“Kiran! What are you doing, young scientist?” Dr. Dixon sounded so hurt and confused I almost turned the auto around. But then I thought of Neel in that cell, and the fact that it was my fault, and kept my eyes on my goal.
I was practically flying over the icy ground now, going too fast to hear my teachers behind me. I hoped I wouldn’t crash before I made it to the birds. I really didn’t want to deal with the rakkhoshi if I wasted her wormhole deposit. The machine was bumping over the frozen grass, barely in my control. The birds flew faster and faster, the light between them glowing bright now, like some kind of midair sparkly disco ball.
“Faster, moonie!” I heard the demoness yell, and realized she was zipping along right next to me, her see-through body in its workout gear flying on the wind.
The wormhole between the birds swirled at a frenzied pace now, and colors shot off it like sparks of lightning. I saw that there was a blue sphere opening, like an eye, in the center of the space. A portal.
At the sound of another engine, I gave a quick glance over my shoulder. Close behind me, inexplicably, was my pregnant principal, in her giant SUV, off-roading over the frozen soccer field! What was she doing? She bumped and swerved, but was almost on me!
“Drive through the center and into the wormhole as fast as you can!” The Demon Queen gnashed her sharp teeth, rubbing her chest. “Oof! Your incompetence is giving me a peptic ulcer! Go get my son, you little twit!”
That was obviously the closest to a good-bye and good luck I was going to get.
The wormhole was opening, like a giant blue-and-purple mouth. It pulsated with energy and sound, making the very sky seem to vibrate.
“Push the green button!” shrieked the demoness. “Now!”
I pushed the button, feeling myself lift off the ground. Who knew whether Principal Chen or Dr. Dixon could see me. I couldn’t worry about them anymore. I gunned the auto rikshaw engine and drove as fast as I could toward the rip in the fabric of space-time.
If you have never driven an auto rikshaw through a rip in the fabric of space-time created by two giant, hippopotamus-sized birds, I strongly recommend wearing a bike helmet when you do so. And if your rikshaw doesn’t have a seat belt, you should probably consider duct-taping yourself to the seat. Because I have never been on such a bumpy, upside-down, mentally and emotionally disturbing ride in my life. And I’ve been on some doozies.
First, no matter what that long-haired high school dude who works at the arcade tells you, playing a lot of video games during the summer in no way prepares you for driving a tin can through space. You know those outer space shows where every time they go into warp drive the whole bridge crew goes, “Whoa!” and hangs on to the controls and pretends to shake from side to side? Yeah, it was nothing like that. The motorcycle handlebars were super hard to control, and I felt like the rikshaw was driving me rather than the other way around. I hung on as the machine swung left and right, upside down, and, most of the time, diagonally. Then there was the whole experience of being in outer space. I don’t know what kind of magic spell the auto rikshaw had on it, but even though I wasn’t wearing a space suit, I could breathe and didn’t explode from lack of pressure or gravity or anything, so I guess that part was good. But otherwise the experience was pretty awful. I felt like I was being squished together, until I was practically two-dimensional like a piece of paper. Then my body, spirit, and essence felt like they were being folded up like origami art. Finally, I re-expanded, but still felt my body and spirit in sharp creases and folds. And then the whole thing happened all over again.
It was in the middle of this process of folding and unfolding that I heard it. It was the sound of someone who has to sneeze but is trying to swallow it down and not make any noise.
“Who’s there?” I whipped around to look at the passenger’s bench behind me.
Remember how I said that the ride was super bumpy and I had no seat belt? Thus, the whole whipping-around-in-my-seat-to-look-behind-me thing? Not smart.
I got knocked clear out of my seat and almost out of the rikshaw, which was unfortunately traveling through the wormhole at a sideways angle at the time. I grabbed on to the only thing I could, holding on for dear life. It was those jingly-jangly decorations on the sides of the machine that saved me from plummeting right into that rip in the fabric of time and space. That and the surprisingly strong hand that Naya extended to me. Wait, what?
“What are you doing here?” I asked after I was done screaming and crying and thanking her for saving my skin.
