Page 3 of Aru Shah and the End of Time

Aru pointed at the stone elephant behind her. “I do!”

“You said that you rescued it from India!”

“Well, Mom said it wassalvagedfrom a temple, which is fancy talk forrescue—”

“And you said you have a cursed lamp,” said Arielle.

Aru saw the red light on Burton’s phone: steady and unblinking. He was recording her! She panicked. What if the video went online? She had two possible choices: 1) She could hope the universe might take pity on her and allow her to burst into flames before homeroom, or 2) She could change her name, grow a beard, and move away.

Or, to avoid the situation entirely…

She could show them something impossible.

“The cursed lamp is real,” she said. “I can prove it.”

Oops

It was four p.m. when Aru and her three classmates walked together into the Hall of the Gods.

Four p.m. is like a basement. Wholly innocent in theory. But if you really think about a basement, it is cement poured over restless earth. It has smelly, unfinished spaces, and wooden beams that cast too-sharp shadows. It is something that saysalmost, but not quite. Four p.m. feels that way, too. Almost, but not quite afternoon anymore. Almost, but not quite evening yet. And it is the way of magic and nightmares to choose those almost-but-not-quite moments and wait.

“Where’s your mom, anyway?” asked Poppy.

“In France,” said Aru, trying to hold her chin up. “I couldn’t go with her because I had to take care of the museum.”

“She’s probably lying again,” said Burton.

“She’sdefinitelylying. That’s the only thing she’s good at,” said Arielle.

Aru wrapped her arms around herself. She was good at lots of things, if only people would notice. She was good at memorizing facts she had heard just once. She was good at chess, too, to the point where she might have gone to the state championship if Poppy and Arielle hadn’t told herNobody joins chess, Aru. You can’t do that.And so Aru had quit the chess team. She used to be good at tests, too. But now, every time she sat down to take a test, all she could think of was how expensive the school was (it was costing her mom a fortune), and how everyone was judging her shoes, which were popular last year but not this year. Aruwantedto be noticed. But she kept getting noticed for all the wrong reasons.

“I thought you said you had a condo downtown, but this dump was the address in the school directory,” sniffed Arielle. “So you actually liveina museum?”

Yep.

“No? Look around—do you see my room?”

It’s upstairs….

“If you don’t live here, then why are you wearing pajamas?”

“Everyone wears pj’s during the daytime in England,” said Aru.

Maybe.

“It’s what royalty does.”

If I were royalty, I would.

“Whatever, Aru.”

The four of them stood in the Hall of the Gods. Poppy wrinkled her nose. “Why do your gods have so many hands?”

The tops of Aru’s ears turned red. “It’s just how they are.”

“Aren’t there, like, a thousand gods?”

“I don’t know,” said Aru.