Aru Shah and the End of Time Read online

  “Because you lit the lamp!”

  Aru paused. She had lit the lamp. She had lowered the flame to the metal lip of the object. But it was Poppy’s brother’s lighter. Did that count? And she was only going to light it for a second, not keep it lit. Did that make her only a smidge of a hero?

  “I’m fairly positive you are a Pandava,” continued the bird. “Mostly positive. I am, at least, definitely not going to say no. Otherwise why would I be here? And on that note, why am I here? What does it mean to wear this wretched body?” It stared at the ceiling. “Who am I?”

  “I—”

  “Ah, never mind,” said the bird with a resigned sigh. “If you’ve lit that cursed lamp, the other one will know.”

  “Who—?”

  “We’ll just have to go through the Door of Many. It always knows. Plus that’s a great deal easier than putting something in Google Maps. Most confusing contraption of this century.”

  “You’re a bird! Shouldn’t you know which direction you’re going in?”

  “I’m not just any bird, you uppity hero. I am—” the bird spluttered, then stopped. “I guess it doesn’t matter who I am. What matters is that we stop this before any true destruction takes place. For the next nine days, Time will freeze wherever the Sleeper walks. On the ninth day, the Sleeper will reach the Lord of Destruction, and Shiva will perform the dance to end all Time.”

  “Can’t the Lord of Destruction just say no thanks?”

  “You know nothing of the gods,” sniffed the pigeon.

  Aru stopped to consider that. She wasn’t shocked by the idea that gods and goddesses existed, only that a person could actually get to know them. They were like the moon: distant enough not to enter her thoughts too often; bright enough to inspire wonder.

  Aru looked back at her frozen mom and classmates. “So they’ll just be stuck like that?”

  “It’s temporary,” said the bird. “Provided you aren’t riddled with ineptitude.”

  “In-ep-tee-tood? Is that French?”

  The bird knocked its head against a wooden banister. “The universe has a cruel sense of humor,” it moaned. “You are one of the few who can make things right again. Then again, you are also the one who started it. And so you, and the other, must be heroes.”

  That didn’t sound very heroic to Aru. It just sounded like an epic mess that required an epic cleanup. Her shoulders drooped. “What do you mean, ‘the other’?”

  “Your sibling, of course! You think you can quest alone? Questing requires families,” said the bird. “Your brother—or perhaps sister, although I don’t think that’s ever happened—will be waiting for you. When one Pandava awakens, so too does another, usually the one who is best equipped to deal with the challenge at hand. Until now, the Pandavas have always appeared as fully grown people, not squished bundles of hormones and incompetence.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Come along, girl child.”

  “Who are you?”

  Aru wasn’t going to move a step without some kind of verification. But she doubted the bird carried a wallet.

  The pigeon paused, then said, “Though such an illustrious name should not be uttered by a child, you may call me Subala.” It preened. “I am—I mean, well, I was…It’s a long story. Point is: I’m here to help.”

  “Why should I go with you?”

  “Ungrateful child! Have you no sense of dharma? This is your task! The freeze will keep spreading like a disease in the Sleeper’s wake. If he’s not stopped by the new moon, your mother will stay that way forever. Is that what you want?”

  Aru’s cheeks heated. Of course she didn’t want that. But she also felt as if the whole world had spun the wrong way and she was still finding her balance.

  “Your name is Subala? That’s way too many syllables,” said Aru, fear snaking into her heart. “What if I need help and have to call for you? I could lose an arm or a leg while just trying to say the whole thing. I’m calling you Sue.”

  “Sue is a girl’s name. I am a male.”

  Aru, who was often stuck listening to Sherrilyn’s Johnny Cash playlist, did not agree with Subala.

  “No it’s not. There was a ‘Boy Named Sue.’ You know, his daddy left home when he was three—”

  “Spare me the vileness of country music,” huffed Subala, flying toward the elephant’s mouth.

  Well, if he wouldn’t be called Sue, what about…

  “Boo!” shouted Aru.

  Subala turned his head, realized what he’d done, and cursed. He perched on top of the elephant’s trunk.

