Aru Shah and the City of Gold - Roshani Chokshi Page 0,67

a step back. “What? What’s wrong with them?” She blinked and looked around the room, but nothing had changed since the blue smoke had seeped into them. The flower was still opening and closing its petals. The room was still empty.

Nothing had changed except for how Aru felt.

She kept thinking about her mom’s smile, the feeling of Boo’s feet on her head, the terrible look of pain in his eyes when he’d betrayed them and gone to the Sleeper. Sheela claimed he’d done it so he could protect them, but that didn’t fit with the ugly tone of his voice when he’d told Kubera the Pandavas were nothing more than weak children, not worthy of anyone’s time or attention.

Aru thought again of Sheela’s sorrowful prophecy: You will hate him for his love.

But Sheela was wrong.

Aru didn’t hate Boo. She hated herself. She hated that she missed Boo and pitied the Sleeper. She hated that she wanted to yell at her mom even though she longed for her so much it felt like a constant weight on her chest. She hated that even now—with the Otherworld counting on them, the Sleeper’s army approaching, and Kubera dangling his army in front of them like a toy—she still couldn’t muster the will to fight.

The good guys weren’t so good. The bad guys weren’t so bad.

So where did that leave her?

Mini gasped. She held up her compact to Aru. “Our eyes.”

Aru glanced at her reflection.

Her eyes were blue. As blue as the heart of a flame. And the others had been affected, too. Aiden’s night-sky eyes had lightened to the color of frost. Mini’s milk-chocolate eyes had shifted to turquoise. Brynne’s hazel eyes were a livid teal. Only Kara’s remained the same—a warm, steady gold.

Kara’s gaze flew to something behind Aru, and Aru lurched backward. Vajra transformed into a lightning-whip in her hand, its long coil tensing and sparking. “Oh no,” she said.

Aru felt a storm gathering in her chest as all her fury and hate surged together. There was only one person she wanted to fight right now, and as she turned around, she saw that her wish had been granted.

Aru Shah was staring at herself.

One Brynne. One Mini. One Aiden. One Aru.

But weirdly, no Kara.

The doppelgängers were almost identical to them—their clothes were just as rumpled, their skin just as grimy. They even had the same weapons…only theirs were tinged the same shade of blue as the lotus petals.

The only difference was their eyes, which were the Pandavas’ usual colors, whereas Aru could still see the sapphire sheen of her gaze reflected in Mini’s shield.

It made her feel ill that the thing that wasn’t her looked more like herself than she did.

This wasn’t the first time Aru had been in this situation.

Almost two years ago, a rakshasi had shape-shifted to look just like her. Another time, their rakshasi friend Hira had impersonated Aru as a joke. But on those occasions, someone had just copied her face. Not her mannerisms.

This time was different.

The Other Mini gave the same twitch of her left shoulder that always preceded a fight. The Other Aiden cracked his neck in a familiar way while clenching his jaw and peering at them through the fall of his hair. The Other Brynne perfectly mimicked real Brynne’s roll of the shoulders before settling into a wide stance.

When the Other Aru’s mouth twisted, a shiver ran down Aru’s spine. Her counterpart moved closer. There was hardly twenty feet between her friends and their foils, and the air around them felt burning hot to Aru, as if someone had placed her hand too close to a candle’s flame.

“You,” said Other Aru.

Aru flinched at the sound of her voice.

“You did this to me,” said Other Aru. “And now you’re going to pay for it.”

Behind the row of doppelgängers, the blue lotus was fully open. Kubera’s eye hovered an inch above the petals, its eyelid peeled back as if it didn’t want to miss a single moment of what was going to happen next.

“We have to fight ourselves to get to the eye?” asked Brynne.

In response, Brynne’s counterpart aimed her wind mace straight at her. Brynne narrowly dodged the stream of air. Both girls growled at the same time.

“Okay, you wanna fight?” asked Brynne, her teal eyes glowing brighter.

Aru felt the too-hot quality of the space threading around her, straining tight, and then…

“Let’s fight,” said Brynne.

The thread snapped.

Aru focused all the anger she had inside her, and it exploded toward the line of replicas. “Fall