“Take me to…the other Pandava.” She said the words breathlessly.

She was right. Words did have power. When she said the word Pandava, all the feelings that came from discovering who she really was uncoiled like a spring jumping to life.

It was not unpleasant.

It was like riding a roller coaster and relaxing enough to let the initial panic turn into something else: Exhilaration. Joy. Anticipation.

She was Aru Shah.

Suddenly the world she thought she knew had opened up, as if stage curtains had been yanked back to show her that there was so much more than what she’d imagined. There was magic. Secrets crouched in the dark. Characters from stories, like the ones she’d been told all her life, were taking off their masks and saying, I was never a tale, but a truth.

And—the thought wiped off her grin—there was also her mom…now frozen with a worried expression on her face. Aru’s heart felt like a painful knot inside her. I’m not letting you stay like that, Mom. I promise.

The door opened.

Light washed over her.

Boo squawked.

Aru felt yanked forward. Gone was the mild weather of Georgia. Everything was cold and bright. When she blinked, she saw that she was standing on the large driveway of a sprawling white house. The sun had begun to set. All the trees were bare. And right in front of her was a…giant turtle?

Wait, no. A girl. A girl wearing an extremely unflattering backpack. She stood with her arms crossed, and what looked like black war paint smudged under her eyes. She had a thick pen in one hand and a bag of almonds in the other.

“Are there bees in the Otherworld?” asked the girl. She didn’t seem very surprised to see Aru. In fact, her gaze was a little reproachful, as if Aru had arrived late. “I don’t know if I’m actually allergic, but you never know. You can die within a minute of a bee sting. A minute. And I bet there are no emergency rooms. I mean, I know there’s magical healing and all, but what if it isn’t enough?” The girl snapped her eyes toward Aru, her gaze narrowing. “I hope you don’t have a bee allergy. I only have one EpiPen. But I guess we could share? I’ll stab you, you stab me?”

Aru stared at her. This was the other legendary Pandava sister? Descended from a god?

The girl started digging through her backpack. Boo face-planted onto the grass. Aru could hear his muffled sobs of whyGodwhyme.

Look, but Not Really

“Your family must’ve gotten frozen, too, if you came here to find me,” said the girl. Her voice wobbled a bit, but she forced herself to stand straighter. “Any chance you brought cash just in case? I couldn’t steal my mom’s wallet. It felt wrong.” She sneezed and her eyes widened. “Do you think I might be allergic to magic? Is that a thing—?”

“Stop,” groaned Boo. “Are you a Pandava?”

The girl nodded.

“Answer me!” said Boo.

Aru toed him with her shoe. “She nodded yes….”

“I couldn’t tell.”

“Maybe that’s because you’re facedown in the grass?”

Boo had collapsed on the front lawn outside of what Aru could only assume was the girl’s house. It was so boring here. Not at all the kind of place where she thought another child of the gods would be. The grass was perfectly suburban. Neat and not so green that it would draw too much attention to itself.

With great effort, Boo rolled over onto his back. Sighing, Aru scooped him up and held him out to the girl. “This is our, um…”

“Enchanted assistant, sidekick, comic relief, et cetera, et cetera,” said Boo. He continued to lie across her palms. “Sometimes the heroes in epics are assisted by eagle kings and clever monkey princes. But it’s been quite some time. The world is rusty at being dazzling, and so…here I am.”

“Heroes got eagle kings and we got a—” started the other girl.

Aru coughed loudly. “We got a being of former renown and illustriousness.”

Illustriousness was a word she’d once heard in a film where people kept addressing a grand empress. Aru assumed that it meant illustrated, because the empress’s face was certainly drawn on (no one had eyebrows like that). But important people didn’t seem to take this as an insult. Even Boo gathered himself on her hands, shook out his feathers, and nodded.

The girl shot Aru an are-you-sure? look. Aru shrugged. Maybe it had been a lie to make the bird rally his energy. Maybe it was the truth. Talking this way came easily to Aru. She had done it all her life: looked at something not so great and told herself all the things that made it great.

“I’m Aru.”

The other girl blinked. “Mini.”

“What?”

“I’m Mini,” the girl repeated.

“I mean, I guess you are short,” said Aru. “But—”

“As in that’s my name.”

“Oh.”

“So…we’re siblings? But not like related-related. Like soul-related.”

Mini seemed way calmer than Aru had been when she’d learned she was a Pandava.

“Something like that?” answered Aru.

“Oh.”

There were so many things Aru wanted to ask. Mini’s parents must have told her about her true identity, because she was—in her own way—prepared. She knew what was happening. She knew that Aru had to be some kind of relation to her because she, too, was a Pandava.