  “You may have won this, but I’d wipe that smug grin off your face fairly quickly if I were you. Serious consequences have been triggered by your actions, girl child. As this generation’s Pandava, it’s now your duty to answer the call to questing. The need hasn’t arisen in more than eight hundred years. But I’m sure your mother told you all that.” Boo peered at her. “She did tell you, didn’t she?”

  Aru fell quiet as she recalled the kinds of things her mother had told her over the years. They were small things that wouldn’t help thaw the frozen people in this room: how a flock of starlings was called a murmuration; how some tales were nested inside other tales; and how you should always leave the mint leaves for last when making chai.

  But there’d been no mention of quests. No discussion of Aru being a Pandava. Or how she came to be that way.

  And there’d certainly been no instructions about how she should prepare herself in case she accidentally triggered the end of the universe.

  Maybe her mom didn’t think Aru would be any good at it.

  Maybe she hadn’t wanted to get Aru’s hopes up that she could do something heroic.

  Aru couldn’t lie this time. It wasn’t a situation she could talk herself out of and magically be okay.

  “No,” she said, forcing herself to meet Boo’s gaze.

  But what she saw made her hands tighten into fists. The pigeon was doing that narrowing-his-eyes-thing. He was looking at her as if she were not much to look at…and that was wrong.

  She had the blood—or at least the soul—of a hero. (Or something like that. She wasn’t quite sure about the mechanics of reincarnation.)

  “I may not know,” she said. “But I can learn.”

  Boo cocked his head.

  The lies bubbled happily to her throat. Words of self-comfort. Words of deceit that weren’t necessarily bad:

  “My teacher once called me a genius,” she exclaimed.

  She did not mention that her gym teacher had called her that in a not very nice way. Aru had established a “record” time—for her—of taking fourteen minutes to run a mile lap around the track. The next time that they ran to beat their previous records, she’d ignored the track altogether and just walked across the field to the finish line. Her teacher had scowled at her and said, You think you’re a genius, or something?

  “And I’m an A student,” she told Boo.

  In the sense that she was a student whose name started with an A.

  The more claims she made—even if they were only half-truths at best—the better she felt. Words had their own power.

  “Excellent. All my fears have been allayed,” said Boo drily. “Now come on. Time is a-wasting!”

  He cooed, and the elephant’s mouth widened to the size of a door, its jaw hitting the ground. A breeze from some other place gusted toward her, swirling through the stuffy air of the museum.

  One step forward and she’d be wandering far from Atlanta….She’d be in an entirely different world. Excitement rushed through her, followed by a painful pinch of guilt. If she couldn’t fix this, her mom would become like everything else in the museum: a dusty relic. Aru brushed her fingers against her mother’s stiff hand.

  “I’ll fix this,” she said. “I promise.”

  “You’d better!” snapped Boo from his place on the elephant’s trunk.

  The Other Sister

  Grabbing one of the elephant tusks as a handrail, Ar
u stepped into the statue’s mouth. Inside, it was cold and dry, and far larger than seemed possible. A hall appeared, carved out of stone and marble, and the ceiling soared overhead. Aru stared around her, stunned, as she remembered every time she’d leaned against the elephant, never knowing it’d been hiding a magical corridor within it.

  Boo flew down the passageway, urging her forward. “Come along! Come along!”

  Aru ran to keep up.

  The hallway sealed itself behind her. Ahead was a closed door. Light slipped out from a gap on one side.

  Boo perched on her shoulder and pecked her ear.

  “What was that for?!” exclaimed Aru.

  “That was for renaming me,” said the pigeon too smugly. “Now, tell the Door of Many that you need to go to your sibling who has awakened.”

  Sibling. Aru suddenly felt sick. Her mom traveled most weekends. Was she working, or was she visiting her other children? Children she’d prefer spending time with.

  “How can I have a sibling?”

  “Blood isn’t the only thing that makes you related to someone,” said Boo. “You have a sibling because you share divinity. You’re a child of the gods because one of them helped forge your soul. That doesn’t make a difference to your genetics. Genetics might say that you’re never going to be taller than five feet. Your soul doesn’t care about that. Souls don’t have height, you know.”

