Ungodly Chaos

by Selma Soren

Genres: YA Dark Fantasy

Synopsis

An action-packed contemporary fantasy for fans of Rick Riordan and Legendborn following a heartbroken girl who accidentally discovers her ex-boyfriend is the descendant of the Egyptian god of chaos and in danger from a deadly plot.

Amira Shah is having a perfectly good, perfectly normal year—until her boyfriend (and hottest boy in school) Kaidan Jaziri breaks up with her on her seventeenth birthday. But Amira is never one to let things go, and after overhearing Kaidan loudly arguing with someone in town, she follows him, only to fall through a portal to the underworld, also known as Duat.

There, she learns the chaotic ex-boyfriend who would endlessly rope her into trouble inherited his impulsive nature from his ancestor Apep, the god of chaos.

Kaidan is intent on solving a spree of murders happening in the human realm. Someone is killing other descendants—and if Kaidan isn’t careful, he might be next. Feeling a mystical pull to Kaidan and the underworld, Amira insists on helping solve the mystery.

Together with Kaidan’s rival and descendent of the sun god, Zain Nailos, they uncover secrets behind Amira’s mysterious connection to the Egyptian pantheon and pursue the clever killer who may have been hiding among them all along.

Release date: February 17, 2026

Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

Chapter 1: Tea and Misfortune

1 TEA AND MISFORTUNE
Amira Shah was convinced that if her phone didn’t stop chirping out notifications within the next five seconds, she would toss Deja Brew’s $20,000 espresso machine across the room—taking care not to murder anyone in the process because, really, that would be a bit much—and scream a string of curses so profane that her ancestors would come back from the dead and stuff her mouth with soap.

Instead, she closed her eyes and steadied herself against the counter. Breathed in through her nose, out through her mouth, the way most people learned from their sports coaches and/or therapists.

She’d learned it from her ACT tutor. The same ACT tutor she paid weekly in cold, hard cash from Deja Brew’s measly barista paycheck.

A girl had to eat, sure—but more importantly, a girl had to get into college.

The phone buzzed in her pocket once, twice. Three times. She sighed and glanced at the door leading into the café’s break room. Her manager, Isabel, was relatively chill, but with the number of people congregating near the cash register today (there wasn’t even enough room to form an actual line), Amira had a gut feeling she’d get reprimanded for having her phone out in front of customers.

Still, the shop wasn’t her only responsibility. Mama would throw a fit of her own if her clients weren’t seen to on time.

“Two minutes,” she mouthed to Layla. Her best friend rolled her eyes but took over the drink Amira had been working on—an iced XXXspresso, because nothing on Deja Brew’s menu could be named anything sensible. Obviously.

Amira slipped off her apron, hung it on one of the hooks lining the back wall, and made a beeline for the bathroom.

Once inside, she made a show of flushing the toilet and washing her hands (the wall between the break room and the bathroom was brutally thin) before checking her phone.

As expected, there were about fifty million notifications from Farrah’s Fortunes. A form on Mama’s website would send out emails to Amira’s inbox whenever someone requested an appointment, a follow-up consultation, or a refund because my husband was cheating on me with his sister-in-law, not his secretary, so clearly you were WRONG.

Amira had taken over the administrative tasks of confirming palm-reading appointments from her mother about a year ago. Or rather, Farrah Shah had realized that Google Forms was annoying, and what better way to focus on the client-facing aspect of her business than to outsource the behind-the-scenes labor to her technologically competent, totally-not-busy-with-school-and-debate-club daughter?

At least, that’s what Amira figured Mama’s thought process had been.

With a few swipes of her fingers, Amira confirmed the appointments that had popped up in the calendar field, ignored one condescending review (she’d let Mama deal with that one… if the customer ever came back to their business at all), and reloaded her inbox to make sure she hadn’t missed anything.

