“Hey! Mini! There you are!” shouted Aru.
Aru had circled Costco Parking Lot Section A twice before she saw her. Mini was curled up on the hood of a minivan that boasted MY CHILD IS AN HONORS STUDENT.
When Aru walked up to her, Mini didn’t turn her head. She just kept tracing the Sanskrit symbol on her left palm.
“You’re going to leave me behind, aren’t you?” asked Mini softly.
“What? Why do you think that?”
“I’m not as good as you are at…at this….I wasn’t even supposed to be going on any quests or anything! The first time my mom ever took me to the Otherworld, I threw up. The threshold guardians didn’t even let me past.”
“That’s better than me,” said Aru. “My mom never even took me to the Otherworld. At least your mom told you about all this stuff.”
“She had to,” sniffed Mini. “She’s a panchakanya.”
“What’s that?” asked Aru. She could break down what the words meant, but it didn’t help her understand.
Panch. Five.
Kanya. Woman.
“It’s the sisterhood Mom’s always talking about. Five women who are reincarnations of legendary queens from the ancient stories. These days their job is to raise and protect us.”
“So my mom is part of this…sisterhood?” asked Aru.
“I guess,” said Mini a little rudely.
Aru knew why Mini’s tone had changed. They had started off talking about Mini’s feelings, and now they were back to talking about Aru. But Aru couldn’t help herself. There was so much she didn’t know…and so much she wanted to know.
“Do you know who the other women are? Do they talk on the phone? Have you met the other Pandavas? Are they all girls our age?”
Mini shook her head. “Sorry.” Then her eyes narrowed. “Why? Do you wish you had a different Pandava with you, instead of me?”
“I’m not saying that….”
“You’re not not saying that,” said Mini. “But it’s fine. I’m used to it. Second choice for everything. I’m always getting left behind.”
“Is this about what Boo said? That the slowest one of us is going to get caught by the Sleeper?”
She nodded, sniffling.
“Boo was just being Boo. He’s a pigeon.”
As if being a pigeon explained a lot of nasty behavior. But in Boo’s case, the observation rang true.
“I just…don’t want to be left behind.” Her eyes welled with tears. “It happens to me all the time, and I hate it.”
“Did you get chased by a monster with someone else?”
Mini laughed, but because she was crying, it sounded like a wet hiccup. Aru scooted away a little. The last thing she wanted on her was snot. She was already covered in monster ashes.
“No,” said Mini when she had finished snort-laugh-hiccupping. “You don’t know what it’s like. You’re probably popular at school. I bet you’re good at everything….You’ve never even been to the Otherworld before and you fought Brahmasura better than me. I bet at school you don’t get called the Tattletale. And you’ve probably never shown up at a birthday party to find no one is there because they put the wrong date on your invitation….People wouldn’t avoid you.”
Aru tried not to wince. She had to admit that being a tattletale was the worst thing you could be at school. No one would tell you anything.
“Have you ever done anything you regretted?” asked Mini.
Aru didn’t meet her eyes. She could have told the truth about a lot of things. That she wasn’t popular. That she did know how it felt to be on the outside. That her best talent wasn’t defeating monsters…it was pretending.
For a moment, Aru even wanted to tell her the truth about what happened with the lamp. How it hadn’t been an accident at all, but something she’d done on purpose just to impress people who probably weren’t worth impressing anyway, but she couldn’t.
It felt nice to be considered more than what she was for a change.
So she asked a different question. “If you could go back in time and un-tattletale on someone…would you?”
Mini looked up. “No. Dennis Connor was about to cut Matilda’s hair.”
“So? Why stick your nose into it?”
That kind of thing happened at school all the time. Aru just let it be. It wasn’t her business. Or her fight.
Mini sighed. “Matilda had to leave school last year because she got sick, and when she got chemo, she went bald. Her hair has only just started to grow back. If Dennis had cut it, she would’ve been really sad.”
“See?” said Aru. “You did a good thing. Plus, Dennis has two first names. He was asking to get in trouble.”
