The War to Save the Worlds

by Samira Ahmed

  “Maqbool informs me that normal human children are of a curious nature, and so I shall share with you a tale. Of Suleiman the Wise. Of his defeats of Ahriman, the mighty rebel dev. Of how Suleiman helped Shahpal bin Shahrukh unify the Eighteen Realms in peace these many centuries.”

  On the Schism of Qaf

  Some three thousand human years ago, a powerful, wise, and just malik ruled—

  “Wait. What’s a malik?” Hamza interjects, and immediately gets side eye from Abdul Rahman.

  “In Urdu, it’s like king or master, maybe?” I say, then shush him.

  “Ahem. As I was saying…” Abdul Rahman clears his throat.

  A wise king who reigned over a time of peace and prosperity for his people on Earth, Suleiman, son of Dawood, was bestowed by God with many gifts. Among these were the ability to speak with animals, to control the winds, and to rule jinn with a Ring of Power: the Seal of Suleiman.

  “Woah. Hold up,” Hamza interrupts again. “There were rings of power before Lord of the Rings?”

  “Yes! There are many rings of power in your history and ours. You would think that Suleiman the Wise would at least garner a footnote. Tolkien could have shown some respect,” Maqbool scoffs.

  “Excuse me, am I interrupting? Are you two about to settle the age-old problem of cultural appropriation in the next instant or may I be allowed to continue?” Abdul Rahman asks, not even trying to hide his sarcasm.

  We all nod guiltily.

  It is written that many jinn willingly served in Suleiman’s grand army and pledged fealty to him, for his wisdom and fair treatment of all beings were renowned. It is written that those jinn who openly defied him, who menaced his people and kidnapped children—

  I gulp. “Uhhh… did you say kidnap children?” Hamza pokes me in the ribs with his elbow.

  Maqbool immediately jumps in. “We are not those types of jinn. Like humans, jinn have free will to do good or evil or anything in between. Fear not. With my life, I swear to protect you from any miscreant jinn, dev, or ghul.”

  This is supposed to make me feel better, but it kind of doesn’t.

  “Interruption!” bellows Abdul Rahman. He is so testy. He hasn’t eaten a thing; I wonder if he’s hangry.

  “Humble apologies, please continue, my Vizier.” Maqbool grins.

  It is known that Suleiman the Wise had the ability to magically bind mischievous jinn, dev, ghul, or peri. To trap them within brass vessels, perhaps for eternity. It is said his favorite prisons were small oil lamps that were so cramped—

  “What!” Hamza nearly jumps up from the throne seat. We’re only a few feet off the ground, angled as we ascend the mountain, but Maqbool catches my brother before he can test the strength of the invisible force field. “Are you talking Aladdin and his magic lamp and genie… a genie that is… oh my God… blue! A blue genie… jinn… genie. Heck, yes! You’re the blue singing genie, aren’t you?”

  “Insolent child. How dare you insult me so. I am the Vizier to the King of Kings, Emperor of Qaf. I am not some disreputable jinn cast out from society and bound to a lamp for my misdeeds.” Abdul Rahman’s face turns fuchsia. That’s new.

  “You’re also very pitchy when you sing.” Maqbool giggles.

  Hamza and I look at each other and laugh. Abdul Rahman narrows his eyes at us, but I swear it almost looks like he’s holding back his own laughter. He continues:

  Long story, short. Believe me, this is a true epic that could be told over many nights by our gifted storytellers. Our beloved emperor believed the Eighteen Realms of Qaf—each inhabited by different tribes of creations—ought to be unified, and so he did this after the Great Celestial War. After all, we are a singular creation—all fashioned from fire—even if physical traits and elements of our culture vary. The emperor brought peace, a golden age of Qaf, where there was a renaissance of art and music and literature, where we built our great cities and created beautiful gardens. But one sought the throne and threatened to tear our world asunder. The rebel dev, Ahriman, father of Ifrit, whom you will now face. The rebel stole the Peerless Dagger from the emperor’s armory—the blade that once cut the fabric between worlds, that can sever the stars with the mere thought of its wielder. On the night of an eclipse, Ahriman began to carve out a piece of the moon—each of eighteen portions linked to one of the Eighteen Realms. Even the dagger’s first slash unsettled the heavens, causing tremors on Earth that cracked the Himalayas, swallowing some settlements whole, sending small meteorites crashing into your oceans. Shahpal bin Shahrukh beckoned Suleiman the Wise, binder of jinn, demon-slayer, to Qaf that he could quell the violence and bring the rebel dev to his knees. Commanding him with his ring, with his seal, Suleiman bound the dev into a small brass lamp, soldering it with the fire of the sun and burying it in the depths of the moon. With Suleiman’s help, the emperor reshaped the moon, the stopper between our worlds, and he has been its sole guardian all these many ages. Time passed, and the only trace of Ahriman’s rebellion lay on the face of the moon—humans call it the Sea of Storms.

