The Battle

by Karuna Riazi

  There was a sudden pop behind them.

  The kids whirled around as the newly settled clothing shop gave way once again to the bakery. The lady was carefully dusting sugar over a plate of rose-frosted cookies.

  “Well, she looks happy, at least,” Winnie said. “I guess it must work for people here!”

  “Yeah. Uh. I guess.”

  Ahmad leaned in closer, trying to catch the woman’s eye. She continued to slap the side of her sifter, eyes cast downward.

  “Ahmad! Come on! We don’t have time.”

  Winnie tugged him onward, and Ahmad could hear the crackle of electricity behind him as the shop shifted again. A shiver crept down his spine. Was Winnie right? Was the lady fine with knowing that if someone didn’t want to buy from her, the store would somehow snap her out of existence until she was wanted again?

  “Let’s get back to Madame Nasirah’s before it disappears,” Winnie said as they paused on a street corner. Pedestrians waited on one side of a wide crevasse, through which they could see down into more neon blue, bustling areas of Paheli. Ahmad’s stomach lurched. It was hard to get used to them. “Something tells me crossing the street here isn’t as easy as it is in Manhattan, and besides, we need to review what we learned,” she added.

  “You’re right.”

  It took a few stops and flickers, but Winnie and Ahmad finally shuffled back into the tea shop, decidedly worse for the wear. Madame Nasirah stared at them blankly for a moment, as if she’d already forgotten—again—who they were. But then she looked down at the knapsacks in her hands with a start and smiled.

  “You’re just in time,” she said. “I’ve prepared your bags.” She handed one to each of them, and looked up expectantly, awaiting their response to the goodies she’d shared.

  Ahmad unzipped the knapsack that Madame Nasirah had given him. She had loaded it, along with Winnie’s, with handfuls of small tools and treats, holding them up and naming them as she went.

  “Map. A water bottle. A lantern. Believe me, you’ll want to keep track of that. And . . . oh my!”

  Crash!

  Both of them nearly jumped out of their skin when a huge sword clattered out of the woman’s hand, missing Madame Nasirah’s foot in favor of spearing the wooden floor.

  Madame Nasirah had stared down and, after a moment, shrugged complacently. “Well, just in case.” She tucked it away in Ahmad’s knapsack and gave the stuffed bag a reassuring pat.

  Now he squirmed against the wall as Winnie examined everything they were given.

  “I really hope this isn’t an RPG,” she moaned.

  “Me too,” Ahmad said fervently. He hated open world RPGs more than any other type of video game. The idea of spending all that time exploring, fumbling through side quests and debating which ones were actually worthwhile to accomplishing the goals of the storyline, was utterly stressful. What if you chose wrong? What if you missed that right turn on the road that would lead to a good ending? It just made him antsy.

  As he continued to dig, he came upon the final layer at the bottom of the bag: sandwiches of fresh falafel stuffed into warm pita pockets, Ahmad’s favorite mithai, chenna murki, and sweet qatayef dumplings filled with nuts and drizzled with honey. But before he could comment on the thoughtful provisions, a sudden hush descended upon the shop, as though a large hand had reached down and cupped itself about the electric nerves and twitching veins of the great, sprawling city.

  Had Paheli frozen like New York City, another glitch in the game? The kids looked at each other nervously, but Madame Nasirah had only hummed to herself meditatively.

  “Wait just a moment. It will be over shortly.”

  There was a distant clatter. And then, abruptly, there was a fizz and whizz of air, like someone had let off fireworks. Ahmad and Winnie both rushed for the window and the metal shutters before it gave way, just enough for them to see a flare of green light spark up from the tip of the minaret at the very heart of the city. The light ebbed down into small veins set into the sides of the structure, making the entire building grow.

  “That’s the signal,” Madame Nasirah said behind them. “When the Minaret flares, one of the challenges of the game begins. It can be seen from anywhere in the city. Consider it the beating heart of Paheli.”

  “It’s beautiful,” breathed Winnie, pressing her hand against the shutters.

