Aru Shah and the Tree of Wishes (Pandava Quartet #3) - Roshani Chokshi Page 0,1

brain. Abandon conversation!

“Let’s get moving,” she said quickly.

Brynne grinned widely, then swung the wind mace over her head. Bright blue light burst from the weapon. A screech of metal tore through the air. Up ahead, the towering wheel slowly began to turn.

“Go!” said Brynne.

Aru ran toward the Ferris wheel—a nearly two-hundred-foot-tall contraption with rotating enclosed booths. Her nerves bubbled with tension as she dashed up the exit stairs and reached for the first inner rung. The metal bars were slick with recent rain and smelled of iron. Normally, there was no way she would agree to climb this thing, but her customized Pandava kicks came with enchanted suction cups on the bottom that promised she wouldn’t fall.

The Pandavas had been preparing for this all week, and they knew what was at stake. Not a single day had passed without Aru hearing about increased demon activity in the mortal world. But no one had caught sight of the person behind the chaos: the Sleeper. Her father. Aru wished she could only see him as the monster that he was. But certain memories kept messing with her head, and sometimes she didn’t picture the Sleeper as he was now, but as the dad he had been in the past. The man who had cradled her. If just for an hour.

Aru faltered, her hand slipping. A cool wind hit her face as her gaze fell to the ground more than a hundred feet below. From here, the lines of streetlights looked like faraway strings of stars and the groups of trees resembled clumps of mashed-up broccoli.

“You okay?” called Mini from the spoke below.

Steady, Shah, she told herself.

They’d trained for this.

She could do this.

“Nope. I’m Aru.” She smiled weakly and reached for the next rung.

Another cold gust lashed her hair into her eyes.

You’re climbing a Ferris wheel, thought Aru. You know who does that? SUPERHEROES. And that guy from The Notebook, but mostly superheroes.

“Superheroines,” she whispered to herself, and reached for another bar.

Quietly, Aru started singing. Her hands ached and her teeth were chattering. When she looked up, she realized she was eye level with towering skyscrapers.

“Are you singing?” asked Mini, who was getting closer.

Aru quickly shut up. “Nope.”

“Because it sounded like ‘Spider-Man, Spider-Man…does whatever a Spider-Man does,’ which I’m pretty sure aren’t the right lyrics.”

“The wind is messing with your ears.”

Mini, who had always been more agile than Brynne and Aru combined, moved past her.

“I thought you were scared of heights,” said Aru.

“I am!” said Mini. “I’m scared of lots of stuff…but exposure therapy is helping. Maybe for my eighteenth birthday we’ll all go skydiving.”

“We?”

“Look, Aru! First closed booth!”

About fifteen feet away, across a slender metallic bridge, was a glass-encased compartment big enough to hold two people. Its red door was shut tight, and the inside was dark. Aru flicked her wrist, and Vajra turned from a bracelet into a spear. Her lightning weapon sent a shiver of electricity up her arm.

Don’t fry the mission, Aru muttered to herself.

The entire fate of the Otherworld was depending on them. Aru aimed at the door, then let her bolt loose….

Bang!

The lightning hit the door’s hinges. The door swung open with a screech, to reveal…nothing. The booth looked totally empty. Mini held up Dee Dee in its compact-mirror form. Its reflection could show the truth behind enchantments.

“No one’s hiding in this one,” said Mini.

Aru opened her hand and Vajra rushed back to her grip. “Onward,” she said.

They slowly picked their way back across the bridge to the wheel’s hub, then hauled themselves up to the arm above. As they navigated the spoke to the next booth, Aru winced at the sound of her shoe suckers squelching on the damp metal. She zapped the enclosure open, and Mini scanned it with Dee Dee.

“Empty,” she said with a frown.

The third was the same: empty. In the fourth, Aru nearly leaped back as a pair of sneakers, tied to a seat belt, dropped out and dangled in her face….

But it was just a prank left over from whoever had been in there last.

The booth’s door swung shut with a heavy thud.

Aru looked above them. There was only one more booth to check. Her pulse ratcheted up. She closed her eyes, imagining she could hear the hum of unspoken prophecies echoing through the night. The air felt colder, weighted down somehow.

“Last one,” whispered Aru.

She rose on her tiptoes to see better, her shoe suckers letting go of the slick metal bridge. As she adjusted her grip on the lightning bolt,