“No?”
“What about warmer? Or bloated? Like you’re full of hot air?”
But Mini wasn’t paying attention. She was staring at the three signs.
“Deign,” she whispered. “That’s the answer.”
“Why?”
“It’s kinda like a riddle,” said Mini. “The word deign means to look down on. The arrow pointing up is a trap, because the whole point is that we have to look at what’s beneath us. It’s like when you have to make a choice you don’t want to make and you feel like you’re reluctant to do it.”
“Whoa,” said Aru. “You got all that from a cookie? Sure there isn’t any left?”
She grabbed the box from Mini and shook it. Nope. Not even a crumb. Mini stuck out her tongue.
At the edge of the DEIGN sign, a hole formed in the marble floor.
“Why is it only opening now?” asked Aru.
“Probably because we’re looking down and not up?”
Both girls peered down the hole. Something glittered far below. A strange fragrance wafted up. It smelled uncannily like Aru’s apartment in the museum: musty fabric, chai, lavender candles, and old books.
Mini frowned. “Let’s go in alphabetically,” she said.
“No way! My name starts with A. It’s your kingdom, sorta; you go first—”
“I’m the one who made sure we could get even this far.”
“Only because I let you eat the cookie!”
“Chitrigupta gave it to me—”
Aru took a deep breath and settled this the only fair and logical way she could imagine.
“NOSE GOES!” she screamed, smacking her face.
Mini, who must have anticipated Aru being sneaky, immediately smacked her face, too. Except she moved so fast that her glasses flew off her head and fell. Down the hole.
“Ughhhhh,” said Mini. “You’re the worst, Aru.”
And with that, she jumped in after them.
What Meets the Eye (and What Doesn’t)
The descent wasn’t bad. It was like a long waterslide, without the water. It dumped them out in a forest.
But something was off about this place.
Granted, Aru didn’t have much experience with forests. Once, her mother had taken her to San Francisco. At first it had seemed like it was going to be a boring trip, because they spent the whole morning with the curator of the Asian Art Museum. But after lunch, her mother had taken her to Muir Woods. Walking through it was like a delicious dream. It had smelled like peppermint. The sunlight was soft and feathered, hardly skimming the forest floor because the trees were so thick and tall.
But this place, tucked inside a pocket of the Kingdom of Death, didn’t have that foresty feel. Aru sniffed the air. There was no perfume of green and wriggling alive-ness. No smell of woodsmoke or still ponds.
It didn’t have a smell at all.
Mini toed the ground. “This doesn’t feel like dirt.”
Aru bent to check it out. She ran her fingers over the floor. It was silk.
She walked to one of the trees, planning to snap off a branch and inspect it, but instead walked straight through it.
“It’s not real!” exclaimed Mini. She jumped through another one of the trees. “This is amazing!”
A small puddle of water caught the light.
“What is this going to be, a trampoline?” Mini laughed, jumping into it. But the second she did, the liquid stuck to her legs. And then it pulled. With every blink, Mini was vanishing beneath the—
“QUICKSAAAAAND!” screamed Mini. She started struggling.
“Stop!” shouted Aru. “Haven’t you seen any movies? Thrashing around is, like, the fastest way to die!”
“Quicksandquicksandquicksand,” moaned Mini. “I don’t want to go this way. My body will be preserved forever like those bog mummies! I’ll become a Wikipedia page!”
“You’re not gonna die, Mini. Just stop screaming and let me think for a minute!”
She was going to reach for a branch to pull out Mini, but the branches weren’t really there. Aru ran through a couple of the trees. Maybe there was an actual tree lurking in the midst? But there wasn’t.
“Aru!” screamed Mini. By now, she was up to her neck. Any farther, and she wouldn’t even be able to scream. Her arms waved wildly in the air.
“I’m coming!” said Aru, running back.
But Aru tripped. She braced herself for a fall, but of course, the silky ground was soft. She landed with a light thump. When she looked down, her hands were clutching folds of the “dirt.”
“That’s it,” whispered Aru.
She lifted some silk off the ground. It came up in a dark, slender rope. Aru dragged it over to Mini, who, by now, was buried up to her chin.
Mini grabbed hold of the rope, but the quicksand yanked her under.
“No!” cried Aru.
She pulled the rope as hard as she could. Under ordinary circumstances, she might not have been able to do it. Under ordinary circumstances, Aru probably would have slipped into the quicksand herself and both of them would have become dismal Wikipedia pages.
But worry for a friend can make ordinary circumstances extraordinary. In that moment, all Aru knew was that Mini was her first true friend in a long time…and she would not—could not—lose her.
Mini gasped as Aru heaved her onto the silky ground.
Aru was shocked. She did it. She saved her. Even though she’d faced down a demon and tricked the seasons, this was the first time she felt like she’d done something magical.
Mini spluttered and coughed. “There was a shark down there.” She shuddered, then gathered a handful of silk and started toweling off her hair. “A shark! And you know what it said to me? It said, ‘Is it true your sharks don’t talk?’ I didn’t have a chance to answer, because you pulled me out so quickly.”
“What kind of thank-you is that?”
“Why should I say thank you?” asked Mini. “I knew you could do it.”
I knew you could do it.
Aru bit back a grin. “Fine. Next time I’ll let you drown a bit longer.”
“No!” squeaked Mini. “Drowning is number three on my Top Ten Ways I Don’t Want to Die list.”
“Who makes a list of that?”
Mini primly straightened her shirt. “I find that organizing scary information actually makes me less scared.”
Once Mini had finished toweling off, they looked at the path ahead of them. The road that wound through the forest was the same color as the DEIGN sign.
“Do you think it goes to another hall?” asked Aru.
“Maybe? I wish we had a map again,” Mini said, squinting as she studied her hand.
Ever since they had arrived in the Kingdom of Death, the mehndi had grown lighter and lighter, as they did naturally, because they were not permanent. But now all that remained of the fantastical designs were faint waves on their fingers and the dark Sanskrit numbers on their palms.
The forest arced over them. In this place there was even a sky. But given how topsy-turvy everything was, Aru wondered whether it was a sea. Maybe here the moon really was made of cheese.
“Does this place feel familiar to you?” asked Mini. She rubbed her arms as if she had goose bumps.
“No?”
Aru would have remembered a place that looked like this. But she couldn’t deny the smell that she had caught right before they’d jumped into DEIGN. It was the smell of…home.
She was still thinking about this when she experienced a very rude awakening. Every tree they had seen so far had been intangible, so Aru had walked straight through them. She was passing through one of the trunks, not really minding where she was going, when she smacked her nose. Hard.
“What the—?” she muttered, glaring.
She had run into the side of a cliff. A rocky black wall glistening with water. No, it was a hard waterfall. She reached out to touch it carefully. It seemed like actual water, cold and cascading through her fingers. But the minute she tried to put her hand through it, it pushed back. As firm as stone.
“Yet another illusion,” said Aru. “Except this one’s got substance to it.”