  “I know,” Ahmad responded quietly. He absently rubbed his hand against his chest. Something about the Minaret, even in his sketches, reached inside and scratched its nails over old scars in his heart in the worst sort of way. It brought up memories of pain and panic without him even being able to identify what those memories were.

  He yelped, jumping back, as something pelted against the window from the inside—right near where he rested his fingers.

  “What was that?” Winnie asked, her eyes wide.

  Ahmad slowly knelt to pick up the objects. As his fingers glided over them, words sparked in the air.

  OBTAINED: BOAT!

  OBTAINED: NET!

  “Are these . . . some sort of tokens?” Winnie held up her object—the small net—to the light. “Oh wow. It’s so detailed!”

  Ahmad leaned in over her shoulder and narrowed his eyes. It was incredibly delicate, as though it had been knitted on the tiniest needles possible. Winnie was right: Every stitch, once you leaned in, was obvious and etched out with care. It trembled against her fingertips under the softness of their breath.

  “Do we exchange these for the real things?” Ahmad asked Madame Nasirah, who just shook her head. “I cannot give you details on how to use them. I just make sure you receive them.”

  “Typical,” Ahmad muttered under his breath. It was a very adult thing to say: You need to figure it out on your own. But what if you never seemed to do that properly? He turned his attention back to the boat. It was as intricately crafted as the net.

  “What kind of boat is that?” Winnie asked, leaning in over his shoulder.

  “Oh. Um.” Ahmad’s tongue stumbled. He knew this type of boat. He did. Well, not really, but he’d seen it in the picture books his father brought home from trips to Bangladesh when he was younger. “Oh! A dinghy! It’s a type of rowboat. I think.”

  Both Ahmad and Winnie startled when a sudden shower of fireworks cartwheeled through the sky. In their wake, they left glittering words. TRIAL: RESCUE THE MACHI MEN FROM DROWNING IN THE DEPTHS OF PAHELI’S GREAT RIVER!

  “What is that?” Winnie asked, but Ahmad was already opening the door and rushing outside of the shop to crane his head up toward the sky.

  Beneath the shimmering letters, a countdown clock burst into existence: big red numbers blazing against their eyes. Thirty minutes spiraled backward.

  “Wait, wait, wait!” Ahmad gasped. “The countdown starts now?”

  “Machi Men,” Winnie said dazedly as the words faded away. “What could that even mean? Machine men?”

  “Machi . . . ,” Ahmad said slowly, turning the boat he still held over in his fingers. “That also means ‘fish’ in Hindu and Urdu.” For once, his brain wasn’t failing him on the right word, but the rest left him at a loss. Since when did Paheli have a river? And how could fish-men, if he was actually right, drown?

  “I don’t understand.” Winnie shook her head. “None of this feels remotely like a normal game. This is not strategy. This is not teamwork. This is us being told to save some people or else they drown! How can the Architect do this?”

  As though in response to her question, the door thumped closed behind them. They turned to see Madame Nasirah cheerfully waving out the window and pointing toward the ground. Their knapsacks rested against the threshold, neatly zipped up.

  “Great,” Ahmad muttered, staring at it. “I guess giving us another cup of tea before we face our doom was too much to ask.”

  “I thought you were the one who said not to expect much from adults,” Winnie said sharply, but when Ahmad glanced at her face, she had a weakly teasing smile.

&
nbsp; “I did, but—” Ahmad muttered. That was before he got used to warmth and comfort and a hand on his shoulder. That was before it really sank in that they were playing a game where the stakes were higher than making the top scores leaderboard or winning valuable, limited-edition armor off another player.

  Winnie sighed. “There’s nothing else we can do now but try to find that river.”

  So there they were, ducking down side streets and inching through alleyways. It felt like it had been hours, and there was no sign of water.

  There was so much else to take in, though, that it was easy to get distracted. They were definitely in the heart of the souk. Everywhere around were the most lavish things imaginable on sale.

  “We should probably stick together,” Winnie rushed out as a gaggle of beaming, excitedly chattering women nearly swept them apart. “It’s really crowded here and I—Ahmad?”

