Aiden raised Shadowfax to his eye and snapped a couple of pictures. “I don’t see anything nearby. No buildings, no signs—”
“HEY! Why are you kids holding up the line?” demanded someone a few steps away. It was a very tiny pale-skinned woman with flames for hair wearing what looked like chain mail made out of Q-tips. “Keep it moving! You’re not the only ones hoping for a last chance at stardom!”
Stardom?
Brynne, still dizzy and frowning, pushed Aru forward with a vague grunt. Aru glanced at the front of the line. It was moving very fast. Before, it had seemed like they were smushed against strangers. But now the lizard-faced creature with the headdress was a hundred feet away.
The Potatoes jogged to catch up, rounding the bend in the wall until a structure came into view. Aru blinked. On the other side of the wall loomed a glass pavilion. Animals made of smoke—leaping fish, soaring eagles, and prancing horses—circled its cupola, and from within came a dull thrum of music. But the glass was frosted, so there was no way to see inside.
“Definitely enchanted,” said Rudy, holding up a hand. “It’s like some kind of…music venue, I think.”
“A music venue?” repeated Aru. “In the middle of nowhere? Why would they even have that?”
“Where’s the labyrinth?” asked Mini, biting her lip. “I really messed up, didn’t I?”
Aru wanted to say a comforting word to her sister, but someone started yelling at them from the back.
“KEEP MOVING OR I WILL ROAST YOU!”
Aru spun around, a retort ready to fly off her tongue, only to see that the being talking to her was, in fact, a living column of flame. Who happened to be ten feet tall. Aru changed her mind.
“Yeah, okay, let’s go,” said Aru, hustling forward.
The line moved so fast there was no time for the Potatoes to chat. Every now and then they would hear an ear-piercing screech or a deep, bellowing sob from the front of the line, but things quieted down as they got closer. The mirrored wall faded away. A new part of the structure became visible: a big red door that floated a foot off the ground.
Beside it stood a very bored-looking yaksha. He was short and skinny, with mint-green skin and mossy patches above his pointed ears. He wore a white T-shirt with holes in it, a pair of distressed leather pants, and an elaborate brocade sherwani atop it all. A pair of glowing sunglasses was perched on his bulbous nose above an unsmiling mouth. On the other side of the green yaksha was the curtained entrance to the massive tent. From where Aru stood it was still hard to see much inside, but through a crack she could just make out a field. Dark shapes moved on the other side of the glass wall.
“Yeah, listen, you’re, like, the seventh person to tell us that you’re really good at the ukulele,” the green yaksha was saying. He was speaking to a small band of vanaras at the front of the line. They were wearing palm fronds and banana leaves and carrying a variety of musical instruments.
Their leader, who was clutching a bagpipe to his chest, started to weep. “But we’ve been practicing for years!” he said. “We just want one chance to perform on the Final Stage!”
The yaksha yawned. “No.”
“Please! Think of my family!” said the leader, thrusting a photo at the yaksha’s face. “What will I tell my son?”
“Sir, this is a cat.”
“WELL, IT’S THE CLOSEST I HAVE TO OFFSPRING….”
“Next,” said the yaksha in a bored voice.
“We can do a great rendition of Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene.’ Just give us one more chance—”
The red door lurched forward. It swung open and the band disappeared into it with a yelp. All that was left of them was a single photograph drifting onto the sand. In it, a very fat orange cat in a Santa hat was sitting on a chair. It did not look happy.
Now the lizard-faced creature with the green headdress swanned forward, allowing Aru to get a better look past the entrance. Inside was a wide mowed field of grass at least twice the size of a football stadium. Bleachers lined the sides of the pavilion, and in the center was a rectangular stage made of glimmering crystal. Floating directly above it was another door, this one purple and faded around the edges. Curls of smoke seeped from it and combined to form fantastical winged horses and narwhals that twisted in the air.
Brynne peered over Aru’s shoulder, scowling. “I recognize that door from the World Elephant platform,” she said. “But it’s not the one the Sun Jewel picked.”
“I think it was right next to the labyrinth door,” whispered Mini. Her gaze darted to the yaksha, who was less than ten feet away from them and locked in some kind of argument with the reptile-faced person. “So we can’t be too far away from where we’re supposed to be, right? It’s like Sheela said—”
“Near the labyrinth and backward?” said Aru, repeating what their sister had mentioned in the astral plane.
“What if we can’t find the door to the labyrinth in time?” asked Mini, her pitch going up a notch. “Should we just take that one? How? What are we going to—”
“NEXT!” bellowed the mint-green yaksha.
The lizard-faced creature had vanished. Beside the yaksha, the red exit door swelled, then flattened. As if it had burped after devouring something.
A single pink feather twirled in the air.
Aru gulped. That did not bode well.
“Hi,” she said, taking a step toward the yaksha.
She darted a look at her sisters and then at the floating purple door above the stage. How exactly was she supposed to ask for directions to the labyrinth?
“Well?” asked the yaksha, tapping his foot. “What’s your talent? And don’t tell me ukulele. I’ve had, like, a hundred of those. And if you start off by saying you were ‘great in marching band,’ I’ve got news for you, kid—you weren’t.”
Aru frowned. First of all, she wasn’t even in marching band! There’d been an incident with a trombone and, well, Aru had been “encouraged” to try a different extracurricular activity. She was still bitter about it.
“Um, do we need to have a talent to go inside?” piped up Mini. “It’s just that we were hoping to enter the, um, labyrinth—”
The yaksha lowered his sunglasses. His eyes were the color of rocks at the bottom of a river, and the look he gave them was just as cool and indifferent.
“And you are?” The yaksha sneered at Mini.
Behind Aru, Rudy seemed to puff up in indignation, but Aiden elbowed him sharply.
“The only ones who get access”—the yaksha emphasized the word by waggling his fingers and glaring at them—“to the Final Stage are the artists who are deemed worthy of performing upon it. And just to have the honor of auditioning, one must be wildly talented! And even then, the door may not open. It requires the presence of true genius! True je ne sais quoi—”
The Sun Jewel will open the door for us! thought Mini through their mind link.
I could easily blast us up to it with Gogo in hand, said Brynne.
Aru grinned, hope sparking in her ribs. They could do this! They just had to get through the talent-whatever.
“We’ll do it,” said Aru loudly.
The yaksha snorted. “My dear, thousands have tried to get past the first round and failed. Do you think you’re the only one eager to perform on the stage of the apocalypse? When the great Lord of Destruction dances and obliterates existence, we intend to join him in that dance! And we’re not going to have some two-bit performers ruining the end of the world!”