The next day, right before homeroom, Aru had gone up to Carol and held the paper in her face. “I curse you, Carol Yang! From this day forth, you’ll always have a runny nose. Every time you look in the mirror and think you don’t have a booger, one is going to appear, and everyone will see it except you.” And then Aru had hissed, “Kachori! Bajri no rotlo! Methi nu shaak! Undhiyu!”
In actuality, those words weren’t a curse at all. They were just the names of various Gujarati dishes. But Carol Yang did not know that.
Neither did their homeroom teacher, who had walked in to find Carol holding a tissue to her nose and crying. Aru had been sent home with a note from the principal: Please tell your daughter to refrain from cursing her classmates.
Ever since, Aru hadn’t had a high opinion of curses. She’d thought they would function like gifts (It’s the thought that counts!), but both of those things were lies. Thoughts weren’t powerful enough by themselves, and the curse hadn’t worked.
But this time…This time was all wrong.
Behind them, the Bridge of Forgetting looked like a crescent of ivory. Every memory that had forged it had been stolen from Shukra.
She thought she heard the Sleeper’s voice. Oh, Aru, Aru, Aru. What have you done?
But it wasn’t the Sleeper. It was Mini. She touched Aru’s wrist lightly. “What’d you do, Aru?”
“I saved us.” Her voice wobbled. “I got us across the bridge so that we could get the weapons and save the world.”
This was true.
And true things were supposed to feel…clean. Unquestionably good. But she didn’t feel good. Shukra had given up his life-form, and a curse had followed Aru over the bridge.
She was allegedly a hero. Was this how heroes felt, knotted up with doubt?
Mini’s face softened. “It’s okay. When this is over, we’ll get the curse removed. I bet they’ve got places for that in the Night Bazaar. Or we can ask Boo?”
At least Mini was optimistic. Aru forced herself to smile. She tried to push the curse from her thoughts. “Yeah! That’s it! Good idea, Mini. People do that with tattoos all the time. There’s a girl at my school whose sister got a butterfly put on her lower back during spring break, and her parents took her out of school for a week to get it zapped off.”
Mini wrinkled her nose. “Why would anyone want a butterfly permanently on their skin? Butterflies are creepy. Their tongues are weird. And did you know that if tattoo needles are contaminated and not properly sterilized you can get hepatitis?”
“And let me guess….You die?”
“Well, you can get treated,” said Mini. “But you could die.”
Aru rolled her eyes. “C’mon. We must be getting close.”
Chitrigupta had said that the celestial weapons were past the bridge, but there was nothing in sight except a giant cave.
The cave was so tall, it seemed less like a cave and more like a ravine through a mountain range. Pale stalactites dripped down from the ceiling, jagged and sharp, and crowded so tightly that they reminded her of teeth.
And then there was the smell.
Aru almost gagged.
It was worse than that time she had forgotten the groceries in the backseat of her mom’s Honda. The whole car had smelled so bad, her mom had been forced to leave the windows open all weekend. This place smelled like…rotting.
She stepped on something that crunched. Aru looked down to see a slender fish spine stuck to her shoe. She peeled it off and flung it into the cave. It landed with an echoing splat.
“This floor is weird,” said Mini.
It was firm, but springy. Like a mattress. And it wasn’t gray or brown, like the floor of most caves, but a cherry red so deep it glinted black.
“It smells awful in here,” said Aru.
She held her shirt over her nose and mouth as they walked. Almost everything she had seen that had anything to do with the gods and goddesses was lavish and beautiful. But this place looked like a prison. The walls were a wet shade of pink. Every now and again, a gust of hot wind brought the stench of rotting fish.
“Maybe the weapons are rotting?”
“They can’t rot! They’re celestial.”
“How do you know?” demanded Mini. “Are you an expert in all things celestial?”
Aru was going to answer, but she tripped and stumbled. A slender, shining silver thread stretched across the ravine, and the moment she touched it, it triggered something deep in the large cave. Neon words now dangled from the stalactite:
THE CHAMBER OF THE ASTRAS
Astra meant weapon.