  Ahmad’s attention had snagged on a shop window.

  “No way,” he breathed, plastering his face against it to watch as a salesperson cheerfully waved at a watching family before stepping through a shimmering portal—and reappearing a few feet away, deeper in the shop. “Is that a teleportation device? Do those things really exist?”

  “Ahmad,” Winnie huffed, striding over to him. “We’re supposed to be finding that challenge. Okay? Not window shopping.”

  Ahmad was entirely engrossed in the wares on display.

  “This stuff looks like it could belong in Wakanda! That’s some sort of robot assistant. Or maybe it’s an android!”

  It certainly looked human enough. Apart from the visible blue veins shooting down its cheeks and the slight stilted motion of its body as it shuffled through a demonstration of how it could set a dinner table, there was nothing else to distinguish it from the people eagerly clustered around it.

  “Ahmad! Ahmad!” Winnie whirled him around by the shoulder, frowning. “You need to focus. On me.” He was still craning his head to see past her.

  “Come on, just one more minute,” he said distractedly. “It’s not like I could find a store like this in New York City.”

  “Exactly,” Winnie snapped. “You couldn’t. Because this isn’t our world. Listen to me, Ahmad. We promised each other to work together, right?”

  Her eyes were wide and worried. Ahmad felt a twinge of remorse. She was right.

  “Yeah. I know. Sorry.”

  She nodded and cleared her throat. “Me too. I got a little intense. Come on, let’s keep going.”

  With one last longing look at the shop of magical wares, Ahmad followed after her.

  “I don’t understand,” Winnie grumbled. “I know they don’t want us to win this game, but isn’t this too far?”

  “My legs ache,” Ahmad groaned. His brain buzzed like it was tuned in to the wrong radio channel, too. He tried hard to focus and remember his maps, or at least conjure up one of those dream-snatches that were so clear that he could feel the cobblestones beneath his feet. But it wouldn’t give him anything.

  It didn’t help that after a while, everything started to look the same. Every seller had the same beaming smile and the people who milled about—examining fresh fish and exclaiming over warm bread fresh off a conveyor belt looping around a small bakery stall—all melted into one another.

  They’d been walking for what felt like hours, but it didn’t seem like they’d even left the shopping district yet. How could that be? And where was this challenge?

  He flopped down against a street corner in frustration and groped in his bag for his little packet of treats. “I need a snack break.”

  Winnie barely heard him, tapping absently against the stone beneath her feet. “That map is useless,” she announced. “It has no compass rose, and just squiggly lines for the streets. It just looks like a rat maze.”

  “The water is coming,” an eerie voice whispered.

  Ahmad looked up from a packet of chenna murki, about to ask Winnie why she sounded like that, and froze.

  “What is that?”

  “Come on, Ahmad.” Even with her back turned, it was obvious Winnie was rolling her eyes. “Even if you don’t believe it, I know you better than our teachers do.”

  “Winnie,” Ahmad hissed.

  “So don’t try to put on that tough bad boy act and tell me you don’t know what a compass rose is. Don’t accept the label they put on you.”

  “Winnie!”

  Winnie whirled around. “Ahmad, I’m trying to give you a compliment. . . .”

  She froze as well.

  Because standing in front of a trembling Ahmad was a huge, six-foot-tall mouse, dressed as though it was preparing for a presentation of The Nutcracker.

  Ahmad tried to inch backward, but the mouse only had eyes for the open packet of chenna murki he held in his hands. As Winnie finally snapped into action and hurtled forward, the mouse snatched the bag of sweets out of his fingers and bolted down an alleyway.

  “Hey!” Ahmad hollered after it.

  Winnie shuddered, rubbing her hands down her arms. “Ugh, ugh, ugh,” she said. “I didn’t sign up for Rodents of Unusual Size. And I thought the rats you see in Times Square were huge.”

  Then she backed up with a gasp, grasping Ahmad’s arm, as the mouse reappeared, not a foot away from where they stood, moving lightly on its haunches and peering at them with bright brown eyes.

