Game of Stars

by Sayantani DasGupta

  “Neel doesn’t want me to save him, though,” I pointed out.

  “But his mother wants you to save him,” Tuntuni squawked. “You’re the Demon Queen’s chosen one!”

  Mati raised her eyebrows at me. I sighed. “Okay, okay. I suppose she did choose me.”

  “You’re the chosen one, Princess! Like Captain Lola Morgana on Star Travels!” burbled Naya. “Oh, I love that show, don’t you? Look!” She pulled something out of her book bag. “I even wrote away through the intergalactic catalog for a Lola Morgana thermos!”

  That distracted me for a second. “There’s an intergalactic Star Travels catalog?”

  “Yes! I’ve been saving up for the Lola Morgana set of solar-powered curling irons!” Naya forced the thermos into my hands. “Here, Majesticness, you take it! To inspire you to be as successful in your mission as Captain Lola!”

  “Oh!” I took the thermos from the girl. “Are you sure? I mean, um, thanks!”

  “You’re welcome!” enthused Naya, clearly super happy I liked her spontaneous gift.

  Tuni cleared his throat in a rude way. “Could we go back to the video, please?”

  On the small screen, Sesha went on. “Of course, you must figure out where my hotel fortress is, and locate the appropriate ocean.”

  Mati reached into her pocket and handed me a moving map of the Kingdom Beyond. I looked at all seven oceans—the Milky Ocean of Time, the Salty Ocean of Forgetfulness, the Honey-Gold Ocean of Souls, the Serpentine Ocean, the Ocean of Star Light, the Ocean of Infinite Knowledge, and the Ocean of Wine and Sorrow. They were spread all around the seven floating landmasses of the Kingdom Beyond (and beyond). Only which one was the Serpent King’s hotel-slash-dungeon-detention-center under?

  “You must wait for the night of the full moon. Then, once at the shoreline, you must dive under the water with only one breath. Which is when, well …” Sesha cackled evilly, like some bad cliché of a movie villain plotting world destruction. His pet cobras seemed to smile as well. “… most of you will die.”

  “Comforting,” I mumbled. I was getting a headache. Only a real villain would go to so much trouble to actually make a video like this. It made me barfy to even admit to myself I was related to this guy.

  The Serpent King went on: “If you are one of the lucky few who don’t drown, you must enter the hotel fortress, and go down to the dungeon level. Then you must get through the guards—answer their questions in order to find the right doorway, in which will be the crystal box holding a rakkhosh soul bee.”

  Wait, what? Rakkhosh soul bees? Was that related somehow to the Demon Queen’s buzzing minions?

  “You must crack open the crystal case, rip off the bee’s wing, and open the fortress door using that wing as a key. Of course, when you do that, you’ll kill the rakkhosh that bee belonged to—but who cares, right? As long as your loved one is all right,” Sesha snarled evilly.

  “Sick,” repeated Mati, shaking her head.

  “Oh, and unfortunately, the only thing that will crack open the cases is a very particular kind of tooth from a very particular source.” Here, Sesha cackled again, showing off his two frightening front fangs. His pet cobras hissed at the cameras too.

  “So, good luck, you stupid rakkhosh! I’m afraid you’ll need it!” Sesha waved as the video clicked off, but not before the giant TSK logo flashed on the screen again. That darned Ouroboros. It was showing up so often now it was giving me the creeps. And that was even before I realized there were letters etched into its snaky skin.

  The all is one

  Where had I seen that before?

  I gave a shudder. “So, in summary, this mission to rescue Neel from the undersea detention center is basically impossible.” I ran my hand over the cool marble of the balcony. “I mean, if I survive all that diving-to-the-bottom-of-the-ocean-and-getting-past-the-guards stuff, I still won’t have Sesha’s tooth to crack the case.”

  “Ah! That’s where you’re wrong! Look what we have!”

  “What’s this?” I took a heavy green leather book from Mati. It looked like the old-fashioned day planner Baba kept in the convenience store office to keep track of stock delivery dates and bank payment schedules.

  “It’s Sesha’s appointment calendar, usually kept under incredible security,” my cousin explained, her face all hopeful. I kept flipping through the pages, not understanding what I was looking at.