  His son, Ifrit, who now controls the Peerless Dagger, wants to avenge his father. To set him free. So they can seek the Ring of Power, which has been lost over time, clues of its existence scattered, mislaid. Some say it is buried in a secret location. Others say it was lost to the ocean depths. And Ifrit will break the moon and scar both our worlds forever to find it.

  My knuckles are white, and my fingers ice-cold at this new information. That makes this all even worse. “Uh, excuse me. You didn’t explain back in Chicago that Ifrit’s equally evil dad is buried in the moon. So we could possibly have to fight two supervillains? Excellent.”

  “Time was too short to convey all the details!” Abdul Rahman shouts. “The Chosen Ones must face this, that is all. It is written.”

  “So, basically, this is a prison break and a revenge tale,” Hamza says. “Dang. That’s kind of epic.”

  I catch Maqbool’s eyes as he looks away. I don’t think Hamza quite gets it. But I bet Maqbool knows what I’m thinking: How can we possibly win?

  The golden throne passes through a veil of mist, and the Supahi softly descend in their black flying pots, bringing us to the ground as well. We are so high—above the cloud line—I can’t even see the bottom of the mountain. I shift Hamza away from the slope—his forehead is beading up with sweat. We turn to face a wall so high and wide I can’t see the top, and it seems to go on forever. The Obsidian Wall. It’s smooth and shiny, glass-like black rock. Whirly, swirly patterns in the surface are almost mesmerizing, drawing me closer. I reach my fingers out to touch it, and the Wall oozes around them; my fingers melt knuckle-deep.

  “Gross!” I yelp.

  “Cool!” Hamza yells at the same time.

  Before I can pull my fingers out, Maqbool shouts at me to do it slowly. I listen and ease them out of the Wall with a squelch. “Ick. Disgusting,” I say as I try to wipe the black sticky substance onto my jeans.

  “Sorry, should’ve warned you about that,” Maqbool says. “The Obsidian Wall is an optical illusion. It’s not made of rock. It’s a substance that is both liquid and solid at the same time. It’s—”

  “Oobleck?” Hamza and I interrupt together.

  “The portal to the other world is oobleck?” I ask.

  “I have no idea what oobleck is besides an odd-sounding human word,” Abdul Rahman harrumphs. “But then again, many of your words sound odd to my ears.”

  “Old ears,” Maqbool mouths to us.

  “I saw that!” Abdul Rahman bellows.

  Razia and some of the Supahi around her choke back their giggles.

  “It’s a mixture of cornstarch and water,” I say. “But it’s so much more than the sum of its parts. It acts like a liquid, but it’s not a liquid. It acts like a solid, but it’s not a solid. It’s a suspension because the cornstarch grains don’t actually dissolve in the water and react differently to different amounts of pressure. It’s a non-Newtonian fluid.” A satisfied smile spreads ac
ross my face.

  “Nerd,” whispers Hamza.

  “Nerds get the job done,” I whisper back.

  Maqbool claps his hands. “Did I not tell you, my Vizier, how wonderfully odd humans are? Oobleck! What a delightful word.”

  “Oobleck! Poobleck! Call it what you will, strange human children, but my only concern now is where has the portal to Qaf gone?” Abdul Rahman pokes at the Wall with a series of quick jabs with his finger, which meets a solid surface and doesn’t get sucked in. I freaking love science.

  “Gone? Do you mean you cannot find the door?” Maqbool asks.

  “It should be right here. According to my JPS.” Abdul Rahman removes what looks like a brass pocket watch from inside his vest.

  “GPS, you mean,” Hamza says.

  “No, I mean what I say and say what I mean. JPS. Jinn Positioning System.” He shows us the watch, which looks more like a compass. When he turns it to the wall, a red arrow points at a Q where north would be. “This is definitely it.”

  “Isn’t there another way around?” I ask.

