“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. “Shedidtell 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 amurmuration; 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 anAstudent,” she told Boo.
In the sense that she was a student whose name started with anA.
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.