Mini laughed.
“So you’re not a tattletale…you’re just honorable. Like a knight! Knights always rescue people.”
Mini raised her palm. The saat symbol still looked like a backward three. “What about when knights aren’t strong enough?”
“Even when they fail, they’re still knights,” said Aru. “Now come on. Boo said this was a special kind of Otherworldly Costco, and I want to see if their toilet paper floats. Maybe they have special Otherworld-Costco things like bulk bags of wishes or dragon teeth or something. We can pick some up as soon as we get that second key. What is it, again? A bite of adulthood?”
This seemed to perk up Mini. She nodded.
“Still have the first key?” asked Aru.
Mini patted her backpack. “Right here, still wrapped in your Kleenex.”
“Handkerchief.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Let’s go, Sir Mini.”
Like at every Costco Aru had been to, lots of customers were walking in and out. But here the people changed as soon as they crossed the threshold. For example, one woman pushing a cart toward the entrance looked like any woman you’d see on the street. Sensible shoes. Sensible hair. Sensible outfit.
The minute she stepped over the mat that said WELCOME TO COSTCO, she was suddenly covered in golden feathers. Like a giant bird! And her feathers were edged in flames. Little embers sparked and burned, falling onto the pavement and sputtering like a blown-out candle.
Another family was getting their receipt checked at the door before exiting. On the other side of the mat, they looked like humans from the waist up, but from the waist down they were snakes. The moment they crossed the mat, they were all human.
The snake boy winked at Mini.
She walked into a telephone pole.
“You are the Daughter of Death,” hissed Aru. “You don’t walk into a telephone pole because of a boy.”
“I didn’t! I tripped. It wasn’t because…you know. It’s not because he did the thing with his mouth where it went up and his teeth showed.”
“You mean when he smiled?”
“Yeah,” said Mini, rubbing furiously at her bright red cheeks. “That.”
Boo glared at them from the top of a grocery cart. “What took you so long? I almost started aging.”
“You don’t age?” asked Aru.
“If you do, you can use the sprig of youth,” offered Mini. “Not sure how it works, though. Do we just hit you with it?”
Boo flew to Aru’s shoulder and then poked his head out from underneath her hair. “You shall do no such thing, fiendish girl!”
“I was only offering to help,” said Mini, crossing her arms.
“Well, stop offering before you get one of us killed,” said Boo. “Now, before you go into the Costco, remember that it won’t become the Night Bazaar until you stop looking so hard.”
Aru blinked. “What does that mean?”
“It means go to the frozen food aisle, and start counting all the breakfast items. That should be enough to make your mind detach itself from reality and drift off. Or you could do algebra. Or read James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. That’s my go-to.”
“That sounds dangerous…” started Mini, but with one glare from Aru, she took a deep breath. “But I am the Daughter of Death, and so that s
ounds…like something I should like?”
Aru grinned.
The moment they walked inside, Aru was hit with that musty, industrial smell of supermarket. Why was everything made of concrete here? And it was so cold….
Even if it was the middle of summer and so blazing hot outside that the road was melting, supermarkets were always freezing. Aru wished she’d brought a sweatshirt with her.
On her shoulder, Boo had made a strange nest for himself out of her hair and was now peering out of the hair-turned-shawl like an angry grandmother. “Not that way! That leads to the electronics. Too many bright, shiny things.”
There were tons of people walking around them. Moms and dads and kids with those weird sneakers that had wheels on the bottom. There were all kinds of people, too—white, black, Hispanic, Asian, tall, short, fat, skinny. Not all appeared human, either. Some of them were feathered or furred, fanged or feline.
Aru’s eyes widened. “Are they all…like us?”
“Dense as bricks?” offered Boo.
“No, like—”
“Scrawny heroes?” Boo guessed again.
“Ugh!”
“I don’t know what an ugh is, but probably not,” said Boo smugly. “But if you are asking whether they all have a connection to an Otherworld…Yes.”
“Like ours?”
