More City of the Dead Predictions

Sorry it’s been a while, college apps and finals and whatever, blah blah blah, okay time to YELL EXCITEDLY ABOUT CITY SPIES AGAIN (spoilers ahead I’m not gonna mark anything except the big stuff). You can find my last round of yelling about book 4 here.

Okay! So!! In the last few weeks we’ve gotten a lot of news about book 4, City of the Dead (CotD), and it’s all been absolutely fascinating.

From Instagram, we have: slide 8 of this Instagram post  about Ponti’s year in review [slide 8 ID: a picture of Ponti’s computer screen with the prologue for book 4 partially visible and marked up], the book trailer and the previous trailer [video IDs: various pictures of Egypt intermixed with pictures of the city spies doing their thing], a piece of trivia from November 4 [ID: a slide with a picture of an Egyptian boy and a pyramid, saying “100 years ago today, King Tut’s tomb was discovered by this 12-year old boy”], and the cover announcement which is what the first round of yelling about this book was about [ID: Rio, Kat, and Brooklyn under the Sphinx and a pyramid; Rio climbs a wall while Brooklyn fiddles with some computer equipment and Kat points a flashlight offscreen. All three look afraid.]. 

He hasn’t updated his personal website with anything about the new book, nor has he updated All Roads Lead To Audrey (omg, do not get me started on that site now, though). And his Twitter is effectively the same as Instagram. So I think it’s safe to say that this is what we know. 

So, what do I make of this?

Well, rhetorical questions aside, here I go a-rambling. 

First of all, I lied, I’m talking about All Roads Lead To Audrey. James Ponti needs to delete the default pages from All Roads Lead to Audrey (ARLtA); if he wants it to be anything more than one page, he should maybe try to find some trivia? Maybe some secret backstory? When he announced it he said there’d be fan stuff on there, but honestly, we have an ao3 tag, we’re doing pretty well (12 works and counting!), so I don’t think I’d check there really. We’ll see what he does. 

Anyways! Book! I think this is going to be a Fun Book (this is a positive capitalization). I’m pretty sure I have an idea of the plot. My guess: the mission is keeping Umbra from stealing something Big And Important (we know Stavros Sinclair, Le Fantome, and Sir Reg all like art…) out of the tomb of King Tut, or else stopping an Umbra agent from releasing some kind of damaging information. I’d really really like it if Ponti treats major issues in archeology respectfully; his track record is pretty good, but nobody’s perfect, and this looks like it’s more directly about artifacts than anything else. 

I’d bet Kat’s going to be the focus character, and that Mother’s kids are going to show up again, but I really don’t think we’ll (I really hope we don’t) get the end of that arc. 

I’m pretty sure we won’t get any confirmation of my other theories, but we’ll see! Crossing fingers. 

(I’m exhausted from my last final and stopping here.) If you want to yell at me about city spies, please do, I will happily listen and yell back! (I want to make a discord server for the books but I don’t think anyone would join cause I only know two other fans and only have one of their discord handles; if you read the books please yell at me about them and maybe I’ll make that server eventually.)