Nobody saw the hand….
Except Mini.
The world went silent. She thrust her own hand into the sky as if she might catch Kumbhakarna’s fist….But instead, something else happened.
A wrinkle of violet light shimmered just above her, hardly larger than the span of her arm. It blinked in and out, and then it burst.
A violet screen mushroomed over the Pandavas, the night mare, and the portal door. Kumbhakarna howled, grabbing his hand in pain after his fist crumpled against Mini’s shield.
He snarled, “WHAT MANNER OF SORCERY IS THIS?”
Energy pulsed through Mini’s veins, and it made her feel as if she were full of shadows and starlight. Her hair blew back as something solid thudded into her palm and caused her arm to sag. Mini blinked and looked at it. Her Death Danda shone like a scepter. Mini grinned and stared up at Kumbhakarna.
“It’s my power,” she said.
She raised her hand again and a violet light streamed from the shield, wrapping around Kumbhakarna and flinging him far away from them. In the afterglow, the violet light fell over her sisters’ shocked and happy faces. Brynne looked slack-jawed. Aru’s eyes sparkled.
More than anything, Mini wanted to savor this moment, but the ground beneath them cracked even more. Loose Teeth whinnied, rising up and nearly shaking Mini off her back. Mini jumped down and hugged the night mare’s head.
“I’m really happy for you, Mini, but we’ve got to go!” shouted Brynne.
Loose Teeth nosed Mini sadly, huffing hot air over her face and fogging her glasses. The mare pawed the ground.
“Good-bye, sweet horsey,” said Mini. “I’ll see you in my dreams.”
Then, with the Death Danda in one hand and power still racing through her veins, Mini turned her back on the dark.
Kara stumbled out of her recollections of the Sleeper and Krithika. She fell on the floor of the dream bubble Sheela had put her in. It looked like the sea beneath her fingers, but it felt like cold glass. Kara’s lungs ached.
Sheela walked up to her and patted her head. “It’s a lot,” she said.
“What was that?” asked Kara.
“Memories. Genuine memories!” said Sheela. “It took me ages to piece it together from everyone’s dreams, but I did it in the end.”
Genuine.
Kara had always liked the etymology of that word. It came from genu, Latin for knee, from the ancient Roman custom of a father placing a newborn baby on his knee to acknowledge that the child was his. From genu came words like genus, like the categorization of a species, and in the sixteenth century it transformed into a word that meant natural and, most importantly, authentic.
Real.
Kara forced herself to stand. When she turned around, Sheela had remade the dream bubble, fashioning it into an underwater glass tunnel with vivid sea creatures swimming outside. The two of them sat down at a fancy white-clothed table set with a full tea service. Instead of a chair, Kara found herself bouncing on a large pink sea anemone.
“I saw something like this in a magazine,” said Sheela, grinning. “Nikki said it would be a good place for a fashion show, but I think it’s way better for tea parties.”
“None of those memories were—” Kara stopped herself before she could say real.
Something told her that wasn’t the case, and yet she didn’t know how to make sense of them. In the scenes Sheela had led her through, Kara had seen Suyodhana as a young man. She saw the prophecy foisted upon him, the way he had struggled in his search for the Tree of Wishes, the final moments when Krithika locked him in the lamp where he would remain for eleven years.
“Why did you show me all that?” asked Kara.
Sheela fidgeted with the end of one of her braids before shrugging. “Because you needed to see it.”
“What do you want me to do?” asked Kara angrily.
“What do you want to do?” responded Sheela.
What Kara wanted to do had never changed. She wanted to do what was right. It was the reason she had taken the astra necklace and destroyed the other Pandavas’ weapons. But now, when she thought back to that moment, she felt nauseated.
Kara had a way with light. Whether it was because she was the daughter of the sun god or something else, she usually had good instincts when it came to telling what was true and what was false. But, unfortunately, that didn’t make the world any easier to navigate.
True: Her father loved her.
True: Her father had lied to her.
True: Her mother had given her up.
True: Her mother had never given up on her.
Suyodhana did love her. Kara knew that in her bones. And she knew that he loved Aru, too. He even loved Krithika Shah. It was a truth he’d let fester inside himself like a poison he couldn’t get rid of. But those things he had said about her mother…and about Aru pushing Kara away…and about Kara being unwanted…all that was false.
“But he saved me,” said Kara.
Part of her thought she was saying those words just to see how they felt on her tongue. They felt sticky. Slimed.
“From what?” asked Sheela, tilting her head.
“A bad childhood,” said Kara automatically.
“Is that what you saw?”
Kara blinked. She’d seen her mother, Krithika Shah, touching a tree and watching Kara play in the large backyard of a low-slung house. A younger version of Kara squealed with delight as she picked up limes that had fallen from a tree. The little girl also gathered kumquats and jacaranda blossoms and piled them in the lap of a large woman whose face was out of focus.
“I was happy,” said Kara softly. “Wasn’t I?”
Her hands curled into fists in her lap. For some reason she couldn’t get past that image. Once upon a time she’d had a lime tree in her backyard, and she’d picked purple flower blossoms knowing there was someone to give them to. A smiling adoptive mother.
Kara should have been able to remember how that lime had felt in her hand, whether it was cool from the shade or warmed by the sun, whether it was fragrant or rotting, whether it was later used for sugary limeade. But she couldn’t remember, and that lack of knowledge, which had once felt like a sweet mercy, now turned sour.
“You’re lying,” she said to Sheela, ice in her voice. “It’s not real. You’re not real.”
If the images Sheela had conjured were true, then…
Then her father was every bit the monster Aru had said he was. He had stolen her memories, but not to protect her. To manipulate her.
Kara blinked and felt the cold chain of the astra necklace as she’d yanked it off Aru. She saw Aru’s heartbroken face, heard the way Brynne’s voice broke and Mini called out, Kara? Wait! No, no, no!
What had she done?
“I don’t know what real is,” said Sheela, looking around them in the dream world.
A jellyfish pulsed gracefully alongside the tunnel. The sea anemone cushions beneath them shaded from pink to a vivid blue, and Sheela giggled.
“Like, none of this was here before, but I believed it and now it is,” said Sheela. “So, I guess that makes it real.”
“What are you saying?” asked Kara. “That the only thing that matters is what I believe?”
Sheela began to dissolve at the edges. Her voice seemed far away. “Uh-oh, gotta go. Nikki’s going to be mad at me. She hates it when I’m gone too long.”