Specifically ones that had supernatural abilities.
Aru’s pulse raced. She knew she wasn’t supposed to be excited about needing a highly magical and highly powerful weapon (because that just meant your enemy was also highly magical and highly powerful), but she still wanted to see it. She would’ve wanted to take a selfie with it if her mom hadn’t refused to buy her a phone….
“Why wouldn’t the gods keep their weapons with them?” Mini asked. “What if they got stolen or something?”
Aru looked around this dark place. Above them, the stalactites cast a light so stingy that Aru couldn’t see much of what lay ahead. “Maybe they figured they were safe here?”
“But there’s no protection!” Mini said archly. “It’s just a smelly cave. That makes no sense.”
“Maybe the smell is what’s protecting it?”
“Hmm…maybe you’re right. Definitely smells like demon repellent.”
Aru frowned. For a room that was supposed to be full of celestial weapons…it was decidedly empty of weapons.
“Hey, there’s something on the floor,” said Mini. She crouched, pressing her palm to the ground. “Ugh. It’s wet. More of that weird smelly water stuff.” And then Mini was quiet for a minute. “Aru?”
Aru heard Mini, but didn’t turn. The ball turned warm in her pocket, but she didn’t take it out. She was distracted by the dangling words. Before, they had spelled out:
THE CHAMBER OF THE ASTRAS
But now the words had elongated and changed. She stepped closer to read it.
ANSWERS HIDE IN PLAIN SIGHT.
THINGS AREN’T AS THEY SEEM.
THERE’S POWER TO FIND HERE
AND KNOWLEDGE TO GLEAN.
BUT TIME WAITS FOR NO MAN,
AND TIME HAS NO EARS.
IF YOU DON’T MOVE QUICKLY,
YOU’LL MEET ALL YOUR FEARS.
“Did you see this sign?” demanded Aru. “It talks about men, but what about women? Rude.”
Mini ignored her. “Aru, this moisture isn’t some weird humidity.”
“So?”
“So I think that it’s—”
Another hot gust of air blew at them. Deep within the cave, she heard a bellowing sound. Like a gigantic pipe organ breaking apart.
Or…lungs drawing in air.
The ground trembled. Above them, the stalactites began to grow larger. Aru squinted. Not larger. Closer.
“Those aren’t stalactites,” said Mini.
Aru had a sneaking suspicion she already knew what Mini was going to say.
They were teeth.
And whatever beast they had stumbled into was beginning to close its mouth.
#1 on Mini’s Top Ten Ways I Don’t Want to Die List: Death by Halitosis
Aru had lost count of how many times she’d thought We’re going to die.
Granted, they’d always managed to wriggle their way out of dying before. But that didn’t make the thought any less terrifying. Thankfully, by now the two of them had had so much practice that they didn’t scream and cry like the last couple of times. This time they only screamed.
Beneath them, the tongue (gross) began to shake and quiver. Several stalactites—nope, thought Aru, giant teeth—crashed and fell, swallowing up the entrance.
“There has to be another exit!” shouted Aru.
“Try using the ball?”
Aru drew it out of her
pocket and threw it on the ground, but nothing happened. Then again, nothing ever happened with her stupid ball.
Mini opened and closed her compact. “My mirror isn’t working either! It’s just showing my face—” She frowned. “Is that another zit? Aru, do you see anything—?”
“Focus, Mini! Maybe we can prop its jaws open or something?”
“With what? We don’t have anything big enough. Besides, look.” Mini pulled back her sleeve and bent her arm.
“What the heck are you doing?”
“Flexing my muscles!”
“I don’t see anything?”
“Exactly!” said Mini, tugging her hair. She started pacing. “Okay, we’re in a body. Most likely—given the fish breath—it’s some kind of giant demonic whale. So. Let’s think about anatomy and stuff.”
“Cool, I’ll just pull out my pocket anatomy book! Oh, wait! I don’t have one!”
“Do whales have uvulas?”
“How am I supposed to know if it’s a girl whale?”
