If they didn’t leave now, they were probably never going to leave.
“Just this,” said Chitrigupta. He held out his hand. A slim ballpoint pen lay in his palm.
“What does it do?” asked Mini.
“What do you think it does?” asked Chitrigupta. “It’s a pen! It writes!”
“Oh. Thanks?” said Mini.
“Don’t mention it. I cannot help you in defeating the Sleeper, but perhaps this will come in handy at some point. Wherever you are and whatever you write on, I will get the message. And if it is within my means…I will answer.”
With a final farewell, they were off.
The moment the door closed behind them, all of Aru’s old fears raced back to her.
“I like him,” said Mini.
“Of course you do! You guys are practically the same person.”
The Halls of Death unfurled like a maze before them and actually grew. Colors gathered and stretched into passageways. The signs cropped up shortly after that:
TO DARE
TO DISTURB
TO DEIGN
An arrow was attached to each sign.
DARE pointed right and down a blue corridor.
DISTURB pointed left and down a red corridor.
DEIGN pointed up and into nothing.
Beneath them, the floor was polished marble, and the ceiling was a strange twisting river of names that, Aru imagined, belonged to the dead.
“Red pill or blue pill?” said Aru, in her best imitation of Morpheus.
“What pill? It’s a red road or blue road, Aru.”
“I know that! I’m quoting The Matrix!”
Mini blinked. “But a matrix has nothing to do with color. In mathematics, a matrix is a rectangular array of—”
Aru groaned. “Mini, you’re killing me. Don’t you ever watch old movies?” She shook her head and pointed ahead. “Which way should we go? Why don’t they have signs that say Weapons of Mass Celestial Destruction, and then Everything Else Is Actually a Trap? That would be helpful.”
Mini laughed. “What if we went with dare?”
“Why?”
“Because it’s like…we’re daring to save Time?”
“Are we, though? Or are we just panicking around and trying to save what we like?”
And the people we love, thought Aru with a pang.
“That doesn’t sound very heroic…” said Mini.
“What about disturb?” asked Aru. “Like, we’re disturbing the natural order of things?”
“I don’t think that’s right,” said Mini. “That makes it seem like we’re doing something wrong, and we’re not.”
“Fine. What does deign mean?”
“I’ll look it up,” said Mini, and she dug in her backpack.
Aru thought she was going to use her compact, but instead she brought out a Merriam-Webster Pocket Dictionary.
“Seriously?” asked Aru. “Of all the things you thought to pack on a quest, you brought a pocket dictionary?”
“So what? I like being prepared,” said Mini. “What did you pack?”
“I didn’t pack anything,” said Aru. “Who has time to pack when you’re told the world is going to end—”
Mini shushed her. “‘Deign,’” she said. “It means ‘to do something that one considers beneath one’s dignity.’”
“None of those options makes sense,” said Aru. “What if we just try walking in a different direction? Like in between the signs?”
So they tried. But their feet met a wall of air. Something prevented them from taking a single step that was not in a specific direction. The only place they couldn’t access was DEIGN, because the sign pointed up, and there weren’t stairs or anything.
“Chitrigupta could have told us which way to go,” grumbled Aru. “We’re practically family. He said so himself.”
“But then we wouldn’t—”
“Yes, I know. Character-building blah-blah, and the world wouldn’t be saved. That’s way too much pressure. Are our brains even fully developed? We shouldn’t be allowed to make these decisions—”
“Aru! That’s it!” said Mini.
“Okay, now I’m worried. None of what I said was good.”
“We’re not smart enough,” said Mini.
“Yay?”
“But we can change that,” she said.
Out of her backpack, she pulled out the box of wisdom cookies.
“Book cookies?” asked Aru, grimacing. “All right, fine. Gimme.”
Mini looked inside the box, then checked her backpack again. “There’s only one in here.”
The girls stared at each other for a moment. Mini’s fingers reflexively curled over the cookie. Aru could tell how much it meant to her friend.
“It’s yours,” said Aru. “You’ve got the same soul as Yudhistira, and he was always known for being the wisest of all the brothers. That cookie has your name all over it. Plus, I don’t need more wisdom. I’d explode.”
Mini flushed. “Thanks, Aru.”
“How long does the wisdom last?”
“I think only for the duration of the decision making,” said Mini.
“How do you know that?”
“Because it says so on the back of the box.”
Sure enough, the duration of the wisdom cookies was listed alongside the nutritional facts.
“Ooh!” said Mini. “It has my entire daily serving of potassium and zinc!”
“Hooray.”
Mini took a bite of the cookie.
“What’s it taste like?” asked Aru.
“Kinda smoky? And cold. Like snow. I think it’s supposed to taste like my favorite book.”
“What’s your favorite book?”
Mini bit into the second half of the cookie. “The Golden Compass.”
“Never read it.”
“Really?” asked Mini, shocked. “I’ll loan you my copy when we get home.”
Home. A home that was full of books Aru had never cracked open because her mother always read to her. Aru had trouble remembering things she read herself, but if she heard something, she’d never forget it. Maybe that’s why her mom had told her so many stories. Her mom might have left her in the dark about being a Pandava, but at least hearing the stories about them had prepared Aru somewhat. Mom, thought Aru, I promise I’ll thank you as soon as I get home.