“Hi, Your Highnosity! Isn’t it great? I am—how do you say?—a stower-away!” Naya helped me sit back down in the driver’s seat, grinning like the clueless cupcake full of sunshine she was. “I probably should have told you already, but before I lived in New Jersey—”
“You’re originally from the Kingdom Beyond?” I sputtered, realizing that no one who wasn’t could take in all this without freaking.
“Yes! So I thought I would keep you company! Because you weren’t feeling well!”
“You thought you would keep me company?” I repeated.
“Yes! This will be great! It’ll be like a sleepover! We can thread each other’s eyebrows, paint our nails …”
“We’re in an outer space wormhole and you want to paint our nails?” Was this girl for real? But I didn’t have time to ask her more—why she’d lied about being from the Kingdom Beyond, how she knew I was traveling by auto rikshaw—because right then a comet whizzed by us and on our far, far left an enormous star looked like it was ballooning out into a super red giant. The light coming off it was tremendous. And yet, Naya was here talking about manis and pedis and eyebrow threading, as if we were doing nothing more than strolling through the Short Hills mall.
But interpreting sarcasm was not on Naya’s list of skills. “We could do facials too!” she enthused, slapping a sticky thing on my nose that looked like a piece of masking tape. Then she looked at my pony with a critical eye. “Did you dye your hair like that on purpose? An interesting choice! Very, uh, unique! But let me make it even at least.”
Naya pulled out some nail scissors and a bottle of gel from who knows where, evening out my pony and then braiding it. She tilted her head to study the effect. “Quite green, but still nice!”
“I don’t care about my hair!” I shouted, desperately trying to hold on to the steering as the auto rikshaw barely avoided a small asteroid field. “I just don’t want to die!”
“Oh, pshaw, Your Majestic Serenity, you’re such a jokester!” Naya yanked the tape off my nose, making me yelp. Then her face grew serious. “But blackheads are no joking matter. You really should consider taking better care of your pores. They’ll thank you for it!”
Naya pulled my face around for a selfie. Under the picture, I saw her type Just me and my new BFF having a spa day in our outer-space rikshaw! before sending it off to her Instagreat account. Almost immediately, a bunch of “likes” floated across her screen. Wait, she was getting data bars out here? What kind of phone service did this girl have? I felt madder than ever that my parents still wouldn’t let me get a cell phone—not even a stupid flip phone—before I remembered I had more important things to worry about.
“How are you not freaking out?” I asked her, indicating the fact that we were, you know, in deep space. “You realize where we are, right?”
Naya blinked in a surprised way, but she didn’t manage to answer, because just then, as if just driving an auto rikshaw through space-time wasn’t strange enough, things got really funkalicious. The rikshaw banked hard left, then right, then shuddered, practically dislodging both of us again. Then we drove into such a bright, blinding light that I could barely see.
“Downshift! Upshift!” yelled Naya. “Pull fuel pin! Crank the space gear!”
I had no idea what any of that meant, but tried to just hang on to the motorcycle handles with both hands.
This wormhole was clearly not just any wormhole, having been formed by two giant, magica
l birds. Traveling through it was not just the experience of getting from one dimension to another, but more like rewinding the history of the entire multiverse. Of course, I only realized that later. As I tried desperately to control the machine, with Naya shouting useless instructions from the back seat, I felt again like I was being folded up. Only this time, I was being smushed together with Naya, the rikshaw, some moons and planets and stars—basically everything in all of space. Then, boom! Or rather, splaaat! The big bang. But instead of an explosion, as the name implies, it was more like being a really, really tightly folded up little paper that then gets smoothed out over billions and trillions of miles. Except in three dimensions. I guess the best way to describe it is feeling like a chocolate chip all glommed together at the center of a giant dough ball that then spreads out as it heats—distributing chips light-years apart as it stretches itself out, creating a giant cookie universe.
