But how could she escape an illusion when it didn’t exist?
“It’s not like I can escape my head!” she said, tugging her hair.
Wait. That wasn’t entirely true, was it? Shehadescaped her own head. Lots of times.
Aru thought back to every time she’d woken up from a bad dream. She would bolt upright, shot straight out of a nightmare just by remembering what it was: a nightmare.
All of her nightmares were the same. She dreamed about coming home and finding the apartment empty, cleaned out. Her mother hadn’t even bothered to leave a note saying good-bye. Aru had that nightmare whenever her mom left for business trips. But even when her nightmares seemed so real—down to the scratchy carpet of their apartment that would always be caked with dust—they were nothing more than flimsy images shot through with fear. That was the real thing: thefeeling. Everything else was…
A lie.
The flames licked closer. Light and heat splashed across her face.
She closed her eyes and let go of Monsoon’s pendant. She could feel in her bones that pretending like this whole thing was real wasn’t the right thing to do. This time, no acne commercial flickered through her thoughts. Instead, she recalled the story of Arjuna and the fish’s eye.
In the tale, the archery teacher of the Pandavas had tied a wooden fish to a tree branch. He instructed the brothers to shoot an arrow at the fish’s eye. But they could only aim by looking at the reflection of the wooden fish in the water below them.
The teacher asked Yudhistira, the oldest brother, what he saw in the reflection. He said,The sky, the tree, the fish. The teacher told him not to shoot. He asked Bhima, the second oldest brother, what he saw. He said,The branch of the tree, the fish. The teacher asked him not to shoot.
And then the teacher asked Arjuna what he saw. He said,The eye of the fish.
Only he was allowed to shoot.
It was a tale about focusing, about peeling away distractions one by one until all that was left was the target. The eye of the fish.
The flames touched Aru’s feet. She grimaced, but didn’t move. She closed her eyes.
The bow and arrow were only distractions.
The real way out…had always been in her mind.
She pictured Mini and the museum, her mother and the memories. She pictured Boo’s feathery chest puffed out in pride. She pictured the red, blinking light of Burton Prater’s phone. She pictured freedom.
It wasn’t an all-of-a-sudden thing. She wasn’t yanked from one place to the next. She didn’t open her eyes and see a new world where there had been an old one. Instead, she felt something like a latch unclasping inside her.
People are a lot like magical pockets. They’re far bigger on the inside than they appear to be on the outside. And it was that way with Aru. She found a place deep within her that had been hidden until now. It was a place of silence that seemed deafening. It was a feeling of narrowness turned vast, as if she could hide small worlds within her. This was what escape was: discovering a part of herself that no one else could find.
Aru reached. She imagined a door to the Otherworld with a tether of light wrapped around its handle. She grabbed on to that tether…
And pulled.
In that moment, she could no longer feel the flames. She could no longer hear the buzzing of cruel insect wings. She heard only her heartbeat pounding against the silence. She saw only her dreams of freedom turning bright and wild, like a rainbow glimpsed through a prism.
And in that moment, she escaped.
The Palace’s Story
When Aru opened her eyes, she was standing once more in the decrepit palace hall.
Mini was a couple feet away from her, furiously arguing with…with herself?Two Minis?One of them was getting increasingly red in the face and hunching her shoulders. The other pushed her glasses up her nose and kept talking.Her!Aru would’ve bet money that version was the real Mini. Aru tried to run forward, but she was kept back by some kind of invisible barrier.
“Hey!” called Aru, pounding her fists against the air. “Mini!”
But the Minis kept right on arguing. The real one said, “And so it stands to reason that the fastest thing in the world is not a person or a creature, but a thought!”
The other Mini let out a horrible groan, as if she’d just gotten attacked by a headache, and vanished.
The remaining Mini braced her hands on her knees and took a deep breath. The invisible barrier must have disappeared, too, because Mini finally noticed Aru. A grin stretched wide across her face.
