone is equal. He always said only a fool would judge others by the color of their —”

Mau cut her off, “You father was the fool. And look what happened to him.”

“Yes, what exactly did happen to my father?” Sona challenged. “I’ve heard you know something about him. Tell me, where is my father, Mau?”

Avoiding Sona’s eyes, Mau murmured, “I know nothing at all about your father, except that he was a traitor to his own kind.”

Mau quickly followed the doctor into the next room.

Khui stared contemptuously at MeMe, sniffing archly. “I caught up with your ugly friend when I chased her away.”

Sona was surprised. “Caught her? You didn’t tell me that. Where is she now?”

“She’ll die of thirst down here, wandering and lost.” He sneered. “She went up a blind tunnel and got lost.”

“She got away from you, didn’t she?” Sona quizzed him with deep concern. “Is that how you got a lump on your head, Khui?”

Khui hissed angrily at MeMe, “Her mournful spirit will haunt the halls of this charnel house forever — next to your own dried-out bones.”

MeMe shrank back in fear behind Grace.

“Poor Ridley,” MeMe cried softly. “We were so mean to her,”

“You were the best friend Ridley ever had, MeMe.” Grace assured her.

The little cat burst out hysterically, “This is my fault . . . Ridley begged me not to go down there . . . I had to see if the shadows were cats like us . . . I thought we could all be friends . . . and now we’ll float around with all the other ghosts and never see everybody we love ever again.”

MeMe put her face down on the dusty floor sobbing her heart out.

“Ghosts? What ghosts?” Khui regarded MeMe with horror.

“Can’t you see them?” Grace challenged Khui with a knowing smile. “They’re everywhere. Ghosts love to haunt nasty cats like you. They’ll get in your head and hound you to death. They’ll drive you nuts ‘till you wish you were dead.” Grace jumped at Khui with her claws out.

With a shriek, Khui pounded out of the room.

Guilt stabbed at Sona’s heart as she recalled the moment she first saw the two Earth cats on Sunday night. Why had they mistreated those two innocent cats? She’d been a party to it, even helped Khui and the doctor drag them inside the ship.

Tender-hearted MeMe reminded her of her father, Jan. After he had advocated to the Emperor on behalf of the feral cats of Alna, he’d disappeared. Before they left for Earth, she received a message that her father had died in the notorious slave mines of Karrig’s moon.

As Grace tenderly groomed her friend, trying to comfort her, Sona whispered, “When did Ridley disappear?”

“Why do you want to know?” Grace snapped suspiciously.

Sona looked around to make sure they were alone. “Because I’d like to help you if I can,” she whispered.

MeMe looked up. “What do you mean, help? You’re gonna leave us down here to die after you find these blue cats you’re looking for. We’ll be one more set of dried out ghosts next to Ridley’s miserable bones, like that Khui guy said.”

They heard Dr. Mina call out from two rooms away, “Heads up! I think I’ve found something!”

MeMe dried her tears and reluctantly started toward the other room.

“Wait, MeMe.” Sona whispered. “Now’s our chance. We’re taking a risk because we don’t have Mina’s map, but with the light from my collar, I hope we can remember how to get back”

“You mean you want us to run away?” Grace was surprised.

“Mau will abandon you down here. But we have to hurry before we’re missed.”

But MeMe wasn’t sure, “What if Ridley comes back looking for us and we’re not here? What’s she going to do? I’m not going anywhere with you because we have to wait for Ridley.”

“Yeah, me neither.” Grace insisted, “How do we know we can trust you?”

“Please,” Sona urged. “He’ll be back any minute. They can track me, so we need a head start.”

Grace looked back over her shoulder into the line of burial chambers.

“What do you think MeMe, stay with him or go with her?”

“What about Ridley? What if she comes looking for us?”

“We’ve got to find Ridley first, before they do. These murderers will kill all of us if we don’t do something now.”

Sona knew she was taking a terrible risk for these cats. What she was contemplating was mutiny. And what could these Earth cats give her for saving their lives? What would become of her if she freed them? Disgrace? Prison? More likely an ignominious death in the same gulag that claimed her father.

As she was considering this, Sona heard MeMe say, “We sure can’t trust those other cats, Gracie, but I think we can trust Sona. She’s our friend.”

It was something Sona hadn’t heard in a very long time.

Turning to the blue cat, MeMe raised her head hopefully.

“OK Sona, let’s go.”

Sona knew at that moment what these cats had to give her was worth more than all the wealth in the world, but like wealth, it was something she had to earn. It was their trust.

With Sona lighting the way, they raced back together between the rows and rows of towering shelves, up the steps to the room where the silent soldier guarded the wooden door between the dead and the living.

Squeezing through the narrow opening, they ran for their lives.