Page 94 of Aru Shah and the Tree of Wishes

“Now what do we do?” asked Brynne. “I bet the second we remove the shield, the eye will go straight for the House of the Sun, and we don’t know what will happen.”

“My mustache…” groaned Rudy. He patted the single lonely hair on his upper lip. “It’s wilting.”

“Here, lemme see?” asked Aiden.

Rudy turned to him. “Oh good, you can help me, though I don’t know how, considering there’s nothing on your face except—”

Quick as a flash, Aiden grabbed Rudy’s mustache hair and yanked it out.

“OW!” said Rudy, clapping his hand over his mouth.“What did you do?”

“I put it out of its misery,” said Aiden. “And maybe now I can say the same thing for us.”

Rudy glared at him. “You’re a monster!”

Just then, a bright light flared inside the bubble.

“Whoa, what’s happening to Kara?” asked Mini.

Aru looked down to see that the trident, Sunny, had brightened, and glimmering gold strands were racing through Kara’s hair.

“Maybe she’s waking up!” said Mini.

The eye knocked again at the shield. Ahead of them, the door to the House of the Sun swung open. Sunlight spilled out onto the grassy lawn.

“Someone knows we’re here,” said Aru.

Her heart raced a little faster. How would the god of the sun test them? And how long would it take?

She tapped Vajra twice, and her lightning bolt twisted up her arm like a sparkling rope. “Let’s go,” she said.

Aru didn’t know what they would find inside the House of the Sun. A lot of air-conditioning? Floor tiles made from crushed-up sunglasses? Instead, there was…nothing. Well, almost nothing. The palace was full of floating clouds.

It was eerily quiet. Soft, warm sunlight—the cozy kind that belongs to lazy Sunday afternoons—radiated off the polished gold floor. Low-lying clouds serenely glided through the pillared entry hall, and the vaulted ceiling overhead had skylights that opened to a fathomless, star-strewn space. The eye, which had zoomed through the front door, now hovered in the middle of the chamber as if waiting for something.

“Hello?” called Mini.

Aru looked at Kara, still being held aloft by Gogo’s gentle wind. Kara appeared brighter here, but she still hadn’t woken up.

“What if we just, I dunno, slowly rotate her?” asked Aru. “I mean, the walls have lots of sunlight…. Maybe she just has to soak up enough of it….”

“She’s not amarshmallow, Shah,” said Brynne. “I don’t think it works that way.”

Rudy fell backward onto one of the clouds and flapped his arms as if trying to make a snow angel.

“Verynice quality,” he said. “At least twelve-hundred-cloud count. I wonder where they got this. I heard only Airavata can make clouds this soft, but he’s very particular about who gets his product.”

Airavata was one of the vahanas, or mounts, of Lord Indra. But Aru didn’t know that the white elephant knitted clouds. How could he do that without thumbs?

“Maybe it’s a knockoff,” said Rudy haughtily.

“It’s not,” said an unfamiliar voice.

A pair of goddesses descended through the clouds. They both had beautiful dark skin and glowing amber eyes, and each wore a crown that looked like shards of sunlight. One of them was draped in a gown of shadows. The other wore a gown of evening clouds that billowed out behind her. The goddess in the cloud dress had Kubera’s eye clutched in her hand. Aru tensed. Was this the test? Were they supposed to snatch it from her hands or something?

Rudy scrambled so fast to get out of the cloud that he fell on the floor.

“Hello, granddaughter,” said the goddess in the cloud dress as she gazed down at Mini. Then her eyes roved to Kara.