“You still have the python jewel, right?” Neel asked.
It took me a couple moments because my fingers were still numb. Neel helped me struggle out of his sopping jacket, and finally we pulled out the python jewel from the pocket. The light from the magic stone illuminated the dark forest.
I heard the flapping of large wings. Like some kind of a beacon, the jewel had called the horses from wherever they’d been hiding. Snowy and Midnight trod their way through the banyan tree roots, neighing and tossing their manes.
“You couldn’t just have told me to take out the jewel sooner?” I said as Snowy snarfled my ear with a wet nose. “There’s fresh clothes in the saddlebags!”
“I’m sorry; I was a bit preoccupied watching you heal Tuntuni.”
“I didn’t heal him!” Where did Neel get that idea? “He just got better on his own.”
“If you say so.”
“I do.” I scuttled off, shaking with wet and cold, to go change behind a distant tree.
After I was in dry clothes, I felt almost myself again. I pulled out Ma’s map. In the light of the python jewel, we had no trouble reading it. The decoding trick was actually easy. You just had to shine the jewel at the paper, then put your eye up to the back of it, so you were viewing the map through the prisms of the python jewel’s surface. Just like that, the blank sheet was covered with the recognizable symbols on a map.
“Look, some kind of body of water—a sea—separates us from the Maya Mountains.”
I stared at the paper. The writing on it was actually moving. Where, just a second ago, had been the lake entrance to the underworld kingdom was now the drawing of a huge tree. And, if I wasn’t mistaken, there were also two little human figures and a bird next to two creatures that looked like winged horses.
Neel was unfazed. “You are here,” he said, pointing at the shorter of the two human figures. “And the sea we have to cross is”—he dragged his finger not a long distance on the map—“here.”
“And then over the sea to the Maya Mountains, easy!” I slung my quiver on my back.
“As long as the mountains don’t move again before we can get there,” Tuntuni mumbled. “Or if we don’t get eaten by sea monsters. Or catch our deaths of pneumonia …”
“Your secret’s out, Tuni.” I picked up the bird and put him on my shoulder. “You’re not as much of a grump as you pretend to be.”
“Oh, yes, I am!” squawked the bird. But he puffed out his feathers in pleasure.
Neel rolled his eyes at the both of us as he tugged on Midnight’s reigns. “Come on, boy, let’s go!”
We were on our way to the Ruby Red Sea, when something else Neel said in the Serpent King’s throne room came back to me. We rode side by side, but I still had to shout a little to make myself heard over the wind.
“Hey, Neel, what was that other thing you said about my … I mean, the Serpent King? You said he was my dark matter? Is that the same thing as dark energy?”
“Nah, dark matter’s a whole other mysterious force.” Neel clicked his tongue at Midnight, who kept straining at the bit, trying to gallop faster. “In your dimension, dark matter’s the invisible presence that surrounds galaxies. Your scientists can’t see it, except sometimes like a halo around star systems.”
“And that relates to the Serpent King how?”
“Dark matter has this incredible gravitational pull,” Neel explained. “It wants to incorporate everything into itself. Think about how badly the Serpent King wanted to draw everything into himself. Your brother-snakes. You.”
“There is no light without the darkness,” Tuntuni chirped from my shoulder. “No darkness without the light.”
It was the same thing the merchant of shadows had said to Neel. She’d also said that Neel had to face his shadow self but not get pulled into the darkness. I guessed the same was true for me. My biological parents had been invisible my whole life—but hovering around me like a dark halo even as Ma and Baba filled my life with light. And now that dark pull had brought me back to this place, threatening to extinguish my parents’ light forever.
I couldn’t ask anything else because we had already gotten to the edge of the sea. As we landed and dismounted the horses, I noticed there was a long line of colorful barges on the shore of the lapping water, carved and painted to look like peacocks. Neel pulled the barge closest to us in more securely onto the land.
“Can’t the horses just fly us over?”
Neel shook his head, pointing to a sign that read:
PFDBMHNFZ
Then in smaller letters under it:
Pakkhiraj, Flying Demons, Bird Man, and Helicocroc No-Fly Zone
“Another no-fly zone, huh?” I remembered the Mandhara Mountain.
Neel nodded. “Any land mass that tends to move is a no-fly zone. There’ve been cases of flying horses getting trapped in the space between here and there if they’re flying when the land under them decides to shift around.”
“And I guess I don’t really want to know what a Helicocroc is, huh?”
Tuntuni shuddered. “Just be glad, Princess, they can’t fly here.”
Neel heaved the golden and silver spheres out of Midnight’s saddlebags and into the barge, while I packed what food and supplies we had left into my backpack. As we worked, I picked up the conversation from before.
“I don’t get it, Neel. Is the Kingdom Beyond Seven Oceans and Thirteen Rivers some kind of version of outer space? Back in the stables, I think I saw something really weird in your mother’s mouth …”
“Like planets and moons and stuff?” His smile was twisted and didn’t really reach his eyes. “Like I said before, it’s all really complicated to explain. That’s why we call people from your dimension 2-Ds. Most people from there can’t imagine that there are a lot of realities that exist at the same time. That one thing can have multiple forms. That the difference between inner space and outer space might just be an illusion.”
I remembered a Shady Sadie the Science Lady show about how our reality might just be one of many, and that these parallel dimensions might be like a bunch of vibrating strings in a row—each dimension clueless about the existence of the others. But even though I’d heard about it before, it was still really hard to imagine. Just trying to think about it hurt my brain.
But then something else struck me. “So if we don’t get to my parents in time”—I gulped—“they really will get swallowed into a black hole?”
“You could say that. Every time a spell collapses, it gives birth to a new rakkhosh from a well of dark energy. The amount of time that takes varies—usually rakkhosh are born the night of a new moon. And when they’re born …” Neel trailed off. “Well, let’s just say, they’re hungry.”
“So what are we waiting for? Let’s go!”
Before I got into the peacock barge, I hugged Snowy’s muzzle.
“I’ll miss you, Tushar Kona,” I murmured, using his real name.
And then, as clearly as if the horse were speaking to me, I heard his voice in my mind.
Don’t get killed, Princess. I really like you.