“Oh no,” said Mini.
“What? What is it?”
Mini held up her palm to show the symbol there:
“Another doomsday squiggle?” asked Aru. “Okay, well, it looks like a two, which would be really bad news, but maybe it means four?”
“It means two.”
“Noooooooo! Betrayal!”
Only two days left? And the entirety of the Kingdom of Death left unexplored?
Mini ate the rest of the wisdom cookie.
“Feel any wiser?” asked Aru anxiously.
“No?”
“What about warmer? Or bloated? Like you’re full of hot air?”
But Mini wasn’t paying attention. She was staring at the three signs.
“Deign,” she whispered. “That’s the answer.”
“Why?”
“It’s kinda like a riddle,” said Mini. “The word deign means to look down on. The arrow pointing up is a trap, because the whole point is that we have to look at what’s beneath us. It’s like when you have to make a choice you don’t want to make and you feel like you’re reluctant to do it.”
“Whoa,” said Aru. “You got all that from a cookie? Sure there isn’t any left?”
She grabbed the box from Mini and shook it. Nope. Not even a crumb. Mini stuck out her tongue.
At the edge of the DEIGN sign, a hole formed in the marble floor.
“Why is it only opening now?” asked Aru.
“Probably because we’re looking down and not up?”
Both girls peered down the hole. Something glittered far below. A strange fragrance wafted up. It smelled uncannily like Aru’s apartm
ent in the museum: musty fabric, chai, lavender candles, and old books.
Mini frowned. “Let’s go in alphabetically,” she said.
“No way! My name starts with A. It’s your kingdom, sorta; you go first—”
“I’m the one who made sure we could get even this far.”
“Only because I let you eat the cookie!”
“Chitrigupta gave it to me—”
Aru took a deep breath and settled this the only fair and logical way she could imagine.
“NOSE GOES!” she screamed, smacking her face.
Mini, who must have anticipated Aru being sneaky, immediately smacked her face, too. Except she moved so fast that her glasses flew off her head and fell. Down the hole.
“Ughhhhh,” said Mini. “You’re the worst, Aru.”
And with that, she jumped in after them.
What Meets the Eye (and What Doesn’t)
The descent wasn’t bad. It was like a long waterslide, without the water. It dumped them out in a forest.
But something was off about this place.
Granted, Aru didn’t have much experience with forests. Once, her mother had taken her to San Francisco. At first it had seemed like it was going to be a boring trip, because they spent the whole morning with the curator of the Asian Art Museum. But after lunch, her mother had taken her to Muir Woods. Walking through it was like a delicious dream. It had smelled like peppermint. The sunlight was soft and feathered, hardly skimming the forest floor because the trees were so thick and tall.
But this place, tucked inside a pocket of the Kingdom of Death, didn’t have that foresty feel. Aru sniffed the air. There was no perfume of green and wriggling alive-ness. No smell of woodsmoke or still ponds.
It didn’t have a smell at all.
Mini toed the ground. “This doesn’t feel like dirt.”
Aru bent to check it out. She ran her fingers over the floor. It was silk.
She walked to one of the trees, planning to snap off a branch and inspect it, but instead walked straight through it.
“It’s not real!” exclaimed Mini. She jumped through another one of the trees. “This is amazing!”
A small puddle of water caught the light.
“What is this going to be, a trampoline?” Mini laughed, jumping into it. But the second she did, the liquid stuck to her legs. And then it pulled. With every blink, Mini was vanishing beneath the—
“QUICKSAAAAAND!” screamed Mini. She started struggling.
“Stop!” shouted Aru. “Haven’t you seen any movies? Thrashing around is, like, the fastest way to die!”
“Quicksandquicksandquicksand,” moaned Mini. “I don’t want to go this way. My body will be preserved forever like those bog mummies! I’ll become a Wikipedia page!”
“You’re not gonna die, Mini. Just stop screaming and let me think for a minute!”
She was going to reach for a branch to pull out Mini, but the branches weren’t really there. Aru ran through a couple of the trees. Maybe there was an actual tree lurking in the midst? But there wasn’t.
“Aru!” screamed Mini. By now, she was up to her neck. Any farther, and she wouldn’t even be able to scream. Her arms waved wildly in the air.
“I’m coming!” said Aru, running back.
But Aru tripped. She braced herself for a fall, but of course, the silky ground was soft. She landed with a light thump. When she looked down, her hands were clutching folds of the “dirt.”
“That’s it,” whispered Aru.
She lifted some silk off the ground. It came up in a dark, slender rope. Aru dragged it over to Mini, who, by now, was buried up to her chin.
Mini grabbed hold of the rope, but the quicksand yanked her under.
“No!” cried Aru.
She pulled the rope as hard as she could. Under ordinary circumstances, she might not have been able to do it. Under ordinary circumstances, Aru probably would have slipped into the quicksand herself and both of them would have become dismal Wikipedia pages.