Deep down, she was just hoping that Kaidan would finally reach out again. Even if it were over something as boring and professional as a stupid email. And not so they could get back together or anything; that would be ridiculous. But so that she could finally spew in his face all the pent-up rage her heartbreak had boiled down to. As it was, Layla had forced her to block his number and delete all traces of him from her phone, so she didn’t even have their old text messages to vent in. A notepad would work, but it would feel too much like a school assignment. And carrier pigeons were probably also off the table.

“Hey, Amira?” Isabel’s voice called from outside the bathroom. It was followed by a couple of polite but quick raps on the door. “Did you get lost in the toilet, or are you, like, actually sick?”

Amira’s gaze flitted to the door in the mirror, then to her reflection. Purple half-moons had made their home beneath her eyes in the last couple of weeks, her dark hair looked like it hadn’t been washed in twice that amount of time, and she had a raw, stubborn cut at the corner of her bottom lip from chewing on it aggressively.

She wasn’t sick. She was tired. And irritated. And—

“Amira?” came Isabel’s voice once more.

—and still on the clock.

With another sigh, Amira slammed the button on the hand dryer again, let it run for a few seconds over her very much not-wet hands, then swung the door open to face her manager.

Isabel was a pixie at barely five feet tall, but the force of her frown still caused Amira to shrink back a bit.

“Oh, good. You’re not dead,” the woman said with a snort and a toss of her fire-engine-red curls. She gestured to the hallway leading back to Deja Brew’s front of house. “Mind rejoining the land of the living?”

Amira wiped her now-sweaty palms on her pants. “Sorry. I was just… it’s that time of the month, you know?”

Isabel nodded slowly as if to say Yeah, right. But before Amira could sidle past her, she held out her key ring. The silver keys rattled together like coins in a tip jar.

Amira lifted a brow.

“Can you close up shop today? I gotta pick up Martin early from his after-school program—kid vomited all over the carpet during show-and-tell.”

“Will do,” Amira said, doing her best to hold back a grimace. She took the proffered keys and slipped them into her pocket. “And I promise I won’t get lost in the toilet again.”

“Was that Kaidan?” Layla hesitantly asked as Amira returned to her station. She hadn’t looked up from the foam art she was constructing on an overpriced oat-milk latte, but Amira could still feel the weight of her attention in the words.

“It was three different white women named Jennifer who were looking to get an appointment with my mom,” she replied with a sigh. Thankfully, the line had dispersed in the ten minutes that she’d hidden in the bathroom, and all she had to do was stand around and wait for the next order. She busied herself by wiping up some spilled milk on the counter.

The idea that Kaidan would ever contact her again was ridiculous, despite how much she hoped for it. She shouldn’t hope for it. It was nauseating. She hated Kaidan Jaziri and his stupid brown eyes and his thoughtful gestures and his crooked smile. If he ever emailed her, the best course of action would be to (a) toss her phone into the depths of Lake Erie and (b) run far, far away.

It’d been two weeks since Amira’s seventeenth birthday. Two weeks since Kaidan had stood at the edge of her front yard, in the middle of a storm, and told her in no uncertain terms that their relationship was over. He hadn’t even bothered to step into her house and hand her a birthday/apology/goodbye present and grab some basbousa for the road! All he’d gifted her was that Hey, can we talk? I’m outside your place text message that every person dreads getting.

She still remembered in vivid detail that day last year when she’d been staring at him during their volleyball unit in gym class and Layla had leaned over to whisper, “The new guy is so cute—definitely your type.”

Sophomore-year Amira had scoffed at the idea.

“Agree to disagree,” she’d said, spiking a volleyball that went wide and flew out of bounds. One of her teammates shot her an irritated look.

In the school hierarchy, Kaidan was at the top of the pyramid. A jock. A god. And to everyone else, Amira was a lowly teacher’s pet. A nerd obsessed with arguing and proving everyone wrong to the point that she’d become the youngest debate club president in her school’s history. It also didn’t help that all the other students at school knew about Mama’s job and teased her for it. How many times had the popular upperclassmen guys come up to her, leering, and asked if she could give them a “palm reading”?

