“You know,” Lal clarified, “an Earth exilation notification, a royal-to-nonroyal cover pass, a tweet from the president?”
“Um.” I closed my eyes as the horses finally landed in a vast canyon. The red-brown ground was dry, without a sign of any tree, bush, or shrub. More bald than our front yard even, and that was saying a lot. Weirdly shaped outcroppings of stone, and a giant mesa-like mountain marked the eerie landscape.
Where were we? Something about the spires of red rocks seemed familiar, like I’d seen a picture of this place before.
“Are we in … Arizona?” I asked when we finally dismounted. I stretched my aching legs. Snowy pawed the ground like he was stretching his legs too.
“It’s the biggest non-wormhole transit point to other dimensions in the U.S.” Neel looped Midnight’s reins loosely in his hands. “Even though the local government doesn’t like it.”
“So what kind of papers do you have, lady?” Lal asked again. “You’ll need them to get through here.”
Why were they so obsessed with my “documentation”?
“I have a birthday card from my parents, and …” I don’t know why, but I hesitated before telling the princes about the map. “Yeah, just the card.”
“A birthday card?” Neel snapped. “Who travels with just a birthday card? How are we supposed to get you past the transit officer without getting snacked on?”
“Princess Kiran will prevail. Have faith, Brother.” Unlike Neel, who looked totally rested, Lal seemed a little tired after the long ride. Not that it made him any less handsome, but his fourth eyelash from the right definitely looked less curly than the others. Or maybe it was that I’d gotten to know him a little better and could see him more like a regular person.
Lal peered at me with a hopeful expression even as Neel continued to scowl, biting his nails.
“You must be good at riddles?” Lal asked.
“Riddles?”
Zuzu’s brother Niko was obsessed with dumb jokes and riddles, and was always trying them out on us, but I couldn’t see why that would be helpful.
I squinted against the harsh sun. It was like we’d ridden all night and landed on some alien planet. There was nothing here. Just rocks. No train station, no airport, no subway platform. Not a soul—animal, human, or even monster. Where was this transit thingy the boys were talking about?
Neel stomped off, kicking red rocks and making a mini dust storm as Lal continued, “Please—you must be familiar with puzzles and logical games?”
“A bit,” I admitted.
“All this way, and Princess K-pop gets eaten by the transit officer because she has no papers!” Neel shouted to no one in particular.
“Chill, dude! She won’t be consumed by the officer, all right?” Lal said in a voice so different than his usual cultured way of talking that I realized how much of an effort he put into his princely accent. But I didn’t have time to worry about that now, because I really didn’t like what I was hearing.
“Consumed? Who’s going to consume me?” Why did the boys keep putting me and consumed in the same sentence?
“No one, no one will consume you!” But Lal was looking worried too. Which wasn’t comforting. “The transit corridor is the place where, in passing from one world to the next, the officer checks your papers, makes sure all is in order.”
“Like the security lines at an airport?” I took a swig from the water bottle Lal supplied. The water was warm and metallic and did nothing to make me less thirsty.
“Oh, sure.” Neel ground a good-size rock to dust under his heel, making me wonder about his workout routine. “If airport officers were ten feet tall and had a taste for human bones.”
“The transit officer is a rakkhosh?” My stomach spasmed. I might have discovered some secret demon-fighting gene in myself, but it didn’t make them any less scary. In fact, all the confidence I had felt last night seemed ground to dust this morning, like the stone under Neel’s foot.
“Not a rakkhosh precisely,” Lal said, “but a sort of an unusual fellow who has, er, been known to eat individuals without the proper documents.”
“He’s been known to eat people? Are you kidding me?” My head ached. It was all too much—my parents’ disappearance, the surprise trick-or-treaters, the demons, the spells, the risk of death and dismemberment at every turn. Besides which, I was hungry and thirsty and had just had a really crappy birthday, all in all.
I felt like the last day had been one of those superfast, upside-down roller coasters at the amusement park. (I actually really hate those—once I yuked corn dogs after riding one. Zuzu didn’t help by laughing her head off.) Only now I felt sick and I wanted to go home.
“I’m sorry guys, I can’t do this anymore.” My voice shook and I swiped furiously at my nose. “I mean, killer demons? Different dimensions? Black holes? I’m just an ordinary kid from New Jersey. I can’t deal with all this!”
Lal’s face softened and he looked like he was going to say something nice, but his brother cut him off with a furious exclamation. “Don’t be such a 2-D!”
I whipped around. “What did you call me?”
“A flatfoot, a ruler, a 2-D!” Neel ground out the words like they were curses.
Which maybe they were, by Lal’s reaction. “Brother, please!”
But Neel kept going. “People from your world think that everything is so easily measured and explained—that everyone’s exactly the same, paper dolls in some two-dimensional universe! Well, it doesn’t work that way, all right? Not everything makes sense and not everything in life is fair. The quicker you figure that out, the better off you’ll be!”
My fear was quickly turning to fury, but still, I squirmed inside as I thought about Neel’s words. Maybe I did want everything to be easy and the same. How many times had I wished my parents would just give me a straight explanation for something? How many times had I wanted them to be like everyone else? And now they were missing, and maybe if I’d actually believed all their crazy stories, I would know how to get them back.
“You can’t just decide to forget who you are because its inconvenient, Princess,” Neel barreled on. “Life doesn’t work like that. It’s messy and complicated and everything’s not always peaches and unicorns. There’s dangerous things out there, things none of us understand. But you don’t just quit the first time you get a little scared!”
“I am not scared!” I shouted. But I was. I’d almost just been eaten. My parents were missing. And I’d just realized my whole life had basically been a lie.
“What do you know anyway? I mean, peaches and unicorns? What are you, like six years old?” My face felt positively radioactive.
Neel grabbed at my dusty sweatshirt. “Don’t you want to see the people you know as your parents again?”