But the big-bang-slash-great-chocolate-chip-cookie theory of the ’verse wasn’t the only origin story we experienced. As we passed from our universe through many others, we lived through other beginnings, other ways to understand the birth of the cosmos. We traveled through a solar system that looked like it was revolving around fire, saw the sun rising from an infinite sea, the chaos of the universe morphing into an egg that was then split in balanced two by an ax-wielding god, resulting in earth and sky, murky and clear, yin and yang. Even as we saw all of these possibilities, I knew there were an infinite number of other stories we didn’t see, stories that whirred by us too fast for my brain to comprehend; beginnings and beginnings and beginnings without end.
The last thing we saw floating by us in space-time were some gods and demons churning an ocean of milk. They pulled on a familiar-looking snake wrapped around a mountain that operated as a churn. Out of the ocean rose medicine and poison, light and dark, good and evil, and then a sparkling white stone and a glowing yellow one. Holy smokes! We were watching the birth of the Chintamoni and Poroshmoni Stones! Hadn’t the Rakkhoshi Rani said something about this in that poem? Something about seeking immortality from the milk-white sea? I remembered her next words, “Jewels, stars, eternity. Life and death in balance be.” Those stones must be more powerful than the Raja knew, and that’s why Sesha was after them. That’s why he’d set up this whole game show. He wanted the power of the stones to grant him wealth, and maybe even the ability to cheat death! Maybe this whole thing wasn’t about me at all, but about Sesha’s greed and those two jewels!
But then the black void and distant stars of space became the bright blue sky and the humid air of a hot summer’s day. I felt like I was choking in my winter coat, and struggled to get it off. In the meantime, the rikshaw kind of floated and hopped, like a plane making a rough landing. Naya and I couldn’t really talk anymore because of all the dry wind whipping by our ears, but soon enough, the rikshaw practically crashed down in a field in front of what looked like a high barbed-wire fence. We were finally in the Kingdom Beyond Seven Oceans and Thirteen Rivers, outside of the same bazaar where I had first entered this dimension.
“Oof!” Naya exclaimed as the auto came bouncing down. “Your Princessness, no offense, but you really must work on smoother landings!”
I didn’t bother arguing with the girl, but instead looked around, taking in where we were.
Everything looked really different than when I’d walked through a field of flowers last fall, crossed a bridge over a babbling brook, and strolled into the quirky little market. Sure, the crooked streets and colorful, haphazard houses were still there, but where there had been lush green grass, now the land looked dry and parched. The brook too, just beyond the new twelve-foot-high barbed-wire fence, seemed all dried up and full of trash—empty chip bags, chocolate wrappers, plastic coffee cups, and soda cans. But that wasn’t the strangest thing. The strangest thing was the game show recruitment slogans plastered everywhere we looked. Hanging from every lamppost and tree were banners for Who Wants to Be a Demon Slayer? with the TSK snake-eating-its-tail logo and contest logo of the bow-wielding girl with her braid, green skin, and purple combat boots. Each banner had a slightly different recruitment slogan for potential contestants, obviously written by the government of the Kingdom Beyond:
Get Off Your Rear End and Become a Real Legend!
Make Demons Groan, Win Back Our Thinking Stone!
Embrace your Hero’s Fate (Plus You’ll Get a Lot of Dates!)
“Um … Your Majesticness?” Naya ventured, pointing an unsure finger up at the green-skinned girl.
“I know, it looks just like me—except the skin!”
“Well, you do have the green hair,” said Naya. Then she pointed at my arm, which was exposed now that I’d taken off my coat and sweatshirt. “And there’s the green scar on your arm.”
“Green scar?” I looked down with alarm, and sure enough, the snake sign on my upper arm had taken on a faintly green hue. I whipped out a bandanna from my backpack and slapped it over the mark. This must be a side effect of Essence-Tyme, or traveling though the wormhole, or something. “I can’t believe that game show logo looks so much like me!” I repeated as I tied off the bandanna.
“Shhh,” Naya cautioned. “Maybe it is better that you don’t let on to everyone here who you are.”
That’s when I realized we weren’t alone.
The auto had landed us in a giant line with hundreds—maybe thousands—of other people. There were people on foot, in cars, in rikshaws, and in taxis, people on horses, elephants, and even one person on what looked like a giant flying crocodile.