  Tuntuni flew over, using his beak to flip me to the right page. “We lost a lot of good people to get you this appointment book, Princess.”

  “No, we didn’t,” Mati said, rolling her eyes.

  “Well, we might have. It was very risky anyway.” The talking bird sniffed. He had a smattering of rice stuck to his beak, but I didn’t bother telling him.

  I peered at the page Tuni had flipped to. First, I noticed that two nights from now was the night of the full moon—which had both an upside and a downside. The upside was that this was the one day that I could potentially storm the underwater prison. The downside was that since it was the full moon, my moon mother would be high in the sky and couldn’t possibly help me.

  “What am I supposed to be looking at?” Tuni put his beak down on the page with a swift peck, practically nicking my finger. “Hey!” I protested. But I did notice what he was pointing out. It was one of those sticky round appointment reminders that Dr. Berger, Jovi’s mom, gave us every time we had an upcoming appointment for a tooth cleaning. “My bio dad has a dentist appointment tomorrow? The day before the full moon?”

  “The Serpent King has terrible dental hygiene,” Mati explained, pointing to an X-ray on a light box that Naya had pulled out of her endlessly roomy backpack. Mati pointed to all the black spots on the X-rayed fang. “He can regrow his teeth, but he has to get his fangs pulled all the time, they’re so decayed and cavity-filled! I mean, look at that plaque and gingivitis!”

  “Say, why do kings go to the dentist?” squawked Tuntuni.

  “I don’t know, why?” Despite the dire situation, Naya was all chipper enthusiasm and wonder, as usual.

  “To get their teeth crowned!” crowed the bird, flying in circles as he laughed.

  “Oh, that’s a good one!” Naya’s eyes were all round with innocence. “But I thought the plan was Princess Lady Kiranmala was going to go steal the Serpent King’s tooth while he was at the dentist so that she can use it to crack the bee case and free His Royal Highness Neelkamal, sir.”

  “It was a joke, Naya,” explained Mati. “But yes, that’s what Kiran is going to do. We’re going to sneak her into the dental office, and she’s going to grab that fang as soon as it’s pulled.”

  And then we three put our hands and Tuni put his wing together. With a rallying sort of a cry, Mati raised her fist in the air and shout-whispered, “To the dentist!”

  Naya and Tuni joined in, gleefully pumping their fist or wing in the air and saying in less-than-shouty voices, “To the dentist!”

  I inwardly groaned. Oh man, what had I gotten myself into now? I wasn’t strong enough to confront Sesha again. What if this whole thing failed because of me? Being the chosen one sucked big time.

  The plan was for me to meet my friends in the woods surrounding the palace at dawn. I snuck out of my rooms before the sun rose and made my way down to the grounds, grateful the camera crews didn’t seem to be awake yet.

  The thought of going to confront my evil snake father was scary enough. The added creepy factor of having to do this in a dentist’s office didn’t make me feel any better. I hated dentists! Maybe it was the fact that Dr. Berger, my dentist, was also my neighbor and Jovi’s mom, but going to the dentist had always made me anxious.

  Mati, Naya, and Tuni were waiting for me in the woods with two new additions, those giant birds, Bangoma and Bangomee. Since all dental offices in the Kingdom Beyond (and beyond) were located in Demon Land (fitting!), and since landmasses tended to move a lot around here, the safest way for us to travel was by magical giant bird, as they apparently had m
agical GPS systems built into their brains. Only problem was, Bangoma and Bangomee were huge. My stomach was already doing flips before we climbed onto the giant birds—Tuni and I on Bangoma, Naya and Mati on Bangomee.

  “How are the other PSS going to get there?” I’d asked my cousin, who had told me that we’d have skateboarder backup outside the dental office, just in case my bio father brought some henchmen with him.

  She’d looked mysterious and just mumbled something about “another way.”

  I ended up wishing I’d gone with them that “other way,” because Bangoma and Bangomee flew so fast that the air battered our faces and made my hair feel like it was going to get whipped off my head. There was nowhere to really hold on, so I gripped Bangoma’s slightly oily feathers with all my might, yanking off a few by mistake in the process. I wondered how the others on Bangomee were faring, because on Bangoma’s back, my insides felt like they were getting mixed up in a power smoothie blender. Midway to the dentist’s office, poor Tuntuni got caught by a gust of wind and almost taken off our ride.

