The lights that Vajra had cast into the museum lobby had dimmed. Mini and Boo were still out cold. It was just Aru and the Sleeper.
“Kill me, and that is the future you will face,” hissed the Sleeper. “You think I’m the enemy. Do you even know what that word means? What is an enemy? What is evil? You are far more like me than you realize, Aru Shah. Look inside yourself. If you hurt me, it will mean losing everyone you ever cared about.”
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.
Boo circled the museum. As he did, all the rubble and chaos sorted itself, the dust and debris jumping and wriggling. The front wall of the Hall of the Gods rose from the floor. Even the chandelier in the lobby gathered its crystal shards and took its place on the ceiling.
The front door to the museum had fallen into the street. Aru peeked out and heard familiar, beautiful sounds.
Cars honked. Tires screeched against the asphalt. People shouted to one another:
“Is there an eclipse? Why’s it nighttime?”
“My car battery is dead!”
Aru couldn’t believe it.
“See?” Mini said quietly from behind her. “We did something.”
The girls stepped inside, and the front door zoomed back into place. Aru leaned against it, completely worn-out. “What’s happening?”
Boo flew down and landed in front of them. “Only if the Sleeper reached the Kingdom of Death by the new moon could his curse of frozen sleep become permanent.”
“But I didn’t defeat him…” said Aru.
“But the two of you managed to distract and delay him,” said Boo kindly. “And you did it without me. Which is, frankly, mind-boggling.”
“What about the Council of Guardians?” asked Mini. “Do you think what we did was enough to impress them?”
“Ugh. Them. Are they going to want to train us after I…” Aru paused, not wanting to say the word even though it hung over her head: failed. “At the last minute, I…I let him get away.”
“It was that curse,” said Mini gently. “Remember?”
On the Bridge of Forgetting, Shukra had told her that when it mattered most, she would forget. But had that really been the fulfillment of the curse? Aru couldn’t remember—or perhaps she didn’t want to remember—what she had felt the moment the Sleeper disappeared.
“Yeah,” said Aru weakly.
“But even with the curse, you stopped him,” said Mini.
Aru didn’t point out that he’d stopped himself, and only because he thought she would join him. Never in a million years.
“And on top of that, we prevented the end of Time,” said Mini. “What more do you want?”