  Aru hadn’t heard anything after You’re a child of the gods.

  Up until this point, her brain had only distantly understood that she could be a Pandava. But if she was a Pandava, that meant that a god had helped make her. And claimed her as his own. As his kid.

  Her hand flew to her heart. Aru had the strangest impulse to reach into herself as if she might pluck out her own soul. She wanted to look at the back of it, as if it had a tag, like on a T-shirt. What would it say? MADE IN THE HEAVENS. KINDA. If she couldn’t hold it, it didn’t seem real.

  And then another thought took root, one that was even stranger than the fact that a god was her dad.

  “So I’m, like, a goddess?” she asked.

  That wouldn’t be so bad.

  “No,” said Boo.

  “But the Pandavas were like demigods. They could use divine weapons and stuff. So that makes me half a goddess, right?” asked Aru. She examined her hands, flexing them like Spider-Man did whenever he started shooting out webs. “Does that mean I get to do magical things, too? Do I get powers? Or a cape?”

  “There shall be no capes.”

  “A hat?”

  “No.”

  “Theme song?”

  “Please stop.”

  Aru looked down at her clothes. If she was going to be meeting some long-lost sibling, she really wished she were wearing something other than Spider-Man pajamas.

  “What happens after…after I meet them?”

  Boo did that pigeon thing where he regarded her at an angle. “Well, we must go to the Otherworld, of course. Not quite what it used to be. It dwindles with humanity’s imagination, so I suspect it is currently the size of a closet. Or perhaps a shoe box.”

  “Then how will I fit?”

  “It will make room,” said Boo airily. “You should have seen it in its glory days. There was a Night Bazaar where you could purchase dreams on a string. If you had a good singing voice, you could use it to buy rice pudding dusted with moonlight. Finest thing I’ve ever eaten—well, second only to a spicy demon. Mmm.” He ignored Aru’s cringe. “We’ll take you to the Court of the Sky. There you may formally ask the Council of Guardians for the details of your quest.” Boo’s feathers ruffled when he mentioned the Council. “You’ll get your weapons. I shall get my place of honor back, make no mistake. And then it’s up to you and your brother. Or sister, gods help us.”

  “Weapons?” repeated Aru. “What kind of weapons? That’s not something they teach you in seventh grade. How am I supposed to stop the Sleeper from getting to the Lord of Destruction if I can’t throw a bow and arrow?”

  “You shoot a bow and arrow!”

  “Right. I knew that.”

  Aru wasn’t exactly the best at gym. Just last week she’d scratched at the inside of her nose hard enough to fake a nosebleed and get out of dodgeball.

  “Perhaps you have a hidden talent somewhere inside you,” said Boo. He squinted at her. “Buried quite deeply, I imagine.”

  “But if there’re all these deities, why don’t they help? Why leave it up to, as you said, a bundle of hormones and incompetence?”

  “Gods and goddesses may occasionally help, but they don’t mess around with affairs that affect only humans. To them, mortal lives are but a speck of dust on the eyelash.”

  “You don’t think the gods would be even a little upset to find out that their entire universe was stamped out?”

  Boo shrugged. “Even Time has to end. The real measure of when others will get involved comes down to whether or not you succeed. The gods will accept the outcome either way.”

  Aru gulped. “Awesome. That’s just the best.”

  Boo nipped her ear.

  “Ow!” said Aru. “Could you not?”

  “You are a child of the gods! Stand up straight!”

  Aru rubbed her ear. A deity was her…father. She still couldn’t quite believe it.

  She had lied about many things, but she’d never invented stories about a father. She would’ve felt ridiculous bragging about someone who had no interest in her. Why should she go out of her way to make him sound better than he actually was? He’d never been there. The end.

