The Chaos Curse (Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond #3) - Sayantani DasGupta Page 0,23

I yelled to the room. “I’d need three tries max in any situation to figure out which of the three keys fit which of the three doors!”

“Please do not mumble, young person!” said a disembodied voice from who knows where. “Please speak clearly and distinctly into the Victrola to halt your imminent death!”

“The what?” I yelled. What in the heck was a Victrola? The ceiling was so low now I was on all fours, crawling around like a baby. A few more seconds and I’d be squished up like all these smooshed-together story threads.

I looked desperately around the room, my eyes lighting on the third door and the record player thing below the dancing peacocks. Whereas it had just been a flat painting a few minutes before, it kind of popped out three-dimensionally now. Of course! A Victrola was what people called those old-fashioned windup record players!

I crawled over to the green door, almost needing to be down on my belly because of the rapidly moving ceiling. “Three tries!” I yelled as loudly as I could into the Victrola’s funnel. “I would need three tries to figure out which of the three keys fit which of the three doors!”

With a thudding screech, the ceiling stopped moving. And then it just up and disappeared, revealing the stretching tunnel again above my head. I breathed a huge sigh of relief. I’d gotten it right! And not gotten squished to a horrible, pancake-like death! Then, before my eyes, the three tiny doors morphed into just one and the three keys changed back into the animals they were originally, just all tiny-sized, like me.

“Well done, Princess,” said Bunty the tiger. “A scholarly achievement!”

“I honestly didn’t think you’d be able to solve it,” said Tuni. “I was sure that was it!”

“I was too there for a sec,” I said dryly, even as the little yellow bird flew toward the closed door and grabbed the doorknob with his beak. It opened easily. On the other side was a humming darkness full of promise.

Tiktiki One just stuck out its tongue and blinked its giant round eyes.

I put the lizard and bird on either of my shoulders. Bunty knelt down, and I got up on the tiger’s muscular striped back.

“Let’s go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky, like a patient etherized upon a table …” said Bunty in a deep, poetic voice.

“Um, could we just go like awake people instead?” I asked, wrinkling my nose at the thought.

“Definitively!” laughed Bunty. “Let us vamoose!”

“To New Jersey!” I cried, my fist in the air.

“To New Jersey!” cried the tiger and bird as we leaped through the one small door and out into the ripped fabric of space-time.

The thing about interdimensional travel that I’ve come to realize is that it’s way unpredictable. One minute I was on a tiger’s back with my bird and lizard friends, leaping through a wormhole in space-time, and the next moment, I was alone, freezing my butt off on the top branch of a giant tree in Parsippany. At least I was me-sized again.

When I’d left the Kingdom Beyond, it was blazing summer. I’d entirely forgotten it was February in New Jersey. Which meant, when I landed in the big tree in front of my next-door neighbor Jovi’s house, the branches weren’t just covered in snow, but ice. My teeth were chattering, and within a few seconds, I was soaking wet. My summer salwar kameez from the Kingdom Beyond wasn’t exactly the warmest winter-weather wear.

I teetered there, looking out at the snowy universe around me—Jovi’s house at the bend in the road, and my own house right next door. This had been what my moon mother had said to me, about Lal being in a tree at the bend in the road, and something about my enemy’s enemy being my friend. I sniffled, my teeth chattering, even as I realized this had to be where Lal had been held captive by that shape-shifting ghost. Even if I had no idea where the animals were, the intergalactic wormhole had somehow deposited me in the exact place I needed to be. I gave my ruby-red boots a little tap of appreciation. Okay, but how to get the trapped prince out?

“Lal?” I called. “Lal, are you in here somewhere?”

Nothing. I licked my numb lips and raised my voice. “Lal? Where are you?”

Again, nothing. How was I supposed to know if this was the right tree, and even if it was, if he