“It’s the dangly punching-bag–looking thing in the back of your throat,” said Mini. “It makes you gag. If we could throw something at the whale’s, then it would have to throw us up!”
That was not a bad idea. Except it had a giant flaw. “You want to ride out on whale vomit?”
“I just want to ride out.”
“Good point.”
The girls raced toward the back of the throat. Here, the stench was even worse. Aru’s chin-length hair stuck to her face. Her shirt was soaked through with wet whale breath.
The neon sign flashed in the dark, suspended by back teeth that seemed to be growing longer by the second. Maybe that was where the uvula thing was. But when they got there, Aru couldn’t see anything that looked like a punching bag. Instead, the tongue sloped down into the whale’s throat. Aru could hear water sloshing angrily below. Worse, it was rising.
“There’s no uvula!” said Aru.
Mini groaned. “Finding Nemo was a lie!”
“Wait. You made a life-and-death choice based on Finding Nemo?”
“Well, uh…”
“MINI!”
“I was just trying to help!”
“And I’m just trying not to push you down this throat right now!”
The teeth pressed a little closer. At first, Aru had only seen rows upon rows of pale, crowded teeth. Now she saw something else. Something that glinted.
The heck are those? Behind-the-teeth braces?
Wait. Weapons!
This was where the devas had hidden them. Aru could now make out long swords, axes, maces, and arrows with strung bows, all jutting from the tangle of teeth.
“The weapons,” breathed Aru. “We have to find the right ones for us! That’s how we get out.”
“I don’t want to kill the whale….”
“We’re not going to kill the whale,” said Aru. “We’re just going to poke it a bit, so that it keeps its mouth open long enough for us to escape.”
Mini didn’t look convinced. “How do we know which ones are the right weapons for us?”
Aru started sprinting back toward the front of the whale’s mouth. “Whichever ones we can grab fastest!”
If Mini rolled her eyes or said something snarky, Aru didn’t notice. She measured the distance to the giant weapons above them. Maybe if she jumped, she could reach one of them. A sword with an emerald hilt glittered temptingly.
The whale’s jaws continued to close. Aru had no idea whether the sword was the right choice. She’d thought she’d find something based on her divine parent, but she didn’t see anything like Lord Indra’s thunderbolt in this collection. So a sword it was….
“Mini, give me a lift?”
“We’re never gonna get out of here,” moaned Mini.
Aru struggled for balance as she climbed up, but she refused to believe they weren’t getting out of here. They hadn’t gotten this far just to be killed by whale halitosis. That would be so embarrassing on a Wikipedia page.
Mini layered her palms, boosting Aru higher.
Aru reached for the hilt of the sword hanging above her. “Just…a little farther—”
A gust of hot air knocked her to the ground. Or tongue. Whatever it was.
Aru scrambled to her feet, but she kept getting thrown off-balance. The rotting wind turned fiercer.
“Aru!” called Mini behind her.
Aru spun around to see Mini trying to hold on to the floor. But the whale’s lungs were too strong. Her legs kicked out behind her, lifting into the air.
“It’s trying to inhale us!”
“Hold on!” called Aru. She crawled toward Mini, but it was like crawling over ice. Her palms slipped, causing her elbows to jam into the tongue-floor. The whale’s breath sucked at her. “I’m coming,” she croaked.
There was no way they were going to get those weapons. She knew it now. Behind her, the light shrank.
“I don’t think I can hold on any longer!”
“Don’t think, then!” shouted Aru. “Just do. I believe in you, Mini.”
“There were so many things I wanted to do!” moaned Mini. “I never even got to shave my legs.”
“That’s your life’s biggest regret?”
Aru braved a glance at the sign. The neon riddle flashed and flickered. ANSWERS HIDE IN PLAIN SIGHT. Well, Aru was looking around (as plainly as she could) and there was nothing to help them. Nothing at all.
Mini was straining in the wind. Her backpack was now flying behind her. Her knuckles had turned white. One of her hands lost its grip. “I’m sorry,” she said.
Their eyes met.
Aru watched as her sister was flung back against the dark throat. Sister. Not just Mini. Now that she had thought it, she couldn’t unthink it. It had gone from idea to truth.