  The kids held on to each other and stared.

  “Um,” the mouse said.

  Winnie squealed again and seized Ahmad’s arm.

  “Did the giant rat just talk? To us?” Winnie asked. “Is this part of you being the chosen one of this world or whatever?”

  “Who said I was the chosen one of anything?” Ahmad hissed back. “And believe me, if giant talking rodents were any part of my Paheli, I would have mentioned it by now.”

  “I would prefer T.T. to giant talking rat, if you don’t mind,” the mouse said primly. It still held the open packet of chenna murki between its paws. “And I’m a mouse, not a rat. I think. Apologies for scaring you. I just wanted to warn you. The water is coming.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The mouse started to count.

  “One . . .

  Two . . .

  Three . . .”

  The sky, which had already been dark—but, at least, a comforting dark, broken through with the distant twinkling stars of occupied apartment windows—was now ominous, curdled with seething clouds and occasional claps of lightning.

  Water seeped from the ground beneath their feet. It lapped about Winnie’s ankles and she danced from foot to foot with a shudder. “Ahmad? What’s going on now?”

  Ahmad couldn’t answer her, but a familiar feeling coiled in his spine.

  Dread.

  And then the river broke free around them.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  AHMAD HAD TAKEN HIS first swimming lessons in Bangladesh. They were not the eased-in, water wing–inclusive fare of the local city pool. One of his cousins had simply tossed him in. But rather than sinking like a stone, it was as though the river itself had risen to embrace him, welcoming him back into his heritage along with the silvery fish that darted between his toes and the petals tangled in his hair when he resurfaced to his family’s giddy congratulations.

  This water was different. It hit Ahmad hard, every drop feeling like shards of cold, sharp glass. He groped in the inky dark, relieved when he felt Winnie’s hand grasp his, and tore against the current until they broke the surface.

  He sputtered out a mouthful of river.

  “This way,” T.T. the mouse called, paddling ahead of them. Were mice always such adept swimmers?

  A dock had emerged over what was previously a street and now was overflowing with water.

  By the time Ahmad and Winnie worked their way onto the lip of the deck, they were exhausted. They sloshed and skidded back and forth on the wet wood, holding each other for balance as they gingerly picked their way forward.

  “Giving us some rain boots would
have been a good idea!” Ahmad hollered over the wailing wind. “Or maybe some of those sticky cup things to put underneath our shoes.”

  “I’m not sure if those would actually help in this weather,” Winnie called back. “At least we now know how life feels when you are a stick of butter.”

  “Did we actually need to know that, though?” Ahmad shouted back, but the winds swallowed his words.

  Ahmad squinted upward. Through the damp in his eyes, he could just make out the glowing Minaret. That awful red timer was still there too, broadcast over the horizon with all the subtlety of the Bat Signal. Five minutes.

  Ahmad exclaimed, “Five minutes? Really? After dumping us into that without warning?”

  He reached into the soggy depths of his knapsack.

  “Useless, useless, useless,” chanted Winnie as he sorted through the mess of items, surfacing first with the sodden bag of food and then with the map, bleeding ink all over his fingers. “Is that really all of it?”

  “This is ridiculous,” Ahmad seethed, water dripping off his eyelashes. No, it was more than that. It was just like school. You were told what to do, but never given what you needed to do it. You were told that you needed to try harder, but the game was already rigged in someone else’s favor.

  Angrily he dumped the knapsack out on the dock. Something clattered against the slick wood, and Ahmad picked it up. It was the miniature boat. He stared at it, and then at Winnie.

  “This could be a red herring,” she said cautiously.

  “But remember the token? And my Switch screen?” Ahmad lifted the boat over the churning water. T.T., who had been mumbling to himself and wringing out his damp paws, noticed the movement and his eyes widened.

  “No! You can’t! Not so close to the dock!”

  But Ahmad had already dropped it.

  “Oops.”

  Winnie sighed and opened her mouth, but then let out a shriek instead.

  “What—what is it doing?”

  The water shifted and sloshed against the dock. Ahmad and Winnie braced themselves against each other.