  “Save me, Princess! I’m too pretty to die!” yelled the bird.

  I lunged for him and grabbed him by a yellow wing. I saw that on Bangomee, Naya and Mati also seemed to be hanging on to each other for dear life.

  After what felt like an extra-long dryer cycle of turbulence, the two giant birds began slowing down over Demon Land, that waste-strewn landscape of single-use plastic cartons and discarded yo-yos. The smell of rotten carcasses filled the air, and yet, the part of Demon Land where we landed was nothing like the jungle I’d run through with Neel last fall, or the dry desert where we’d visited his grandmother Ai-Ma. This was a more industrialized part of the country, with strip malls, fast-food joints, and a multilane blacktop highway. In fact, this part of Demon Land looked very eerily like New Jersey.

  “The dental region,” said Tuni in my ear. “Only dental offices in this entire area. Oh, and the occasional podiatrist too.”

  A whole area for tooth and feet doctors? Why not.

  As we flew even lower, I saw in the distance the familiar shoreline of the Ruby Red Sea. From each direction, there were lines of demons trudging toward the watery border of their country.

  “What’s going on there?” I pointed.

  “Ever since the show producers started raiding demon villages, taking away rakkhosh, khokkosh, doito, and danav to detention centers, the refugee situation has been terrible,” said Tuni, his voice unusually serious. “Everyone in Demon Land is leaving their homes, and running away. No one wants to be the monster on a game show, the bait so that someone else can be a hero.”

  I shivered, not sure what to feel. I mean, these were demons we were talking about. They were evil. They ate people, for goodness’ sake. But it was still kind of sad to think about an entire country living in fear of being raided and put in detention.

  “What’s going to happen to them?” I looked at the endless streams of rakkhosh, khokkosh, doito, and danav, happy that we were well out of the reach of their notice, not to mention their claws and fangs. They were mostly traveling in what looked like family groups, adults carrying children and elders on their shoulders and backs. Plus, a lot of demons seemed to be carrying all their worldly possessions—inflatable life rafts, half-eaten kitchen appliances, broken-down toilet seat covers.

  “Some will make it to safety across the Ruby Red Sea, and some won’t,” said Tuni, as Bangoma landed in a rubbish-filled but otherwise empty parking lot. “There was an entire boat of doito schoolchildren drowned last month. Doito are scared of water as a rule, and not as strong as rakkhosh. Those kids didn’t stand a chance.”

  Wow, that was heavy. It was terrible thinking of those doito kids drowning, but less sad when I remembered that feeling sorry for demons was something you could only do from really far away. That’s when another thought occurred to me. What if those refugees started streaming into the Kingdom Beyond? Or even, gulp, through a wormhole and into Parsippany? I mean, Naya and her family had somehow immigrated, just like Ma, Baba, and I had. What was to stop refugee rakkhosh from doing the same thing?

  Mati and Naya approached us from where the other bird had landed, a few feet away. “Ready, Cousin?”

  “Hey, how did the dentist become a brain surgeon?” quipped Tuntuni.

  “Tuni, this is really not the time, I really want to know how …” I began, but the dumb bird just kept going.

  “His drill slipped!”

  Despite myself, I laughed along with everyone else. Okay, whatever was going on with this rakkhosh refugee stuff, saving demons was not my problem right now. I just had to worry about saving the half-demon prince Neel. I took a big breath and tried to put the image of those drowning refugee kids out of my mind.

  Mati went over the plan again with us with the seriousness of a director giving her spies a briefing. “Remember, the dental receptionist is on our side. So, she’s arranged for the regular dental hygienist not to be there today. You’ll be taking that hygienist’s place, Kiran, and helping the dentist with the extraction.”

  “But there’s no way Sesha’s not going to recognize me!” I protested.

  “Don’t worry, you’ll be in this fantastic disguise!” Naya chirped, handing me a full hygienist’s robe along with a ridiculously bright red wig.

  “Um … really?” I looked skeptically at the wig, which would do nothing for my skin tone.