She had a sister. A sister she had to protect.
Aru didn’t waste any more time thinking. She just reacted. She reached for the ball in the pocket of her pants. In her palm, it glowed a little brighter, like a creature waking from a long nap. She let the ball loose.
Above her, the teeth descended. She could feel the hilt of the sword sinking into her shoulder blade. Aru could just see the outline of Mini, suspended in a moment of falling.
Aru imagined a fishing line. Something that could fly out, and reel back in—
Light haloed in front of her. It unfurled from the ball, unspooling in the air like loopy cursive letters. The tethers of light stretched around Mini, gathering her up and yanking her out of the creature’s throat.
Aru whooped happily. The golden ball zoomed back into her hand. Only this time it wasn’t a golden ball at all. It was a lightning bolt.
The sheer size of it was enough to prop open the creature’s jaws, which she immediately started to do.
Before she could finish, Mini came running toward her, screaming. And not in a happy YOU-SAVED-MY-LIFE-WE’RE-FRIENDS-4EVA way. It was more like a GET-OUT-WHILE-YOU-STILL-CAN kind of scream. Which didn’t make any sense. Aru had just saved her life….
That’s when Aru felt it:
The barest scrape of teeth along her scalp. But she couldn’t move! Aru tried to jump out of the way, when a violet light burst around her, hardening into an enormous sphere. The whale’s teeth glanced off the sphere.
Before her, triumphant in a sphere of her own, stood Mini. In her hand was the danda of the Dharma Raja, a staff that was as tall as she was and braided with purple light. The whale’s teeth pressed down on the sphere, causing faint lines to spider across it, but the protective device held, and finally the jaws relaxed. Light filled the cavernous space, and the two spheres dissolved.
In the back, the neon riddle flashed. ANSWERS IN PLAIN SIGHT. That had been true after all. The glowing ball had been Vajra, the lightning bolt of Indra, the whole time. And Mini’s compact hadn’t been a compact at all, but the danda stick of the Dharma Raja. It had just been waiting for a reason to show up. Which made Aru think of the words Urvashi had said so long ago when
they had visited the Court of the Sky: You must awaken the weapons…go to the Kingdom of Death. Their trying to save one another had activated the weapons. Maybe what they’d done had proven to the weapons that they were worthy of wielding them in the first place.
“You’re welcome,” said Mini breathlessly.
It took Aru—who was still staring at the lightning bolt in her hand—a full minute to realize what Mini had said.
“Um, excuse you,” she said, crossing her arms. “You’re welcome. I saved you first.”
“Yeah, but I saved you right after that. It was basically at the same time. How about we’ll both be welcome?”
“Fine, we’ll both be welcome. But who’s going to say thank you first? I think that—”
“NOSE GOES!” shouted Mini, promptly thwacking her face.
She had her there. Aru grinned, feeling strangely proud of Mini. She offered her elbow. Mini bumped it.
“Thanks.”
“Not Thanks, sis?” asked Mini.
“Mini, no one says sis. Like, ever.”
“We could bring it back! Make it retro-cool.”
“There’s nothing retro-cool about sis.”
“Fine. What about sister from another mister?” asked Mini.
“No.”
“What about…?”
This continued for far too long.
I’ll Be a Cow in My Next Life
Lightning bolts are much heavier than they look.
After Vajra had revealed its true form, it seemed reluctant to revert to the size of the ball. Aru had finally solved the problem by imagining Vajra as flip-flops to be worn on her feet after they’d walked on that goopy whale tongue. The weapon had shuddered at the idea and obediently shrunk.
Mini, on the other hand, preferred to use the Death Danda (or “Dee Dee,” as she had nicknamed it) as a walking stick, and was currently acting as though she were twelve hundred years old instead of twelve.
“I think I’m predisposed to having joint problems,” she said. “And you only get two knees. I mean, I guess I could replace them, but it won’t be the same, and getting surgery isn’t something you should do lightly. Tons of things could go wrong. You could even die.”
Aru Shah and the End of Time Page 21