the others. Or maybe it was that I’d gotten to know him a little better and could see him more like a regular person.
Lal peered at me with a hopeful expression even as Neel continued to scowl, biting his nails.
“You must be good at riddles?” Lal asked.
“Riddles?”
Zuzu’s brother Niko was obsessed with dumb jokes and riddles, and was always trying them out on us, but I couldn’t see why that would be helpful.
I squinted against the harsh sun. It was like we’d ridden all night and landed on some alien planet. There was nothing here. Just rocks. No train station, no airport, no subway platform. Not a soul—animal, human, or even monster. Where was this transit thingy the boys were talking about?
Neel stomped off, kicking red rocks and making a mini dust storm as Lal continued, “Please—you must be familiar with puzzles and logical games?”
“A bit,” I admitted.
“All this way, and Princess K-pop gets eaten by the transit officer because she has no papers!” Neel shouted to no one in particular.
“Chill, dude! She won’t be consumed by the officer, all right?” Lal said in a voice so different than his usual cultured way of talking that I realized how much of an effort he put into his princely accent. But I didn’t have time to worry about that now, because I really didn’t like what I was hearing.
“Consumed? Who’s going to consume me?” Why did the boys keep putting me and consumed in the same sentence?
“No one, no one will consume you!” But Lal was looking worried too. Which wasn’t comforting. “The transit corridor is the place where, in passing from one world to the next, the officer checks your papers, makes sure all is in order.”
“Like the security lines at an airport?” I took a swig from the water bottle Lal supplied. The water was warm and metallic and did nothing to make me less thirsty.
“Oh, sure.” Neel ground a good-size rock to dust under his heel, making me wonder about his workout routine. “If airport officers were ten feet tall and had a taste for human bones.”
“The transit officer is a rakkhosh?” My stomach spasmed. I might have discovered some secret demon-fighting gene in myself, but it didn’t make them any less scary. In fact, all the confidence I had felt last night seemed ground to dust this morning, like the stone under Neel’s foot.
“Not a rakkhosh precisely,” Lal said, “but a sort of an unusual fellow who has, er, been known to eat individuals without the proper documents.”
“He’s been known to eat people? Are you kidding me?” My head ached. It was all too much—my parents’ disappearance, the surprise trick-or-treaters, the demons, the spells, the risk of death and dismemberment at every turn. Besides which, I was hungry and thirsty and had just had a really crappy birthday, all in all.
I felt like the last day had been one of those superfast, upside-down roller coasters at the amusement park. (I actually really hate those—once I yuked corn dogs after riding one. Zuzu didn’t help by laughing her head off.) Only now I felt sick and I wanted to go home.
“I’m sorry guys, I can’t do this anymore.” My voice shook and I swiped furiously at my nose. “I mean, killer demons? Different dimensions? Black holes? I’m just an ordinary kid from New Jersey. I can’t deal with all this!”
Lal’s face softened and he looked like he was going to say something nice, but his brother cut him off with a furious exclamation. “Don’t be such a 2-D!”
I whipped around. “What did you call me?”
“A flatfoot, a ruler, a 2-D!” Neel ground out the words like they were curses.
Which maybe they were, by Lal’s reaction. “Brother, please!”
But Neel kept going. “People from your world think that everything is so easily measured and explained—that everyone’s exactly the same, paper dolls in some two-dimensional universe! Well, it doesn’t work that way, all right? Not everything makes sense and not everything in life is fair. The quicker you figure that out, the better off you’ll be!”
My fear was quickly turning to fury, but still, I squirmed inside as I thought about Neel’s words. Maybe I did want everything to be easy and the same. How many times had I wished my parents would just give me a straight explanation for something? How many times had I wanted them to be like everyone else? And now they were missing, and maybe if I’d actually believed all their crazy stories, I would know