“Like theirs,” said Boo. “Whatever their version of the Otherworld happens to be. But let’s not get into the question of metaphysics. Many things can coexist. Several gods can live in one universe. It’s like fingers on a hand. They’re all different, but still part of a hand.”
They passed a display of potted trees. Apple trees with glistening fruit the color of pearls. Pear trees with fruit that looked like hammered gold. There was even a giant Christmas tree, sparkling with the flames of a hundred candles nestled on its branches.
Aru watched as a redheaded girl reached for the Christmas tree. The girl giggled and, right in front of Aru, stepped into the tree. The tree gave a contented little shake. But no sooner had she settled into the tree than a tall woman with long strawberry blond hair started knocking on the trunk.
“Come out of there, now!” she said. She had an accent. Irish? “I swear on the Dagda, I’ll—”
The woman yanked on one of the pine branches, pulling it like an ear, and hoisted the girl out of the tree. The girl looked very unhappy.
“Every. Time,” said the woman, who appeared to be the girl’s mother. “This is why you’re not allowed in parks. Maeve, my goodness, when your father learns that you…”
But Aru couldn’t hear the rest of the scolding, because the two of them turned and hurried away down an aisle marked LAUNDRY SUPPLIES.
“All these…Otherworldly people…come here? To a Costco?” asked Mini.
Boo winked. “Who says it looks like a Costco to them? Who says they are even in the United States? The world has many faces, children. It’s only showing you one at a time. Now hurry. Time will move even faster here, and you still need armor and the second key.”
“And a snack?” added Aru hopefully.
“Yes, fine, one snack.”
Why Are All Enchanted Things So Rude?
The three of them stopped at the wide aisle of frozen foods and started taking inventory: black bean soup, lunch rolls, pizzas, bagels, pizza bagels, tripe, codfish, catfish, I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-fish fish. Gross. Aru waited for her perception to change, for magic to prickle on the outside of her vision like television static. But she didn’t feel any different, and her hopes of seeing any magical toilet paper were quickly fading.
“So this is where every Otherworldly person does their shopping?” asked Mini.
“And weapons perusing, apparently,” said Aru.
Not to mention key-to-the-Kingdom-of-Death browsing.
In all of Aru’s previous grocery shopping, she’d never once picked up a gallon of milk and then wandered over to an aisle labeled SHARP DEADLY THINGS. (Unfortunately.)
“The Night Bazaar has had to adapt, change form, and account for things like families moving to new countries and imaginations evolving,” explained Boo.
“So what did it used to look—” Aru started.
“Just read the items,” said Boo, irritated.
Mini yawned. “Fine…more pizza rolls…why do there need to be so many different brands of pizza rolls? Peanut butter sandwiches. Frozen salmon.” She stopped. “Did you know you can get E. coli from salmon? It can kill you.”
Aru, who was shivering from all the refrigeration, scowled. “Anything and everything can kill you, Mini! You don’t need to point it out all the time.”
Mini straightened her shoulders. “My mother always says that knowledge is power. I’m just trying to make us more powerful.”
“And my mother says that ignorance is bliss,” said Aru under her breath.
Muttering the words made her pause, though. Ignorance hadn’t been bliss. Not even close. Bliss meant happiness, but here Aru was, not knowing who she was, where she was, or what she was supposed to do next. Had her mother said that because she had chosen to keep Aru in the dark?
Maybe her mom had done it to protect her. She did that a lot, even though Aru never understood until days (or even months) later. Like the time her mom had tearfully apologized when no one showed up at Aru’s birthday party during third grade. She confessed that she’d accidentally thrown away all the invitations. They spent the day at the movies and had breakfast for dinner instead (which was awesome), but Aru had been furious. It wasn’t until a year later that Aru learned the truth from a classmate. None of the invited kids had wanted to come, so her mom had lied to protect Aru’s feelings.
Aru thought back to Mini’s story about showing up to a birthday party on the wrong date. Mini had no idea how much they had in common….
Mini started to drone on again about the aisle’s offerings. “Frozen waffles, frozen pancakes, frozen stars, frozen wings, frozen—”
“Wait a sec…” started Aru.
