Aru Shah and the End of Time (Pandava Quartet #1)(8)

“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, Aru 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.”