In-ep-tee-tood

Aru had read somewhere that if you stare at a chimpanzee, it will stare back, smile…and then attack you.

She hadn’t read anything about what kind of consequences might follow from staring at a pigeon.

But she did know that gazes were powerful things. Her mom used to tell her stories of Gandhari, a queen who chose to go through life blindfolded out of empathy for her blind husband. Only once did she take off the blindfold, to look at her eldest son. Her stare was so powerful it could have made him invincible—if he’d been naked. But no, he was too embarrassed to go without his underwear. He was still superstrong, just not as strong as he could’ve been. (Aru sympathized with him. That must have been a horribly awkward moment.)

And so Aru maintained eye contact with the pigeon…but took one step back.

Finally, the bird relented. It hung its head. Its wings drooped.

“The last dormant Pandavas were so brilliant!” it said, shaking its head. “The last Arjuna was a senator. The last Yudhistira was a famous judge. The last Bhima was an Olympic athlete, and Nakula and Sahadeva were famous male models who wrote fabulous best-selling self-help books and started the world’s first hot-yoga studios! And now look at what has become of the line: a girl child, of all things.”

Aru didn’t think this was particularly fair. Even famous people had been children at some point. Judges weren’t born wearing wigs and carrying gavels.

And that led to another question: What was the bird going on about? All of those names—Arjuna, Yudhistira, Bhima, Nakula, and Sahadeva—were the names of the five most famous Pandava brothers. There was one more—Karna—the secret Pandava. In the stories, the other Pandavas didn’t even know he was their brother until the war had begun.

And why did the bird say dormant? Didn’t that mean sleeping?

The pigeon flopped onto its back and draped one wing dramatically over its beak. “So this is to be my fate,” it moaned. “I used to be going places. Top of my class, you know.” It sniffed.

“Um…sorry?”

“Oh, that’s useful!” The pigeon lifted its wing and glared at her. “You should’ve thought about that before you plunged us into this mess! Just look at you…The horror.” It covered its face with both wings, muttering to itself. “Why must every generation have its heroes?”

“Wait. So there’s been five Pandava brothers in every generation?” asked Aru.

“Unfortunately,” said the bird, throwing off its wings.

“And I’m one of them?”

“Please don’t make me say it again.”

“But…how can you be sure?”

“Because you lit the lamp!”

Aru paused. She had lit the lamp. She had lowered the flame to the metal lip of the object. But it was Poppy’s brother’s lighter. Did that count? And she was only going to light it for a second, not keep it lit. Did that make her only a smidge of a hero?

“I’m fairly positive you are a Pandava,” continued the bird. “Mostly positive. I am, at least, definitely not going to say no. Otherwise why would I be here? And on that note, why am I here? What does it mean to wear this wretched body?” It stared at the ceiling. “Who am I?”

“I—”

“Ah, never mind,” said the bird with a resigned sigh. “If you’ve lit that cursed lamp, the other one will know.”

“Who—?”

“We’ll just have to go through the Door of Many. It always knows. Plus that’s a great deal easier than putting something in Google Maps. Most confusing contraption of this century.”

“You’re a bird! Shouldn’t you know which direction you’re going in?”

“I’m not just any bird, you uppity hero. I am—” the bird spluttered, then stopped. “I guess it doesn’t matter who I am. What matters is that we stop this before any true destruction takes place. For the next nine days, Time will freeze wherever the Sleeper walks. On the ninth day, the Sleeper will reach the Lord of Destruction, and Shiva will perform the dance to end all Time.”

“Can’t the Lord of Destruction just say no thanks?”

“You know nothing of the gods,” sniffed the pigeon.

Aru stopped to consider that. She wasn’t shocked by the idea that gods and goddesses existed, only that a person could actually get to know them. They were like the moon: distant enough not to enter her thoughts too often; bright enough to inspire wonder.

Aru looked back at her frozen mom and classmates. “So they’ll just be stuck like that?”

“It’s temporary,” said the bird. “Provided you aren’t riddled with ineptitude.”

“In-ep-tee-tood? Is that French?”

The bird knocked its head against a wooden banister. “The universe has a cruel sense of humor,” it moaned. “You are one of the few who can make things right again. Then again, you are also the one who started it. And so you, and the other, must be heroes.”

That didn’t sound very heroic to Aru. It just sounded like an epic mess that required an epic cleanup. Her shoulders drooped. “What do you mean, ‘the other’?”