But Kaidan—he’d been different. Somehow, despite his obnoxious friends and all the girls practically flinging themselves headlong at him like a pack of horny lemurs, he’d sat next to her at lunch and invited her to the library. And the library sessions had turned into coffee sessions at Deja Brew. And the coffee sessions had turned into… well, other types of sessions.

And after all that, the teasing from her classmates had stopped. It’d stopped, and for what felt like the first time in two long years, Amira had been able to breathe. She wasn’t Amira Shah, Teacher’s Pet; Amira Shah, Palm Reader’s Daughter. She was Amira Shah. Period.

Losing that… going back to the powerless person she’d told herself she’d never be again… sometimes, it felt worse than a breakup.

And then sometimes, like now, when she stared at the faded blue love seat tucked away in the corner of Deja Brew near one of its big picture windows—she thought maybe, just maybe, it was the person she missed. Not the power.

By five p.m., Layla had already gone home, and Isabel had left Amira with clear instructions about removing the garbage and cleaning the floor before she could leave. She’d swept every corner, tidied up the counters, and thrown away expired flyers on the corkboard near the bathroom. It was nearing six p.m. by the time the place looked spotless. Grabbing her keys in one hand and the two giant trash bags in the other, Amira gingerly opened the door to the café and peered out into the darkness.

It was warm tonight. Humid, too. She wrinkled her nose as she stepped onto the sidewalk and the stench of warm trash blew in from the alley nearby. Leaves scuttled across the asphalt, heading for gutters and the end of the street, but otherwise, nobody would have thought it anything other than a late summer day.

And yet it was mid-November in Dearborn, Michigan, for God’s sake. Global warming might have been taking its toll on the entirety of the planet, but that didn’t mean the past few weeks of drizzly Midwestern cold and icy wind would just up and vanish within one shift.

Something was decidedly off. The type of something her mother would have muttered about in one of her sessions.

Holding her breath, Amira checked over her shoulder to make sure the door was shut and hoisted the garbage bags up from where they were skimming the sidewalk before making the dreaded walk to the dumpsters.

The entrance to the alley was just in view when she heard it. A shout cutting through the silence:

“I don’t care that you—”

Amira froze in her steps as her heartbeat went into overdrive. She knew that voice—it was one she hadn’t heard in two weeks, but she recognized it instantly.

Kaidan?

She leaned the trash bags against Deja Brew’s rough brick wall and peered around the corner.

Two men stood opposite each other, illuminated by a pool of golden lamplight. The stranger’s back was to her, but when he shifted, she caught a glimpse of her ex-boyfriend’s face.

Amira bit her lip, hard, to keep herself from calling out his name. It was late, and though she couldn’t make out what they’d been discussing, the argument seemed to be escalating dangerously close to a full-out brawl.

But she could stop it, couldn’t she? Shouldn’t she?

She made to grab for the trash bags—it would serve well as a distraction to break up the fight, maybe even give Kaidan an excuse to go back to Deja Brew with her—but as soon as she turned to glance at the two men again, her fingers slipped from the plastic drawstrings.

The two men were falling down. No, not down. Into. They had dropped—leaped? Amira’s brain couldn’t quite catch up—right into a hole in the ground.

And then they vanished.

Amira finally allowed herself to call out his name: “Kaidan?”

She ran into the alley at full speed, skidding to a stop at the edge of the sinkhole. But it wasn’t a sinkhole. It couldn’t be. From this angle, only a few feet away, it was more an eddy of swirling, shifting air. Darkness, to be sure, but an awaiting darkness. An invitation.

Amira looked back at the mouth of the alley. There was no time to get help. And she’d stupidly left her phone back in the shop. But if Kaidan had gone in there… If he was in danger…

She clasped the old necklace her mother had given her for her birthday as she thought of the stormy sky outside her house as he’d left her. Of his silence these last two weeks at school.

The hole was shrinking, bits of the alley’s asphalt showing through at the edges.

It was disappearing.

She had to make a split-second choice—now or never.

“Damn you, Kaidan Jaziri,” she hissed through her teeth. Then she closed her eyes and stepped forward.

The darkness swallowed her whole.