Page 12 of Aru Shah and the End of Time

Light washed over her.

Boo squawked.

Aru felt yanked forward. Gone was the mild weather of Georgia. Everything was cold and bright. When she blinked, she saw that she was standing on the large driveway of a sprawling white house. The sun had begun to set. All the trees were bare. And right in front of her was a…giant turtle?

Wait, no. A girl. A girl wearing an extremely unflattering backpack. She stood with her arms crossed, and what looked like black war paint smudged under her eyes. She had a thick pen in one hand and a bag of almonds in the other.

“Are there bees in the Otherworld?” asked the girl. She didn’t seem very surprised to see Aru. In fact, her gaze was a little reproachful, as if Aru had arrived late. “I don’t know if I’m actually allergic, but you never know. You candiewithin a minute of a bee sting.A minute. And I bet there are no emergency rooms. I mean, I know there’s magical healing and all, but what if it isn’t enough?” The girl snapped her eyes toward Aru, her gaze narrowing. “I hope you don’t have a bee allergy. I only have one EpiPen. But I guess we could share? I’ll stab you, you stab me?”

Aru stared at her.Thiswas the other legendary Pandava sister? Descended from a god?

The girl started digging through her backpack. Boo face-planted onto the grass. Aru could hear his muffled sobs ofwhyGodwhyme.

Look, but Not Really

“Your family must’ve gotten frozen, too, if you came here to find me,” said the girl. Her voice wobbled a bit, but she forced herself to stand straighter. “Any chance you brought cash just in case? I couldn’t steal my mom’s wallet. It felt wrong.” She sneezed and her eyes widened. “Do you think I might be allergic to magic? Is that a thing—?”

“Stop,” groaned Boo. “Are you a Pandava?”

The girl nodded.

“Answer me!” said Boo.

Aru toed him with her shoe. “She nodded yes….”

“I couldn’t tell.”

“Maybe that’s because you’re facedown in the grass?”

Boo had collapsed on the front lawn outside of what Aru could only assume was the girl’s house. It was so boring here. Not at all the kind of place where she thought another child of the gods would be. The grass was perfectly suburban. Neat and not so green that it would draw too much attention to itself.

With great effort, Boo rolled over onto his back. Sighing, Aru scooped him up and held him out to the girl. “This is our, um…”

“Enchanted assistant, sidekick, comic relief, et cetera, et cetera,” said Boo. He continued to lie across her palms. “Sometimes the heroes in epics are assisted by eagle kings and clever monkey princes. But it’s been quite some time. The world is rusty at being dazzling, and so…here I am.”

“Heroes got eagle kings and we got a—” started the other girl.

Aru coughed loudly. “Wegot a being of former renown and illustriousness.”

Illustriousnesswas a word she’d once heard in a film where people kept addressing a grand empress. Aru assumed that it meantillustrated, because the empress’s face was certainly drawn on (no onehad eyebrows like that). But important people didn’t seem to take this as an insult. Even Boo gathered himself on her hands, shook out his feathers, and nodded.

The girl shot Aru anare-you-sure?look. Aru shrugged. Maybe it had been a lie to make the bird rally his energy. Maybe it was the truth. Talking this way came easily to Aru. She had done it all her life: looked at something not so great and told herself all the things that made it great.

“I’m Aru.”

The other girl blinked. “Mini.”

“What?”

“I’m Mini,” the girl repeated.

“I mean, I guess youareshort,” said Aru. “But—”

“As in that’s my name.”

“Oh.”

“So…we’re siblings? But not like related-related. Like soul-related.”