“Can’t we get rid of them?” I asked Mati. Bunty began trying to reason with Muffet, to convince her to return to her own dimension, but the giant girl just lay down and stomped her arms and legs. “More curdsth! More whey!” she wailed. “And none of thath curry-flavor sthuff like lasth time! It’s too spithy!” As for Jack, he was so small it wasn’t even possible to understand anything he said. Tuni flew him up on top of one of the sewing machines for safekeeping and let him keep on with his obsessive jumping over the machine’s bobbin.
My cousin shook her head sadly. “I’m scared, Kiran. I don’t know who’s going to be next. Did you know there’s a beanstalk growing in the middle of the unisex bathrooms? I mean, will I change too? I don’t want to forget my heritage; I don’t want to forget who I am. I don’t want to vanish into somebody else’s story.”
I grabbed Mati’s hand and held on. “I won’t let you forget who you are, my sister,” I promised, remembering that in Bengali there was no real word for cousin. All cousins and even friends were our brothers and sisters; all adults were some version of aunties and uncles.
Mati smiled and squeezed my hand. “I’m sorry we fought, Sis.”
I wrapped my arms around her and gave her a big hug, feeling my heart expand to the size of the growing universe. I realized how small and tight everything in my chest had felt when we were fighting. “I am too.”
Together, we decided to call an all-hands-on-deck planning meeting for that afternoon.
“A council of war,” Mati had started to say, but I’d put my hand over her lips.
“No, a meeting of friends and allies,” I’d corrected her. “No war, no hate. There’s enough strength in our love and friendship.”
We sent a message via Tiktiki One and called back Lal, Buddhu, and Bhootoom to the resistance hideout. Soon, we were all there: Lal, Neel, Mati, Tuni, Bunty, Buddhu, Bhootoom, and those of the PSS who hadn’t forgotten who they were yet.
Right before the meeting, we got some wonderful news. We heard from Dr. Ahmed that the poison antidote had worked! This made our little band of friends cheer and shout. With the doctor’s permission, we all went to visit Naya.
My rakkhoshi friend was weak but awake. She would need a few weeks to recover her wing power, but the doctor felt confident that she would.
“You went back to the past for me?” Naya asked, grasping our hands in gratitude.
“I’m so sorry, Naya. I’m so sorry you got hurt. I’m so sorry for not thinking things through and risking your life.” I laid my head down on her bed, letting her stroke my hair. “Thank you for saving me.”
“Silly. That’s what friends are for, isn’t it? To save each other?” Naya said. “You taught me that.”
Naya was saved, but unfortunately, everyone else in the multiverse was not. Right after we visited the hospital wing, tragedy struck our little group. The formerly tough rakkhoshi Priya suddenly dubbed herself Princess Petunia Pants and started screaming at the sight of the other rakkhoshis.
“Who are they? What is this? Where am I?” she screamed, pulling at her nonexistent hair. We knew then that she was a goner. Another victim of story smushing. Another sign that Sesha was winning and the big crunch was on its way.
Abandoning her camo pants and sari cape for a tutu, crown, and wand she got from who knows where, Priya was even starting to look like a bald version of the cutie-pie Princess Pretty Pants™ doll. Which was, as you can imagine, way disturbing. We left Priya-slash-Princess-Petunia with tiny Jack and the giant Miss Muffet, as well as Sir Gobbet, who was now convinced he was the short, moustachioed sultan from a popular 2-D cartoon about a boy and a flying carpet.
“A whole new world!” he warbled really loud in a super off-key way.
We were so few in numbers that we needed all of our brainpower now, so we even got the doctor’s permission to hold our planning meeting in Naya’s hospital room. Mati opened our meeting with a summary of all that had happened, and then called on Neel and me to report on our experiences in the past, at Ghatatkach Academy.
“We got a glimpse as to why Sesha wants to marry my mom—he obviously wants to use her power to kill the diversity of the multiverse, what he calls chaos, and make all our stories collapse into one,” said Neel. “And we know now that my mom, as the Rakkhoshi Queen, holds the multiple stories of the universe somehow inside of her, that she’s at least partially responsible for keeping the stories of the universe expanding. But we haven’t a clue as to why my mom’s agreed to the marriage.”
I shot Neel a curious look, and he shrugged. “What?” he said. “We don’t. I mean, there are multiple theories, but we don’t have enough, um, data, to know which of them is right.”
“I don’t know about that, Neel,” I said. I saw him look warily at me, so I rushed to continue. “Going into the past, Neel and I learned that even if Sesha was using her, Pinki really loved him, at least back when they were young.” I turned to Neel. “I’m sorry I was so quick to judge your mom. I was wrong.”
He smiled gratefully at me, and again, I felt my heart do that expanding trick.
“What we need is some help,” Mati said. “Oh, look, he’s here.”
“Ask and you shall receive!” a voice called. It was Einstein-ji!
Naya smiled up from her hospital bed. “I’m so glad you received our gecko-gram, Your Smartness!”
I realized Tiktiki One was once again sitting on Naya’s shoulder, swiveling his eyeballs and rolling and unrolling his tongue.
“Two correctly delivered messages in one day! Good job!” I congratulated the little lizard.
“I told you the technology worked,” Naya said with a proud, if tired, smile.
Neel looked wonderingly up at the scientist. I realized his presence was fainter than it usually was, kind of see-through and transparent. Also, all around him, there were little chirping star babies. “Are you using Essence-Tyme, and calling in from Maya Pahar, Smartie-ji?” he asked the scientist.
“We are starting to feel ze beginnings of ze big crunch even here!” said Albert Einstein. “Star babies are refusing to sing! Ze nebula is starting to look more and more like a multilevel parking lot, and ze wells of dark energy are drying up. No more rakkhosh babies being born!”
“No more wells, no more babies!” Naya gasped. “My people—are we to die off, then?”
“If Sesha and ze Anti-Chaos Committee of intercultural villains have their way, we will all die off, even ze serpents of the Kingdom Beyond,” said Einstein-ji. “Ze only ones left after we collapse into ze singularity will be those who have most intergalactic power. Sadly, power has always determined whose stories are told and whose stories are allowed to be remembered.”
Then, just as abruptly as Einstein-ji had appeared, his Essence-Tyme signal cut out and he was gone.
“I guess we’re on our own,” Mati whispered.
I reached out and grabbed her hand. “We have each other.”
“So what can we do?” asked Lal.
Neel raised a surprised eyebrow in his direction. “We? You tired of being Raja already?”
Lal blushed a little. “Brother, I take our responsibilities seriously. But I also know that they are ours together. Not mine alone.”