Aru Shah and the End of Time (Pandava Quartet #1)(84)

In the stories, the Pandava brothers fought an epic battle against their own family. But they never turned on one another. In the vision the Sleeper showed her, Aru saw something else: her family turning against her.

Tears ran down Aru’s cheeks. She didn’t remember when she’d started crying. All she knew was that she wished the Sleeper would choke on his words.

But he kept talking.

“I pity you the most, little one,” he said. “For you think you are the hero. Don’t you realize the whole universe is laughing at you? That was never meant to be your destiny. You are like me: a hero draped in evil clothing. Join me. We can wage war on fate. We can break it together.”

He walked toward her. She raised the lightning bolt a little higher. He stood still.

“Your mother pays no attention to you,” he said. “Don’t you think I’ve sensed it through the lamp? But if you’re with me…I will never leave you, child. We can be a team: father and daughter.”

Father and daughter.

Aru remembered her mother’s face in the vision from the Pool of the Past. The way she had talked about the three of them being a family. She had shared her husband’s idea of people defying their own destiny.

Her mom had lived with only half of her heart for eleven years.

Eleven years.

And only because she loved Aru that much.

“Kill me, and your sisters and family will grow to hate you,” said the Sleeper. “You will never be a hero. You were never meant to be a hero.”

Hero. That one word made Aru lift her chin. It made her think of Mini and Boo, her mom, and all the incredible things she herself had done in just nine days. Breaking the lamp hadn’t been heroic…but everything else? Fighting for the people she cared about and doing everything it took to fix her mistake? That was heroism.

Vajra became a spear in her hands.

“I already am. And it’s not hero,” she said. “It’s heroine.”

And with that, she let the lightning bolt fly.

The moment the bolt left her hands, doubt bit through Aru. All she could see was the image of her sisters lined up against her. All she could feel was the shame of being hated, and not knowing what she’d done to deserve it. A single dark thought wormed into her head: What if the Sleeper was telling the truth?

Her fingers tingled. The bolt cut through the air. One moment it was spinning straight at the Sleeper. She watched his eyes widen, his mouth open up for a scream. But the next instant, everything changed.

That tiny, needling doubt shifted everything. The lightning bolt stopped just short of hitting him, as if it had picked up the barest whiff of Aru’s misgiving.

The Sleeper stared at the lightning bolt poised an inch from his heart. Then he glanced at Aru. He smiled.

“Oh Aru, Aru, Aru,” he taunted. It was the same voice she had heard when she lit the lamp. What have you done?

“Vajra!” called Aru.

“One day, you’ll see it my way, and I will welcome you, daughter.”

“Strike him, Vajra!” shouted Aru.

But it didn’t matter. When she looked up from the spear of lightning…the Sleeper had vanished.





Failure


Once, when Aru was really stressed about an exam, she didn’t eat for a whole day. She was too busy trying to remember all the dates from her history textbook. When the last bell rang, she stood up from her desk and got so dizzy that she fell right back down.

That had been a bad day.

But this day was worse.

Aru had thought that magic would make her powerful. It didn’t. It just kind of kept things at bay. Like how anti-itch cream erased the pain of a bee sting but didn’t repel the bee itself. Now that all the magic had drained out of the room, hunger and exhaustion rushed into her.

Aru sank to the floor. Vajra flew back to her hand. It was no longer a spear or a bolt of lightning but just an ordinary ball. The kind of harmless toy a kid would play with and a demon wouldn’t look twice at.

Aru shuddered. What had just happened?

She kept staring at the spot on the floor where the Sleeper had disappeared. She’d had him in her sights, right there. She’d had the lightning bolt poised and everything. And yet somehow—even with everything lined up to help her—she’d failed. The Sleeper had let her live, not because he pitied her, but because he thought she’d actually join him.

Tears ran down her cheeks. After everything they’d been through, she had failed. Now her mom would be frozen forever, and—

A touch on her shoulder made her jump.

It was Mini, smiling weakly. There were a couple of cuts on her face, and one of her eyes looked a bit bruised. Boo fluttered down from Mini’s hands and hovered in front of Aru.

Aru waited for him to yell at her. She wanted him to tell her all the things she’d done wrong, because that would be better than knowing that she’d done her best and still wasn’t good enough. But Boo didn’t yell. Instead, he tilted his head in that strange pigeon way of his and said something Aru had not expected:

“It is not failure to fail.”

Aru started to cry. She understood what Boo meant. Sometimes you could fall down and still win the race if you got up again, but that wasn’t how she felt right now. Mini sat down next to her and put her arm around her shoulders.

Aru used to think that friends were there to share your food and keep your secrets and laugh at your jokes while you walked from one classroom to the next. Sometimes, though, the best kind of friend is the one who doesn’t say anything but just sits beside you. It’s enough.