  Maqbool shakes his head. “This portal was built by the emperor for Suleiman the Wise and the other anointed so that only those humans with true business in Qaf could pass. He alone commands it so that no ill-intentioned can pass from our world to yours. The door should appear for the Chosen Ones.” Maqbool tries to make eye contact with Abdul Rahman, who clearly is avoiding it. “Perhaps put on your reading glasses, my Vizier, to see if you’ve read the settings correctly.” He walks back and forth in front of the Wall as another tremor, the strongest one we’ve felt, makes me grab for Hamza to steady myself. This can’t be right. None of this is right.

  “Maybe it’s hidden, like we need to say a secret password or something,” Hamza suggests, then sits down in front of the Wall. He quickly jumps up. “I got it! Mellon,” he shouts.

  “Melon? Are you still hungry? We just ate,” I say.

  “Not melon. Mel-lon. The Elvish word for ‘friend.’ You know, that riddle from Lord of the Rings? A sign above a door says something like, ‘Speak, friend, to enter.’ And the magic word is actually just ‘friend.’”

  “Oh my God. It could be the end of the world and you think the answer is going to come from Hobbits?”

  “First of all, it’s Gandalf who says that. An actual wizard. And it was worth a shot. Besides, that book is about the end of the earth, too.… Middle Earth, anyway. And small people who go on a quest to defeat a great evil. Sound familiar?”

  I sigh and am about to make a smart-alecky remark, but my eyes are drawn to the darkening sky. No. No. No. Hamza gazes up and sees the same thing I do: a burst of fire, an explosion on the moon’s surface. I see it so clearly now. Another piece of the moon is about to break off. And we’re still here. On the wrong side.

  Suddenly I hear Hamza exclaim, “Excelsior!” And then I see him take a running start. He wants to smash through the goop wall, apparently. But before I can yell at him to stop, that it’s useless, he bounces off the Wall with a loud thwack and falls to the ground, clutching his shoulder.

  “I thought I had a chance,” he groans as he stands up.

  “You know how oobleck works. The faster you run at it, the harder it’s going to get.”

  “I know, but I figured maybe… I dunno… jinn oobleck would be different?” He points at the sky. “Desperate times.”

  The ground beneath our feet rumbles again. This time even more violently. I grab Hamza’s backpack and reach for the Box of the Moon. Oh no. One of the gears is spinning fast, too fast, and as the tiny moon moves… it could mean…

  We all look up to see another chunk of the moon float away and into the sky. The trees around us bend at unnatural angles. In the distance we hear cracks and the tops of some trees falling. There’s a second of silence. Then a deafeningly loud WHUMP.

  “By Suleiman’s beard, NO!” Maqbool yells, pointing to the top of the mountain range as we see a peak crumble, setting off an avalanche.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Element of No Surprise at All

  I SCREAM. I THINK IT’S ME, ANYWAY. I CAN’T TELL IF THE screams I’m hearing are my own. I’m staring up at a mountain that is rumbling down toward us. We are going to be crushed under rock. Stupid, stupid portal. How can we be the Chosen Ones if we can’t even get past a wall of oobleck? My brain feels like oobleck, like impossible-to-understand, mysterious goo. Now it’s in an oobleck loop. God, I’m going to die thinking about oobleck. Vijay Kumar did a science fair project testing the strength of oobleck. It was actually pretty cool; he did all these experiments with it, cutting it with a hot knife, stabbing it, aiming a high-velocity force…

  My eyes fall on the dagger Hamza tucked into the cummerbund around his waist. Before I even realize it, I’m reaching for it, and I’m watching myself like I’m outside my body. I grab the bejeweled hilt of the blade, pull it out of the sheath, turn to Razia and the Supahi, and scream, “All together, PUNCH IT!” In unison, the warriors punch the Wall full force, and I plunge the dagger into the substance at the same time it hardens, pulling down with all my strength until the surface cracks. Razia kicks at the break, and a chunk wide enough for us to fit through breaks off. We have only seconds before it becomes liquid again; I grab Hamza and our bags and shove him through the seam. The jinn morph into something like an orangey mist, follow us through, and recorporealize on the other side as the Wall shifts and shivers and a liquid curtain covers the rip we tumbled through.

  Hamza and I are both on our knees in sweet-smelling grass, blobs of oobleck stuck to our clothes and hair.

  “Sis! You did it!” Hamza jumps up, pulling an elastic-y, rubbery bit of oobleck off his nose.