  She helped me slip into the robe and jammed the wig on my head before saying, “You’ll also have this!” Naya handed me an eye patch that looked like she’d stolen it from a Halloween pirate.

  I put on the disguise, feeling ridiculous. “But what happens if something goes wrong? Who’s my backup?”

  “We’ll be right there with you—in the air shafts.” Mati had pulled out, again from who knows where, a scale model of the dentist’s office. “We’ll enter here”—she pointed—“and crawl through to here”—she pointed again. “From there, we’ll connect the sleeping gas canister pipes to the pipes for the ventilation. So that when the dentist turns on the gas to knock the Serpent King out, he’ll knock himself out.”

  “Won’t I get knocked out too?”

  “That’s where this special face mask comes in, Your Royalness!” Naya chirped, handing me a weird-looking beak face mask that looked like something out of a medieval painting.

  “Uh, okay.” I eyed the beak mask. “But what about your secret agent? The receptionist, I mean? She’s on our side too, right? How will she not get knocked out?”

  Naya and Mati exchanged a look. “Oh, she’ll be able to handle herself.”

  “We merry band, we band of sisters,” Mati said in an inspiring voice. When Tuni cleared his throat, she added, “And bird, of course. We go now to take the first step in rescuing Prince Neelkamal. They will tell of this day for generations to come in story and song, the day Princess Kiranmala stole the Serpent King’s tooth!” Mati was all flushed from her speech, but I didn’t blame her. I was feeling pretty pumped up too.

  “To the dentist’s office!” we all said again, and this time, I actually joined in.

  The dental office was easy to spot—a decrepit, factory-like building of filthy, falling-apart brick. On top of the building was a giant neon billboard that first glowed bright with a grinning dentist in one of those mirrored head lamps, a pair of pliers in his hand. Then the sign changed to the patient’s mouth, a tooth flying out along with giant neon red splotches of blood. Now the dentist, now the bloody mouth, now the dentist, now the bloody mouth. I understood why all dentists, regardless of species, had their offices in Demon Land.

  I put on the beak-like face mask, taking a few tentative breaths. “Here goes nothing!”

  Mati pointed me toward the employee entrance as she boosted Naya and then directed Tuntuni into the opening for the building’s air shaft. I made my way all by myself through the ramshackle front hallway of the office building, past the broken elevator, and then up some rickety stairs to the dentist’s offi
ce. There were entire steps missing so that I kind of had to jump and rock-climb in places. The place was so eerie and empty I felt like I was in a zombie apocalypse movie. A zombie apocalypse movie where people still cared about getting their cavities filled, that is.

  The front door to the demonic dentist’s office was hanging off its hinges, and someone had taken a giant bite out of the wood, but no one had bothered to repair the breach. On the outside of the broken door was a stenciled name plate—Dr. I. M. Pagol, dental unprofessional, it read. Well, that wasn’t reassuring. The door frame and ceiling were huge—at least twenty feet tall—made for rakkhosh patients I supposed. All right, time to go in. I took a big breath. Under my hygienist robes, I still wore my backpack and weapon. I fingered the bow, hoping I’d be able to easily throw off my robes and nock an arrow if this receptionist turned out to be less friendly than Mati said. I charged into the office, ready for anything.

  But to my surprise, the receptionist was someone I knew. Someone huge, and strong, and cannibalistic, but someone who still loved me—in her own wacky way. Her gangly pole-like legs were barely tucked under the broken desk and the huge hands on the ends of her fire-hose arms poked listlessly at an ancient typewriter with no paper in it. She was wearing a stained cardigan with buttons that looked scarily like real bones over her ratty sari. Her bug-encrusted gray wig was fashioned into a bun, and a pair of thick-framed black reading glasses were perched on her nose, attached around her neck with a rusty chain. The lenses were so cracked and smudged, she couldn’t see out of them, but the receptionist didn’t seem to notice.

  “Ai-Ma?” I said, not able to believe my eyes.

  Neel’s rakkhoshi grandmother took one look at me and leaped up into a fighting stance, knocking over her desk in the process. “Scram! Get away from here, you ginger-haired, pirate bird-beast! We don’t want your cargo-stealing, bird-seed-eating, and rum-drinking kind here! Any closer and I’ll yo-ho-ho your liver for dinner!”