“A little lamb. Don’t be afraid.” The man reached out his hand then and scooped up a handful of mulch from the bed of a nearby tree. Ari couldn’t help but suck in his breath—dirt soiling the man’s fine hands, wood chips leaving splinters in his skin.
But when the man’s hand returned to Ari, the mulch was gone, and in its place was a new ice cream bar, whole and untouched.
Ari stared at the ice cream and felt a ripple in the air, like the timeline of his life was shifting. Where had it come from? Where did the mulch go?
At last, he spoke. “Who are you?” he asked quietly.
The man looked as if nothing strange had happened. He just gave him a knowing smile. “Prometheus,” he said. “I’ll see you again.” Then he rose and walked down the street, his hands in his pockets.
When his uncle returned to him, Ari was still holding the new ice cream bar. His uncle slapped him on the back, asking him why he hadn’t eaten it yet, joking that he would if Ari didn’t want it. Ari didn’t dare mention the stranger’s odd name. Prometheus, wasn’t that an ancient Western god? He wasn’t sure; he’d only heard it once in a movie. His uncle would look at him like he was crazy. So Ari kept holding the ice cream bar without eating it, not even when melted vanilla began to drip from a crack in the chocolate shell. At last, his uncle snatched the treat from him and ate it in several bites. Ari watched him, wondering if it would crumble back into dirt in his uncle’s mouth, whether he would make a face and spit it out and hit Ari for playing a trick on him. But his uncle relished it like it was real ice cream, and by the time they arrived home, Ari thought that perhaps he had misunderstood what he’d seen. Perhaps he’d been so surprised by the stranger that he hadn’t eaten his treat. Obviously the man hadn’t justcreatedit out of mulch from the street. And the more Ari thought about it, the better he felt. An impossibility, spun from his imagination. Maybe the man hadn’t been real at all.
But when Ari woke the next morning, he heard the man’s voice coming from the sitting room of his home, with the foreign accent and loud laugh.
He lay on his mat for a while, sweating slowly in the morning heat, andlistened. The strange man was speaking to Ari’s mother, although Ari’s mother replied so infrequently that it sometimes seemed like the man was speaking to no one.
I will cover the expenses.
No, not a loan.
No, he will live there.
Yes, that would be his monthly stipend.
Of course, of course he can come back.
Outside, Ari could hear his sister laughing with his older brother, his father chiding them in his low, gentle voice, and later in life, he will return over and over again to this memory, close his eyes and picture the scene: Kriti’s elegant hands covered with soap suds as she rinses bowls, Dev pushing curls away from his forehead, Pappa fanning his shirt in the sun.
A while later, his mother came into his room, brows furrowed and eyes glossy, her lips pulled into a line that seemed to be both a smile and a frown.
“Look at you, still asleep,” she scolded. Her voice was hushed with tension, and Ari felt his heart jump in panic.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Come, come.” She put a cool hand on his cheek, and he leaned into her touch. “Come out and say hello to Uncle. He’s offered to take you on a trip, so you need to be thankful.”
Ari obeyed, because he loved his mother, and rose to meet the man that was not his uncle.
When Ari first arrived in Angel City, the man—his real name was Rudra Mahajan, Ari learned—put him up in a luxury hotel, where the air conditioning, a fairly unfamiliar concept to him, was set so low that he spent the night shivering under his blankets. Lavish breakfasts, lunches, and dinners were wheeled in daily for him on carts laden with silver trays. Ari eyed the meals warily, prodding at them with his fork until Rudra assured him they were vegetarian. The same scrutiny was leveled at the tap water, which Ari didn’t trust. In between his meals, he doodled on the hotel stationery and idled by the windows, awed by the strange skyline. He was not allowed to go outside, which was for the best, since he was too frightened to wander around alone in a new country anyway.
The second week, Mr. Rudra gave Ari an elegant apartment on one of thetop floors of downtown’s Eastern Columbia Building, a famed, turquoise-and-gold terra-cotta landmark in the middle of the city. It was far more space than a child needed, multiple bedrooms and high ceilings and long halls and windows that stretched from floor to ceiling, with floors of smooth, ash-gray oak and veined marble. The closets were full of crisp collar shirts, trousers, ties, and blazers, all already tailored to Ari’s exact dimensions. There were so many outfits, in fabrics so fine, that Ari’s head swam. He grew up wearing shirts handed down from his brother and cousins, threadbare and faded, shorts so large that he always needed to cinch them with his father’s belt so that they wouldn’t slip right off his hips. Touching clothes this exquisite felt like a sin. But he still smiled as he tried on the silks and linens, still savored the cool sting of metallic buttons touching his chest.
But the best part of the apartment, by far, was the bookshelves that lined the halls and the study. A team of movers showed up halfway through the week with boxes and boxes of books, some with gleaming new leather covers, others rich with the smell of old paper. Ari had never owned a book before. Were all these really for him? He watched, dazzled, as they filled the dozens of shelves until there was no space left. That night, he sat in bed with a pile of the new books around him, poring hungrily through each one. Most of them were in English, with a few in Latin, French, and Mandarin. He couldn’t read any of them yet, but he studied them all the same, puzzling over the strange diagrams of interlocking circles, the endless formulas, the shapes of sacred geometry.
The following afternoon, right after Ari’s first day of American school, a black car picked him up. He knew little English then, and the entire day had been a struggle, a litany of reading body language and sitting through ESL and not understanding what kids were saying to him that made others snicker. Exhausted, he sat in silence in the car as the driver swore quietly at the traffic. It didn’t seem so bad, Ari thought as he watched the man flip off another car, not when compared to the traffic in Surat.
After a half hour, the car arrived in the center of the city, where it pulled up in front of Angel City’s Central Library. An older girl with short blonde hair was waiting for him at the entrance. Like Mr. Rudra, she wore a golden fox pin on the lapel of her flawless navy suit. She looked down at Ari’s faded T-shirt and jeans through her pair of blue-rimmed glasses.
“Ari?” she said.
Ari nodded.
She pointed at herself. “Isla,” she replied. “Welcome to Lumines.” She nodded critically at his outfit. “Here, we expect you to always present yourself as an example of perfection. I hope you’ll dress accordingly tomorrow.”
Ari understood enough of her rebuke to turn deep red with embarrassment. No one had told him he was supposed to wear his new clothes today. Perhaps they’d thought it should have been obvious.
Isla led him through the art deco doors into a rotunda adorned with murals of the city’s history, then toward a private wing. Over its entrance were engraved the words:ALEXANDER REED GALLERY.Inside, Ari turned his head up and gaped at the yawning, circular study, its richly carpeted floors dotted with dappled light from the domed glass ceiling, its columns etched with whorls of leaves and the phases of the moon. Cloistered under stone archways adorned with carvings of Isaac Newton and Democritus were a dozen well-dressed students settled at one end of a long wooden table, with Mr. Rudra standing at the front of the room.
Everyone turned to stare at him. Ari just stood there in his worn old clothes, shifting anxiously, cheeks hot with shame as they judged him from head to toe. One of the boys looked away in an attempt not to laugh. Two others exchanged knowing smirks. Only a girl with a neatly braided crown gave him a small, friendly smile.
