I shook my head. The pressure on my lungs was too much. I was going to drown. I didn’t want to die like this. I had to get air … had … to … get …
With a burst, the tree branch Neel was hanging on to cleared the surface of the water. I gasped big breaths into my lungs.
I breathed.
I breathed.
I breathed.
The air tasted so sweet. I would never take the simple act of breathing for granted again.
The tree deposited us on the shore, its branch acting like an enormous hand. As soon as we tumbled off, the branches kept shooting upward and outward. The banyan’s roots stretched and grew until the entire surface of the lake was gone. And with it, the underworld kingdom was buried without a doorway to the upper realm. Where the lake had been, with its magic door, was now a majestic banyan tree.
Neel and I lay side by side near the tree’s roots, panting.
“We’re alive!” Neel’s eyes glowed in a way that made me feel a little dizzy.
“You don’t need to sound so surprised.” I groaned, trying to sit up. My entire body ached like I’d been through some giant car wash. Except without a car. I felt all vomit-y again.
“Dark energy!” Neel stretched his arms, cracked his neck, and then began wringing out his shirt. “Dang, that’s some powerful stuff in Chhaya Devi’s shadows.”
“Dark what?” My breath was still jagged and hurt my raw throat. My hair was plastered to me, but I couldn’t find the strength to brush it from my eyes.
I couldn’t help but resent Neel, who looked almost chipper now. There was something really annoying about a boy who never seemed tired, even after fighting a passel of poisonous snakes, then getting half drowned.
“Dark energy. It’s the energy that helps the universe keep expanding. You might call it a part of the universal life force.”
That sounded vaguely familiar.
“My Baba always tells me we’re all connected by energy—trees, wind, animals, people, everything.” I tried to get my ragged breathing under control. “He says that life energy is a kind of river flowing through the universe.”
“And that our souls are just a bit of that river water held inside the clay pitcher of our bodies?” Neel smiled at my surprise. “Yeah, I know that story too. They say that when our bodies give out, that’s just the pitcher breaking, pouring what’s inside back into the original stream of universal souls.”
“So no one’s soul is ever really gone,” I finished, repeating the words that Baba had said to me so often.
“Yup.” Neel nodded. “It’s the same idea that governs Chhaya Devi’s shadows. When unleashed, there’s nothing more powerful than the desire of nature to reunite with the universal soul.”
I was about to ask Neel to explain some more, when I noticed the still, yellow body a couple of feet away.
“Tuntuni!”
The little bird wasn’t moving at all. His wings were dark with water, and his head and beak were at a funny angle. Panic sent energy shooting through my cramped muscles. I half crawled, half scrambled over to where his tiny form lay on the ground.
I shook him, calling his name. The poor thing just flopped in my hands. I tried looking for a pulse (did birds have pulses?) but couldn’t find one. My own heart fluttered alarmingly in panic. Where was a phone to dial 911 when I needed it! I started to do CPR, pumping his little yellow chest with two fingers. Problem was, the only CPR I’d ever learned was from a hospital TV show.
“He might be gone, Kiran,” Neel murmured. He touched the bird’s feathery head. “Returned to the universal stream of souls.”
“I won’t let him die! He saved our lives!” I wailed, but then I noticed Tuni’s chest was moving—although very slightly—on its own. I didn’t know what else to do except to cradle him in my lap, stroking his feathery head. His breathing was uneven, now rapid, now stopped entirely. He made a strange choking sound, and then the movement in his chest slowed down even further.
“Kiran,” Neel said, but I ignored him, rocking and cooing to the bird in my arms.
Within a few seconds, I realized that Tuntuni’s breathing had stopped altogether.
No, no, no.
“Kiran,” Neel said again. This time he put a gentle hand on my shoulder.
“He can’t die!” I cried. “He can’t!”
Everything crashed in on me. Being away from home. Inviting Neel’s mom into the kingdom. Fighting that awful snake in the dark. Coming face-to-face with my über-awful birth brothers and father. The ticking clock on my real parents’ lives. My chest burned until I thought I would explode. And then it happened.
I started to cry. Not just cry, but sob, complete with pathetic bleating noises. My eyes stung, my throat caught. And that doorway in my chest that I’d kept tightly shut for so long burst open, releasing everything that I’d stuffed inside. Salty tears poured down my face, mingling with the lake water on the bird’s body.
But Neel didn’t laugh or point or even say useless platitudes about how the bird had lived a full life. How everything would be okay. He just sat there in my presence, letting me be sad. He just was.
And then the most remarkable thing happened. The stone-still bird took a shuddering breath. He stirred, and grew warm in my arms. I watched, stunned, as Tuntuni opened his eyes.
“What should you buy a bird?” he chirped weakly.
“He’s alive!”
“Looks like it.” Neel looked at me with a curious expression. “He’s alive.”
Tuni coughed and sputtered, shaking his soaked wings dry. “Something cheep!”
I laughed in relief. If Tuni was telling bad jokes, he was going to be okay. I hugged the bird to me until he started to protest, and I put him down.
“Let’s get out of here, numskulls!” Tuni croaked weakly. “Before those snakes figure out how to come back!”
“We can’t.” I looked around wildly. “I don’t know where the horses are!”
“You still have the python jewel, right?” Neel asked.
It took me a couple moments because my fingers were still numb. Neel helped me struggle out of his sopping jacket, and finally we pulled out the python jewel from the pocket. The light from the magic stone illuminated the dark forest.
I heard the flapping of large wings. Like some kind of a beacon, the jewel had called the horses from wherever they’d been hiding. Snowy and Midnight trod their way through the banyan tree roots, neighing and tossing their manes.
“You couldn’t just have told me to take out the jewel sooner?” I said as Snowy snarfled my ear with a wet nose. “There’s fresh clothes in the saddlebags!”
“I’m sorry; I was a bit preoccupied watching you heal Tuntuni.”
“I didn’t heal him!” Where did Neel get that idea? “He just got better on his own.”
“If you say so.”
“I do.” I scuttled off, shaking with wet and cold, to go change behind a distant tree.
After I was in dry clothes, I felt almost myself again. I pulled out Ma’s map. In the light of the python jewel, we had no trouble reading it. The decoding trick was actually easy. You just had to shine the jewel at the paper, then put your eye up to the back of it, so you were viewing the map through the prisms of the python jewel’s surface. Just like that, the blank sheet was covered with the recognizable symbols on a map.
“Look, some kind of body of water—a sea—separates us from the Maya Mountains.”
I stared at the paper. The writing on it was actually moving. Where, just a second ago, had been the lake entrance to the underworld kingdom was now the drawing of a huge tree. And, if I wasn’t mistaken, there were also two little human figures and a bird next to two creatures that looked like winged horses.
Neel was unfazed. “You are here,” he said, pointing at the shorter of the two human figures. “And the sea we have to cross is”—he dragged his finger not a long distance on the map—“here.”
“And then over the sea to the Maya Mountains, easy!” I slung my quiver on my back.
“As long as the mountains don’t move again before we can get there,” Tuntuni mumbled. “Or if we don’t get eaten by sea monsters. Or catch our deaths of pneumonia …”
“Your secret’s out, Tuni.” I picked up the bird and put him on my shoulder. “You’re not as much of a grump as you pretend to be.”
“Oh, yes, I am!” squawked the bird. But he puffed out his feathers in pleasure.
Neel rolled his eyes at the both of us as he tugged on Midnight’s reigns. “Come on, boy, let’s go!”