“I’m sorry, Uncle, what is this line for?” I respectfully asked an old man on a unicycle.
“Why, to sign up for Who Wants to Be a Demon Slayer? obviously!” The man pointed a gnarled finger in front of us. “Or have you been asleep this past month?”
“The contest’s been going on a month?” I asked in alarm, remembering what the Demon Queen had said about time folding in on itself.
The old man wrinkled his hooked nose. “Yes, since the Raja made the announcement on television!”
I took a big gulp. Okaaaay. It had taken us a month to get here. I could only hope the Rakkhoshi Rani was right about time not moving as fast back home. I looked around me. At the front of the line, I could see a bunch of colored lights and streamers decorating a big cement building—like for a Bengali wedding. Only, instead of a sign above the doorway made of flower petals that read something like Gargi weds Ashish or Tumpa marries Bunty, there was a huge hand-painted sign that read GAME SHOW RECROOTMENT CENTAR. My skin prickled with sweat and discomfort, but also foreboding. I was going to have to join Sesha’s contest and beat him at his own game. Could I do it? But if all he wanted was the jewels anyway, maybe I could. Maybe I could somehow trade the Poroshmoni for Neel’s life? But even as I thought this, I shook my head. What was I thinking? That I’d steal the jewel from the Raja and give it to Sesha? I couldn’t do something like that. Could I?
In the line were people of all ages and genders waiting to sign up for the Serpent King’s game show. There were entire households—from bent-over grannies to crawling babies. And if that wasn’t strange enough, some people were wearing costumes. Well, one costume in particular. Not everyone, but a bunch of people in the line had on green makeup, braided wigs, and purple combat boots. A lot of the people in costume were girls my age, but there were some adults too! A portion of those who were dressed up were also carrying homemade bows and arrows—some out of tinfoil and sticks, and some looking like they could actually do some damage. The answer to the question “Who wants to be a demon slayer?” was obvious: everyone.
Each group of contestants in the line was in a frenzy of activity. Moms, dads, and even what looked like professional tutors were coaching hopeful kid contestants, quizzing them on riddles, making them warm up their voices with scales: “sa-re-ga-ma-pa-dha-ni-SA! SA-ni-dha-pa-ma-ga-re-sa.” A few older kids were practicing stylized-martial-arts-slash-yoga-type moves, one group with swords. Another
bunch of contestants in their twenties seemed to be practicing crying spontaneously on camera. “They’re going to take the contestants who can give them the most drama,” I heard one woman say as she burst into tears and then proceeded to pull at her friend’s hair, calling her terrible names. The two hair pullers were pulled apart by a brawny, tattooed dude, and then all three started screaming really foul insults at each other, until the brawny dude called time. “Arré, ‘pooper-scooper’ is not a real curse word!” he told one of the hair-pulling drama queens.
The good thing about so many people being dressed up in “Princess Demon Slayer” costumes was that no one actually recognized me. It was obvious that they just thought I was a cosplayer like them. A middle-aged, glasses-wearing woman in spray-painted boots and a braided wig (which looked like it was made from an old mop—seriously!) gave me a sneer. “You’ve got the boots, bow, and arrows right, but your hair is completely wrong! The green highlights in your braid—as if!”
“Um, thanks for the advice?” I managed.
Naya gave me a look, and we both collapsed into giggles. Even though I still had a bunch of questions about her, I was actually really glad Naya had stowed away with me. It was nice to have some company.
But the fun didn’t last long. The sun was so hot that soon the parked auto rikshaw started to feel like an oven. We stored our winter coats under the passenger bench, since even looking at them made me sweat. Even though we weren’t too far from the Salty Ocean of Forgetfulness, there wasn’t even a drop of a breeze. Before long, I felt like we’d be here forever, baking in the sizzling sun.
“How long will it take us to get through this line, you think?” I was just asking Naya, when we both saw the cameras.
Naya gave a little squeak and dived under her burlap sack again. What was she doing? The girl was going to burn up in this heat!
Game of Stars Page 7