  Her mother didn’t speak of him, either. There was only one photo of a man in the house. He was handsome and dark-haired, with skin the color of dark amber, and he had the strangest pair of eyes. One was blue, and one was brown. But Aru wasn’t even sure he was her father. And he didn’t look like a deity at all. At least, not like anyone in the Hall of the Gods. Then again, ancient statues weren’t always a good reference. Everyone looked the same when they were cut out of granite and sandstone and their features were worn down to faded smiles and half-lidded eyes.

  Apparently she herself was divine-ish, but whenever she looked in the mirror, all she noticed was that her eyebrows kept trying to join up. And it stood to reason that if you were even a little bit divine, you should not have a unibrow.

  “Now,” said Boo, “tell the Door of Many where you want to go.”

  Aru stared at the door. There were several symbols and scenes etched into its frame. Images of warriors notching their bows and letting their arrows fly.

  When Aru blinked, she even saw a wooden arrow zoom across the tableau. She reached out and placed her palm against the door. The engraved wood pressed back, like a cat nuzzling her hand. As if it were trying to get to know her, too.

  “Take me to…the other Pandava.” She said the words breathlessly.

  She was right. Words did have power. When she said the word Pandava, all the feelings that came from discovering who she really was uncoiled like a spring jumping to life.

  It was not unpleasant.

  It was like riding a roller coaster and relaxing enough to let the initial panic turn into something else: Exhilaration. Joy. Anticipation.

  She was Aru Shah.

  Suddenly the world she thought she knew had opened up, as if stage curtains had been yanked back to show her that there was so much more than what she’d imagined. There was magic. Secrets crouched in the dark. Characters from stories, like the ones she’d been told all her life, were taking off their masks and saying, I was never a tale, but a truth.

  And—the thought wiped off her grin—there was also her mom…now frozen with a worried expression on her face. Aru’s heart felt like a painful knot inside her. I’m not letting you stay like that, Mom. I promise.

  The door opened.

  Light washed over her.

  Boo squawked.

  Aru felt yanked forward. Gone was the mild weather of Georgia. Everything was cold and bright. When she blinked, she saw tha
t she was standing on the large driveway of a sprawling white house. The sun had begun to set. All the trees were bare. And right in front of her was a…giant turtle?

  Wait, no. A girl. A girl wearing an extremely unflattering backpack. She stood with her arms crossed, and what looked like black war paint smudged under her eyes. She had a thick pen in one hand and a bag of almonds in the other.

  “Are there bees in the Otherworld?” asked the girl. She didn’t seem very surprised to see Aru. In fact, her gaze was a little reproachful, as if Aru had arrived late. “I don’t know if I’m actually allergic, but you never know. You can die within a minute of a bee sting. A minute. And I bet there are no emergency rooms. I mean, I know there’s magical healing and all, but what if it isn’t enough?” The girl snapped her eyes toward Aru, her gaze narrowing. “I hope you don’t have a bee allergy. I only have one EpiPen. But I guess we could share? I’ll stab you, you stab me?”

  Aru stared at her. This was the other legendary Pandava sister? Descended from a god?

  The girl started digging through her backpack. Boo face-planted onto the grass. Aru could hear his muffled sobs of whyGodwhyme.

  Look, but Not Really

  “Your family must’ve gotten frozen, too, if you came here to find me,” said the girl. Her voice wobbled a bit, but she forced herself to stand straighter. “Any chance you brought cash just in case? I couldn’t steal my mom’s wallet. It felt wrong.” She sneezed and her eyes widened. “Do you think I might be allergic to magic? Is that a thing—?”

  “Stop,” groaned Boo. “Are you a Pandava?”

  The girl nodded.

  “Answer me!” said Boo.

  Aru toed him with her shoe. “She nodded yes….”

  “I couldn’t tell.”

  “Maybe that’s because you’re facedown in the grass?”

  Boo had collapsed on the front lawn outside of what Aru could only assume was the girl’s house. It was so boring here. Not at all the kind of place where she thought another child of the gods would be. The grass was perfectly suburban. Neat and not so green that it would draw too much attention to itself.

  With great effort, Boo rolled over onto his back. Sighing, Aru scooped him up and held him out to the girl. “This is our, um…”