Aru reached for it, grimacing. She tried to dump out the liquid, but it didn’t budge. Magic was often a stickler for rules. Rude.
“It should be your turn,” Aru said. “But let me guess: I have to sip this because you saved our butts back there?”
“Yup,” said Mini.
Aru gagged just looking at it. “What if it’s poison? It came from a poisonous cauldron, after all….”
Mini shrugged. “Then maybe I could save you with one of Spring’s petit fours.”
Aru was still doubtful. “What if I swallow the key?”
“I wouldn’t recommend doing that. When I was three, I ate my mom’s engagement ring, and they gave me a bunch of bananas, and they had to—”
“NEVER MIND! I DON’T WANT TO KNOW.”
“Drink up or I’ll finish the story!”
“You are evil.”
Mini crossed her arms over her chest. “I believe in fairness.”
Aru took the tiniest of sips, the kind she occasionally took from her mom’s Sunday glass of wine just to see why people fussed over the stuff. She always ending up spitting out the foul-tasting liquid. But old age didn’t taste…bad. It reminded Aru of her birthday last year. Her mom had taken them to a fancy Italian restaurant. Aru had eaten so much that she’d fallen asleep in the car. Her mom had picked her up (Aru remembered because she kept pretending to be asleep) and carried her to bed. The sip of old age was like that—a happy kind of fullness.
A weight pressed down on her tongue. Startled, she spat it out and found a small white key. It was made of bone. NOPE.
“AHHHH!” screamed Aru. She started to scrape her tongue. Then she realized she hadn’t washed her hands since Brahmasura became a pile of ashes. Aru spat on the ground.
“The third key!” said Mini excitedly. “Cool! It’s a bone! I wonder if it was like a phalanx, or maybe a—”
Aru glared at her, and Mini quickly changed the subject.
“We did it!” said Mini. “We’ve got all three keys to get inside the Kingdom of Death.”
Despite being thoroughly grossed out, Aru smiled. They’d really done it. And what made it even better was that Mini wasn’t standing quite so timidly anymore. With the glow of the poison in Shiva’s mouth behind her, it almost looked like she had a halo.
“Ready?” asked Aru.
Mini nodded.
Aru’s palms had started to sweat. Her hair felt pulled too tight. Part of her was wondering whether she should make a last-minute bathroom run, because there was no telling whether the Underworld had public restrooms. But maybe that was just nerves.
The girls laid down the three keys in a row: the sprig of youth, the coin from the bite of Adulthood (now shiny again), and the bone key.
Aru wasn’t sure what was supposed to happen next. But that didn’t matter, because the keys knew what to do. At once, they melted and ran together, forming a puddle of light. Aru held her breath as the puddle rose, growing higher and higher until it was about the height of the seven-headed horse that had carried her across the Ocean of Milk.
In the darkness of the cave, a door took shape.
The door to the Kingdom of Death.
The Door and the Dogs
The door to the Kingdom of Death was wrought of bone and leaf and light.
Mini raised her hand to touch it. Then she shook her head. “I thought I’d feel…differently,” she said.
“About what?” asked Aru.
“About the door and where it was going.”
“It’s going to the Kingdom of Death. That’s all.”
“Yes, but this is the door to my—” Mini stopped and stuttered. “I mean, I guess he really isn’t my…my…”
“Dad?”
Mini flinched. “Yeah. That. But I don’t know him. And he doesn’t know me. I mean, I guess it doesn’t matter. Boo and my parents said he’s my soul dad, not my home dad, but I guess I hoped he’d do something other than give me a mirror, you know?”
No. She didn’t know. Aru knew it was a little mean, but she didn’t feel that bad for Mini. Aru was in the same boat, and she didn’t have a home dad to comfort her. Yeah, Indra might have made her soul, but where was her real father? He could still be out there…somewhere. And whoever he was, he hadn’t wanted her.
She pushed down that surge of envy. It wasn’t Mini’s fault.
“What’re you going to do if you meet the Dharma Raja?”
“I’ll just thank him for letting me exist, I guess? I dunno. It’s weird.” Mini took a deep breath. “Okay, I’m ready now.”
Aru reached for the doorknob, but it shocked her hand. She pulled back, stung. “I think you should do it.”
“Me? Why?”
“Because you’re the Daughter of Death. It’s like going into your house.”
“What if it shocks me, too?”
Aru shrugged. “Maybe say your name first?”
Mini looked doubtful, but she squared her shoulders. “My name is Yamini Kapoor-Mercado-Lopez, and this is…” She turned to Aru and hissed, “I don’t know your last name!”
Aru was tempted to say that her name was Bond. James Bond.
“Aru Shah.”
“No middle name?”
She shrugged again. “If I have one, no one ever told me what it was.”
Mini nodded, apparently satisfied, then continued talking to the door. “Aru Shah. We are entering the Kingdom of Death because we have been sent on a quest to awaken the celestial weapons so that, uh, so that Time doesn’t end and also to find out how to stop this really awful demon by looking for answers in the Pool of the…Last?”
“Pool of the Past,” whispered Aru.
“Pool of the Past!” finished Mini. “Please and thank you.”
The door didn’t budge. Then again, Mini hadn’t pushed it.
“Why aren’t you even trying to open it?” demanded Aru.
“It’s not polite to force things.”
With that, the door gave way with a sigh and a groan.
From the side, the door to the Kingdom of Death was as slim as a closed laptop. And yet, the moment Mini stepped inside, she disappeared. It was as if she had stepped into a slice in the air.
After a few seconds, Mini poked her head out. “Are you coming or not?”
Aru’s stomach turned. She couldn’t remember any stories about the Halls of the Dead. But just the idea of them was enough to scare her. She kept imagining faceless ghosts behind the door. Fires that never went out. A sky devoid of stars.
And then she imagined her mom’s face frozen in horror, her hair falling around her. She remembered Boo lying limp in the Sleeper’s hand. Those images made her move.
“It’s an adventure?” she said, trying to rally herself.
Aru’s hand drifted to the pants pocket where she kept the Ping-Pong ball. It was warm and reassuring. “It’s fine. This is fine. Everything is fine,” she muttered to herself.
She placed her foot across the threshold.
A frigid wind picked up the hairs on the nape of her neck. On the breeze, she could hear the final words of people who had died: No, not yet! And Please make sure someone remembers to feed Snowball. And I hope someone clears my Internet browser.
But mostly, Aru heard love.
Tell my family I love them.
Tell my wife I love her.
Tell my children I love them.
Tell Snowball I love her.
Aru felt a sharp twist in her heart. Had she told her mother she loved her before she left the museum with Boo?
There was no going back now. The moment she stepped into the Kingdom of Death, the door disappeared. She was left in a tunnel so black she couldn’t tell what she was walking on. Was it darkness itself? There were no walls, no sky or sea, no beginning or end. Just blackness.
“My mom used to tell me that death is like a parking lot,” whispered Mini. She sounded close, and like she was trying to reassure herself. “You stay there for just a bit and then go somewhere else.”
“Again with the parking lots?” Aru joked shakily.
She breathed a little easier when she remembered that, in Hinduism, death wasn’t a place where you were stuck forever. It was where you waited to be reincarnated. Your soul could live hundreds—maybe even thousands—of lives before you got out of the loop of life and death by achieving enlightenment.
A dog woofed in the distance.
“Why so serious?” asked a deep voice.