  I look up at him and smile, then fall totally backward onto the grass, closing my eyes. I can hear Hamza high-fiving the jinn and Maqbool letting out a little victory yelp. I’m glad they’re happy, but I feel like I just ran the hundred-yard dash at full speed—heart pounding, a little light-headed. I can’t believe that worked. And I also can’t believe we are still at the beginning; it’s not even the hard part yet. But we made it through. We’re here now. And this is the only real there is.

  I gulp some air, then open my eyes and look around.

  “What is this place?” Hamza walks away from the Wall. Pushing myself off the ground and out of my disbelief, I join him.

  We’re in a garden, but it’s unlike any garden I’ve ever seen. A carpet of emerald-green grass rolls out from our feet in gentle waves. Enormous palm trees line the perimeter alongside red, purple, and orange flowers. Trees the shape of weeping willows, their branches heavy with fruit, dot the garden. It smells like night-blooming jasmine—I know because it’s my mom’s favorite flower. She says that in India there are stories of how the scent could make people act drunk and go wild. Maybe that’s why I feel a bit woozy. I sit down on a sloping bank beneath what I think is an apple tree, but the fruit shines like rubies.

  The Supahi seem to be checking their flying pots for damage. Jinn transportation needs the occasional tune-up, I guess? Meanwhile, Hamza is wandering around and yells back, “This place smells like chocolate!”

  “What are you talking about? It’s jasmine!”

  “No. It’s that chocolaty smell that hits you when you’re walking in the West Loop. You know, the smell of magic.”

  He’s right. About the magic. Not about how the garden actually smells right now, because it’s 100 percent jasmine. But when you’re in downtown Chicago on certain days, especially in late summer, the streets smell like chocolate. It’s because of a chocolate factory, but for a long time, I thought it was because all the chocolate fairies lived in Chicago. Hold up, if peris are real, I wonder if there are chocolate fairies here. That would be awesome.

  “The garden smells as you wish it to. Generally linked to a strong memory or an affiliation to what is most on your mind,” Maqbool says as he approaches me under the tree.

  Hamza walks over. “Wow. That’s cool. But I’m really glad I was
n’t thinking of, like, a sewer. That would really stink.” Hamza snort-laughs. “Get it? Stink?”

  I roll my eyes. Apparently, no matter what he faces, Hamza is always his Hamza-est. I don’t bother to ask him why he’d be thinking about sewers. It would probably involve some convoluted explanation about Ninja Turtles. If you ask me, it looks like the Turtles live in storm drains and not the sewer, because they’re not surrounded by bodily waste, which… ugh. Gross. Why does my brain do this?

  “Yes, indeed. It is quite cool, as you indicate,” Maqbool says. “But sometimes, in Qaf, things are not always as they seem. Perceptions may vary. And it would be smart of you to be wary of that.”

  Hamza nods, only half paying attention, and wanders off. I stand up to ask Abdul Rahman and Maqbool what the next steps are. The sooner we get to it, the better. I watch Hamza walk oddly, slowly, toward a silver gazebo almost like I’m watching him through waves of a mirage. Through the boughs of the leaves in the path between us, I see an older man with a pointy grayish-black beard praying. Hamza greets the uncle, who turns to him. I can’t hear what they’re saying, but I see them both smiling and nodding. Hamza is good at making friends anywhere we go, always ready to chat people up. It’s not quite so easy for me. A tree near Hamza and the old man bows and bends; its branches are filled with gleaming garnet fruit, pomegranates, I think. Hamza throws his head back and laughs at something the man says and then reaches for a fruit.

  Maqbool, who’s been talking to Abdul Rahman, glances up and yells, “Stop!”

  Why is Maqbool getting so worked up about fruit? Are we supposed to be on some special diet here? Hamza’s always hungry. I’m starving, too. Even though we ate that nettle broth and bread only an hour or two ago. Though, maybe, it could’ve been longer? I don’t have any idea what time it is or if Earth time even works here.

  As Hamza wraps his fingers around the fruit, the bright, sunny daylight turns bloodred. Invisible alarms blare. Hamza jumps back, and I race toward him. As I reach him, the kindly old uncle transforms into an orange-skinned, pointy-toothed monster—body like a person but with a face that looks like a wolf. I’m guessing he’s a ghul like Maqbool explained—like a dev but with much sharper teeth. Great.