“Your sibling, of course! You think you can quest alone? Questing requires families,” said the bird. “Your brother—or perhaps sister, although I don’t think that’s ever happened—will be waiting for you. When one Pandava awakens, so too does another, usually the one who is best equipped to deal with the challenge at hand. Until now, the Pandavas have always appeared as fully grown people, not squished bundles of hormones and incompetence.”

“Thanks.”

“Come along, girl child.”

“Who are you?”

Aru wasn’t going to move a step without some kind of verification. But she doubted the bird carried a wallet.

The pigeon paused, then said, “Though such an illustrious name should not be uttered by a child, you may call me Subala.” It preened. “I am—I mean, well, I was…It’s a long story. Point is: I’m here to help.”

“Why should I go with you?”

“Ungrateful child! Have you no sense of dharma? This is your task! The freeze will keep spreading like a disease in the Sleeper’s wake. If he’s not stopped by the new moon, your mother will stay that way forever. Is that what you want?”

Aru’s cheeks heated. Of course she didn’t want that. But she also felt as if the whole world had spun the wrong way and she was still finding her balance.

“Your name is Subala? That’s way too many syllables,” said Aru, fear snaking into her heart. “What if I need help and have to call for you? I could lose an arm or a leg while just trying to say the whole thing. I’m calling you Sue.”

“Sue is a girl’s name. I am a male.”

Aru, who was often stuck listening to Sherrilyn’s Johnny Cash playlist, did not agree with Subala.

“No it’s not. There was a ‘Boy Named Sue.’ You know, his daddy left home when he was three—”

“Spare me the vileness of country music,” huffed Subala, flying toward the elephant’s mouth.

Well, if he wouldn’t be called Sue, what about…

“Boo!” shouted Aru.

Subala turned his head, realized what he’d done, and cursed. He perched on top of the elephant’s trunk.

“You may have won this, but I’d wipe that smug grin off your face fairly quickly if I were you. Serious consequences have been triggered by your actions, girl child. As this generation’s Pandava, it’s now your duty to answer the call to questing. The need hasn’t arisen in more than eight hundred years. But I’m sure your mother told you all that.” Boo peered at her. “She did tell you, didn’t she?”

Aru fell quiet as she recalled the kinds of things her mother had told her over the years. They were small things that wouldn’t help thaw the frozen people in this room: how a flock of starlings was called a murmuration; how some tales were nested inside other tales; and how you should always leave the mint leaves for last when making chai.

But there’d been no mention of quests. No discussion of Aru being a Pandava. Or how she came to be that way.

And there’d certainly been no instructions about how she should prepare herself in case she accidentally triggered the end of the universe.

Maybe her mom didn’t think Aru would be any good at it.

Maybe she hadn’t wanted to get Aru’s hopes up that she could do something heroic.

Aru couldn’t lie this time. It wasn’t a situation she could talk herself out of and magically be okay.

“No,” she said, forcing herself to meet Boo’s gaze.

But what she saw made her hands tighten into fists. The pigeon was doing that narrowing-his-eyes-thing. He was looking at her as if she were not much to look at…and that was wrong.

She had the blood—or at least the soul—of a hero. (Or something like that. She wasn’t quite sure about the mechanics of reincarnation.)

“I may not know,” she said. “But I can learn.”

Boo cocked his head.

The lies bubbled happily to her throat. Words of self-comfort. Words of deceit that weren’t necessarily bad:

“My teacher once called me a genius,” she exclaimed.

She did not mention that her gym teacher had called her that in a not very nice way. Aru had established a “record” time—for her—of taking fourteen minutes to run a mile lap around the track. The next time that they ran to beat their previous records, she’d ignored the track altogether and just walked across the field to the finish line. Her teacher had scowled at her and said, You think you’re a genius, or something?

“And I’m an A student,” she told Boo.

In the sense that she was a student whose name started with an A.

The more claims she made—even if they were only half-truths at best—the better she felt. Words had their own power.

“Excellent. All my fears have been allayed,” said Boo drily. “Now come on. Time is a-wasting!”

He cooed, and the elephant’s mouth widened to the size of a door, its jaw hitting the ground. A breeze from some other place gusted toward her, swirling through the stuffy air of the museum.

One step forward and she’d be wandering far from Atlanta….She’d be in an entirely different world. Excitement rushed through her, followed by a painful pinch of guilt. If she couldn’t fix this, her mom would become like everything else in the museum: a dusty relic. Aru brushed her fingers against her mother’s stiff hand.

“I’ll fix this,” she said. “I promise.”

“You’d better!” snapped Boo from his place on the elephant’s trunk.