Mini’s eyes became unfocused. “Frozen prophecies, frozen orreries, frozen gold, frozen lead—”
Aru looked around, trying to see signs of magic. Slowly, her vision changed. The supermarket faded. The cement floor transformed to packed earth. The fluorescent ceiling lights stopped flickering.
Her bones felt heavy. She grew sleepy.
And then…then it was like dozing off in class. One moment of perfect, heavy-lidded happiness.
That was ruined by the sound of a bell.
Except it wasn’t a bell; it was a loud squawking sound that came from overhead. The warehouse ceiling was gone, and a bird soared in the sky above them. Its wide wings were the color of evening turning into nighttime. Half of the sky was sunlit; half of it was moonlit.
“Whoa,” breathed Mini.
It looked as if someone had taken an ancient marketplace and squashed it together with a modern grocery store. Beyond a pane of glass, aisles stretched far ahead in every direction. From what Aru could see, they held a combination of shelves, displays, small shops, and tents. One shop sold strange bolts of silk whose patterns looked like spun moonbeams and ribbons of rushing water. Next to it was an Apple Store.
There were still metal grocery carts, but they were…alive. The metal grilles curved up and down like mouths, and an extra set of handles slanted like eyebrows. When someone came near them, tiny spikes of metal rolled up and down the grocery cart like bristling fur. They seemed a bit feral. A couple of them growled. One woman with a snake tail cursed loudly as she wrestled with her cart. Finally, when she took hold of its bright red bar with both hands, it gave in and allowed itself to be steered by the triumphant naga woman.
Three glowing signs hovered in the distance, but Aru couldn’t read what they said. When she started walking toward them, she felt a sharp nip on her ear.
“Stay in line!” said Boo.
Only then did Aru realize they were in a long line in front of the entrance to the Night Bazaar, which glimmered o
n the other side of a pane of glass.
“This is absurd,” said the naga in front of her. The snake woman turned to her husband, her cobra hood flaring. “I’m going to miss my haircut appointment. It took me months to book.”
Her husband sighed. As he did, a forked tongue flicked out of his mouth. He rubbed the back of his head and sank lower into the bronze coils of his tail.
“It’s a different world, jaani,” he said. “Less safe. Less secure. Plus, there’s rumors that none of the gods can find their vehicles—”
Mini pulled on Aru’s sleeve. “Did you hear that?”
“Obviously, Mini. I’m standing right here.”
Mini blushed. “Do you think they know about the Sl—”
Before she could finish, Boo pecked her hand. The warning on his face was clear: Don’t say his name.
“The You-Know-Who?” she whispered.
“He’s not Voldemort!”
“Well, I don’t know what else to call him!”
Aru knew better than to mention the Sleeper in the Night Bazaar. It would probably be the equivalent of shouting Fire! in a theater. Everyone here was clearly on guard. A frantic kind of energy was coming off the crowd, as if they were all waiting for something to go terribly wrong. Aru even caught a couple of muffled conversations:
“—the world is simply stopping. Whole groups of people and neighborhoods just utterly frozen! But the pattern makes no sense! Some place in the southeastern United States, another in a strip mall in the Midwest?”
“I’m sure there’s a good reason—”
“The mortals are befuddled….”
Aru tried to shrink. If anyone looked at her, would they see her guilt? All she’d done was light a lamp that everyone thought was going to get lit anyway (just maybe not so soon…). It felt almost cartoonish, like someone throwing a tiny snowball at a mountain and causing an avalanche.
The line moved quickly. Within minutes, the three of them were standing before a muscular man with the head of a bull. Aru recognized this type of Otherworld person from the paintings in the museum. He was a raksha. Aru almost panicked. But not all demons were bad. It was one of the things she liked best when her mother told her the stories: villains could be heroic, and heroes could do evil. Makes you wonder who the villains really are, her mother used to say. Everyone has a bit of good and bad in them.
Aru Shah and the End of Time Page 10