But worry for a friend can make ordinary circumstances extraordinary. In that moment, all Aru knew was that Mini was her first true friend in a long time…and she would not—could not—lose her.
Mini gasped as Aru heaved her onto the silky ground.
Aru was shocked. She did it. She saved her. Even though she’d faced down a demon and tricked the seasons, this was the first time she felt like she’d done something magical.
Mini spluttered and coughed. “There was a shark down there.” She shuddered, then gathered a handful of silk and started toweling off her hair. “A shark! And you know what it said to me? It said, ‘Is it true your sharks don’t talk?’ I didn’t have a chance to answer, because you pulled me out so quickly.”
“What kind of thank-you is that?”
“Why should I say thank you?” asked Mini. “I knew you could do it.”
I knew you could do it.
Aru bit back a grin. “Fine. Next time I’ll let you drown a bit longer.”
“No!” squeaked Mini. “Drowning is number three on my Top Ten Ways I Don’t Want to Die list.”
“Who makes a list of that?”
Mini primly straightened her shirt. “I find that organizing scary information actually makes me less scared.”
Once Mini had finished toweling off, they looked at the path ahead of them. The road that wound through the forest was the same color as the DEIGN sign.
“Do you think it goes to another hall?” asked Aru.
“Maybe? I wish we had a map again,” Mini said, squinting as she studied her hand.
Ever since they had arrived in the Kingdom of Death, the mehndi had grown lighter and lighter, as they did naturally, because they were not permanent. But now all that remained of the fantastical designs were faint waves on their fingers and the dark Sanskrit numbers on their palms.
The forest arced over them. In this place there was even a sky. But given how topsy-turvy everything was, Aru wondered whether it was a sea. Maybe here the moon really was made of cheese.
“Does this place feel familiar to you?” asked Mini. She rubbed her arms as if she had goose bumps.
“No?”
Aru would have remembered a place that looked like this. But she couldn’t deny the smell that she had caught right before they’d jumped into DEIGN. It was the smell of…home.
She was still thinking about this when she experienced a very rude awakening. Every tree they had seen so far had been intangible, so Aru had walked straight through them. She was passing through one of the trunks, not really minding where she was going, when she smacked her nose. Hard.
“What the—?” she muttered, glaring.
She had run into the side of a cliff. A rocky black wall glistening with water. No, it was a hard waterfall. She reached out to touch it carefully. It seemed like actual water, cold and cascading through her fingers. But the minute she tried to put her hand through it, it pushed back. As firm as stone.
“Yet another illusion,” said Aru. “Except this one’s got substance to it.”
Beside her, Mini paled. “Aru, that’s it! I think I know where we are!”
Mini closed her eyes and put her hand on the waterfall. She groped around, and then her hand abruptly stopped moving. She must have found what she was looking for, because her eyes opened suddenly. Behind the waterfall, Aru heard the faintest unclasping sound. Like a key sliding into a lock.
The next instant, the waterfall swung open.
It hadn’t been a waterfall at all, but a secret door.
“Just like in the stories about the Palace of Illusions,” breathed Mini.
“Is this your wisdom cookie speaking, or you?”
“Me,” said Mini, frowning. “I only remember the story because of the carnival my mom took me and my brother to. She brought it up when we went to the place with all the weird mirrors—”
“You mean the fun house?”
“Right, that. She told me the Pandavas had lived in a place like
that. A famous demon king, who was also a really great architect, made it for them.”
Aru remembered hearing that story. In exchange for their sparing his life, the demon king Mayasura agreed to build the Pandava brothers the most beautiful palace the world had ever seen. It came with illusions that befuddled the mind and heightened the senses. They were so convincing that when an enemy prince (who was also the Pandavas’ cousin) came to visit, he fell through a floor tile that was actually water, and he nearly broke his foot jumping into a pool that turned out to be cleverly polished sapphires.
“What if this is the original palace?” asked Mini. “Maybe that’s how I knew how to open the door?”
“So what if it is? It’s not like we’ll remember anything about it from our former lives. It’s just a house, no big deal. And I doubt it’s the real Palace of Illusions. What would it be doing here, anyway? We didn’t reside in the Kingdom of Death….”
Mini frowned. “Uncle Chitrigupta said we’d find all kinds of things here, including forgotten things. Maybe when people forgot about the palace, it moved to the forest?”
“It’s a house! Not a person,” said Aru.
But Mini didn’t look so convinced. The path led to the waterfall door, and there were no other routes around it. “We have to go through the palace, don’t we?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper. “I really don’t want to. I couldn’t even get through the Haunted Mansion in Disney World. My dad had to take me out.”
“Well, if we have to go through it, it’s going to be fine. It’s a palace. It might be a bit weird inside, but we’ve seen a lot of weird stuff on this trip! Like a magical-door crocodile, and Door of Death dogs, and I don’t even want to think about what else. You can get past a couple of stones, some statues, and some optical illusions. Trust me.”
Mini took a deep breath. “Fine, if you say so.”
“Plus, think about it this way: if there are any enchantments inside, you have the magical compact. Just swing it around and look at things out of the corner of your eye.”
Aru Shah and the End of Time Page 17