Aru Shah and the End of Time (Pandava Quartet #1)(65)

She was right. The temperature had dropped. Well, not dropped so much as fallen off a cliff and tumbled straight down.

Aru’s long-suffering Spider-Man pajamas did little to protect her. The wind blew through the cloth, chilling her skin. “Imagine having to live in a place like this,” she said through chattering teeth. “You’d have to pick your nose all the time just so that your boogers wouldn’t freeze into icicles and stab the inside of your nose.”

“Gross!”

The air felt tight. Not that stifled, staleness of the palace. It reminded Aru of how sometimes in winter it hurt to breathe because the air had become overly sharp and thin.

“Aru, look, it’s snowing!”

Aru craned her neck and saw blue-bellied clouds drifting above them. In slow spirals, white flurries fell to the ground.

A single white flake landed on her palm. It looked like a snowflake, down to the delicate lacework of ice. But it didn’t feel like snow. Even though it was cold.

It felt like a pinch.

Beside her, Mini winced.

The snow, or whatever it was, was beginning to fall harder. Now the flakes were hitting the ground. They didn’t melt.

As Aru watched the snow, she spotted a tall tree with hundreds of tiny mirrors for bark. Something slipped behind the trunk. A figure—pale and slim, with a cloud of frosted hair. But when she blinked, she couldn’t remember what she had seen.

“Aru!” called Mini.

She didn’t respond. Not because she hadn’t heard, but because she hadn’t realized Mini was talking to her.

For a second, she had forgotten that Aru was her name.

Panicking, Aru tried to rub the snowflakes off her arm and shake them out of her hair. Something about it was making her lose track of things she should remember. It wasn’t like snow at all. It was like salt thrown on a slug. Slowly dissolving what you were.

“Is it such a bad thing, children, to forget?” asked a voice from somewhere in front of them. “If you never remember, you never grow old. Innocence keeps you ageless and blameless. People are rarely punished for deeds they cannot recall.”

Aru looked up. The snowflakes now hung suspended in the air, a thousand white droplets. A man parted the droplets as if they were a giant beaded curtain. He was beautiful.

Not movie-star handsome, which was something else; this was a distant, unearthly beauty. The way you could watch a thunderstorm brewing across the ocean and find it lovely.

The man was tall and dark-skinned, his hair a shock of silver. His eyes were like blue chips of ice. His jacket and pants were an unnaturally bright shade of white.

“I’m sorry, did you say something?” Mini asked him. “If you did, I…I can’t remember….”

“Ah, forgive me,” said the man. He laughed.

He waved his hand, and the snowy particles lifted off the girls’ skin and hair. Bits of knowledge thudded back into Aru’s head.

Only now did she remember her favorite color (green), her favorite dessert (tiramisu), and her name. How could she have forgotten those things? Aru found that very scary, because it meant she wouldn’t know when something had been stolen from her.

“My name is Shukra. I am the guardian of the Bridge of Forgetting. It is rare that I talk to living beings. You see, I do not venture often beyond my bridge.”

Aru couldn’t remember a single story about him, but that made sense, given who he was. And no wonder he never left. Imagine how rough that would be at parties. “Who are you, again?” “I’m Shukra! Don’t you remember?” “Right, right…So, who are you?”

As Shukra walked toward them, Aru noticed that there were five mirrors floating around him. One over his head, one below his feet, one on his right, and one on his left. Another floated at chest level, high enough that he would only need to tilt his chin down to see his reflection.

Was this normal for beautiful people? In Madame Bee’s salon, the whole place had been covered in reflective surfaces. Aru wondered whether mirrors just conveniently flocked to pretty people like sheep.

Behind Shukra, the land dropped off into a cliff. The snow—or whatever it was—clung to the outline of an invisible bridge. If Aru and Mini could cross that, they’d be well on their way to the place where the celestial weapons were kept.

“I’ve already forgotten my manners once,” said Shukra silkily. “I would be remiss to do so twice. Pray, what are your names, children? Your full names, please.”

Aru felt a tickle at the back of her throat. As if her name was trying to escape. She didn’t want to say it, but it was like she couldn’t help herself.

“Yamini,” said Mini.

“Arundhati,” said Aru.

It was weird to utter it aloud. She only heard her full name once a year, when teachers called roll on the first day and stumbled over the pronunciation. Aroon-dottie? Arun-dutty? Arah-hattie? Aru, she would say. Just Aru. Usually, one of her classmates would howl in the background, pretending to be a wolf calling to the night: Aroooooooo! (In first grade, Aru had tried to go along with it by leaping out of her chair and barking. She’d been sent home.)

“Lovely names. They will be beautiful ornaments for my bridge,” said Shukra, examining his fingernails.

“So can we go across?” asked Aru.

“Of course.” He smiled. He may have been handsome, but his teeth were terrifying. They were black, crooked, and filed to points. “But to those who wish to cross the Bridge of Forgetting, I always offer a choice. And I will offer the same to you. First, will you hear my tale, daughters of the gods?”