What is this thing?”
We were back in the bathing room with the hanging vines, where I’d left my backpack. The mood between Neel and me was still tense, but at least he was talking to me. Together, we examined Ma’s map, which looked just the same as the first time I’d seen it. As opposed to being covered with images of roads, mountains, lakes, or rivers, the entire page was smudgy and blank.
I reread the birthday card, the last message I had from my parents to me. “It says right here it’s a moving map.”
Neel stared at the blank paper with a serious expression, as if commanding the map to appear.
We were both quiet for a minute. Then Neel held the paper up to his face and sniffed it.
“What are you doing?”
“Just what I suspected,” Neel replied. “It smells fishy.”
“Very punny.”
“I’m serious.” Neel’s grim face reminded me that he was only tolerating me out of some sense of princely duty. “There’s a map here; it’s just invisible. It’s probably coated with Tangra fish juice.”
“Some kind of invisible ink?”
Neel nodded.
Why not? A map that keeps up with moving land masses drawn with invisible fish juice. It certainly wasn’t the strangest thing I had heard about so far. Of course, it wasn’t exactly the kind of atlas we sold in our convenience store—the most exotic things on those were, like, the Garden State Parkway and the New Jersey Turnpike. (Though I used to think the Holland Tunnel sounded super exotic, like it was in Europe or something, but it’s actually in Jersey City, New Jersey, which, in case you haven’t been, isn’t really that exotic at all.)
I squinted at the paper. “How do we decode it? With secret spy rings?”
“Let me look it up.” Neel fished a battered little book out of his pocket. The cover read:
The Adventurer’s Guide to Rakkhosh, Khokkosh, Bhoot, Petni, Doito, Danav, Daini, and Secret Code
Khogen Prasad Das
“Rakkhosh I know, decoding I get,” I said. “But what are all those other words?”
“Oh, different kinds of demons, ghosts, witches, goblins, that sort of thing. K. P. Das is a senior demonologist of the highest caliber. He’s one of Lal’s and my tutors.”
Neel’s voice was carefully neutral, and I could practically feel the distance between us. I took a big breath.
“Um … Neel?”
“Yeah?”
“I just wanted to say I’m sorry. I’m really …”
Neel lifted his face from his book and looked, for the first time in what felt like forever, straight at me. I couldn’t tell if he was upset or angry or … hungry. I realized how alone we were and felt a spasm of fear.
But his words weren’t as much scary as they were just sad. “I’m … I’m just going to need some time, okay? I just … I’m going to need some time before I can forgive you.”
I felt like crying, but I just jammed my nails into my fist. “No, I get it, that’s cool.”
“So let’s just get on with what we’ve got to do, all right?”
“No, fine.” I felt like I wasn’t getting enough air. “Good idea. Lots of people to rescue.”
“Lal would have just remembered how to decode Tangra fish juice.” Neel sighed. “Decoding’s my worst subject.”
“What’s your best?” I asked in as normal a voice as I could manage while still trying to stuff down tears.
Neel flipped to the glossary and began scanning the Ts. “Talons, Tambourines … Here it is, Tangra,” he read. “My best subject is demon slaying of course. Even though I believe more in demonic violence prevention and restorative justice than actual demon slaying.”
“Oh.”
It couldn’t be easy, I guessed, for Neel to be half demon himself and have to hear all the time about how much people hated rakkhosh. He knew—maybe even better than me—what it was like to feel different.
“Well, Professor Das says here that there are only three ways to decode something written with Tangra fish juice.”
“All right, shoot.”
“One.” Neel counted on his fingers. “Blow a powder made from ground-up rakkhosh bones on it.”
“That doesn’t sound too bad.”
“You see any dead rakkhosh lying around here? And no, a half rakkhosh doesn’t count. Even if it did, I’m not sacrificing my bones for your map.”
“Fine.” My face was as serious as I could keep it.
Neel looked huffy. Then he realized I was joking. “Very clever. You’re such a comedian.” He concentrated again on the book. “Two, dip the map in the waters from the River Jogai.”
“Much easier than killing a rakkhosh,” I said, “so let’s go; where is this river?”
“Dried up years ago.”
“Better and better.” I sighed. “Okay, and what’s the third?”
“You’re not going to like it.”
“Just tell me,” I insisted.
Neel read from the book. “Well, the third way to decode something written in Tangra fish juice is to look at it through the prism of a python jewel.”
I had a bad feeling. “A what?”
“The jewel from a powerful python’s head. And of course, the place to get that is the underworld Kingdom of Serpents.” He waited a beat. “Your father’s kingdom.”
“My birth father,” I corrected. I’d made up my mind: I wasn’t going to buy into that movie-of-the-week sap—like I was supposed to run into the arms of some dude who’d tried to kill me when I was a baby. Just because he’d donated his genes to my existence didn’t make him Daddy Dearest. I mean, the Rakkhoshi Queen was Neel’s mom and had actually raised him, but you didn’t see him making any “I Heart My Demonic Mama” clay spitoons for her in art class.
“It’s our only choice. Luckily, I have a working map to the serpent kingdom. And there are no other ways to decode something written in Tangra fish juice. At least that exist in this world.”
“What—there’s another way?” I jumped on his hesitation.
Neel nodded. “Lal and I discovered it by mistake when we were trying to get to your house. We didn’t realize the New Jersey map we had was encoded—probably written with Bhetki fish scales—until it was too late. We didn’t think we’d ever make it to Parsippany in time to save you when Lal knocked his Giant Gulpie over on the paper.”
I remembered Lal’s love of soda fountains and fizzy drinks. And what was it that they had been arguing about when I opened the door? If it wasn’t for that Giant Gulpie, we wouldn’t have found her at all?
“So he spilled soda on the map, and the hidden ink showed itself?”
“Yup. I don’t suppose you brought some with you?”
I shook my head, and was about to say something, when Neel went on. “Wait a minute, what’s this writing on the other side of the map?”
“What?” Maybe Ma hadn’t kept everything encoded.
But the opposite side of the map just held a note, written in Ma’s handwriting:
You might get thirsty on your travels. Why not take some pek-pek with you?
Blast. That didn’t help. It was also a code, just a lot simpler than the one in Tangra juice. No one but me and my parents would know that as a kid, I pronounced the word for a brand of soda like peksi and that, over the years, the word had become pek-pek in our family.
I explained that to Neel, who wasn’t that amused by my childhood anecdote. “Your Ma wanted to make sure no one else could follow the map to Maya Pahar,” he growled, “and she gave you this clue to figure out how to decode the map. She went to all this trouble and you couldn’t bother to bring a can of soda with you?”
“Uh, if you’ll remember, Your Imperial Oh-So-Super Royal Highness, I was a little occupied right when we left New Jersey. I was saving Lal’s butt from that rakkhosh on my lawn, while you, his big, strong half-demon older brother, sat around and did nothing.”
“I would have gotten around to saving him,” Neel countered. “I saved you, didn’t I? Not that you seem particularly grateful.”
“Grateful?” I snorted. “Since I’ve met you, my house has been destroyed, my parents have disappeared, I’ve almost been eaten by a tantruming transit officer, then practically got arrested for stealing someone’s moustache”—I took a breath—“I got beaned with guava seeds by a delusional bird, and pretty near got devoured by your demon mother.”
“And you’ve loved every minute of it,” Neel drawled, finally smiling for the first time in what felt like forever.
The thing was, I kind of had.