SO WHAT DO WE do now?” Winnie said, rubbing her hands up and down her arms.
It wasn’t remotely cold, but Ahmad understood why she was doing it. After the MasterMind’s hologram had disappeared, the black mass had seeped down into the ground. They were no longer boxed in, but around them, Central Park was still caught in that horrible, silent stillness. He had the shivers too.
It didn’t help that the doorway was still looming in front of them.
“What else can we do?” Ahmad asked back. “We play the game.”
It was weird, but unlike Winnie, he wasn’t in shock. Instead, all that he could feel was a cold, hard knot of anger in the pit of his stomach. His parents’ frozen faces hung in front of his mind’s eye.
They didn’t ask for this.
And he couldn’t let them down. Not again.
No, there was no other choice. They had to do this.
Winnie didn’t seem to think the same way though. She stared at him with wide eyes.
“Ahmad, are you kidding me? We’re kids. Shouldn’t we call the police? Or maybe someone at school.”
“Like anyone at school would believe me!” Ahmad burst out. His hands clenched into fists at his side. “Like any adult—if they aren’t Popsicles right now—would believe this could even happen. Winnie, you saw the spider. You saw our parents.” He waved his arms around, gesturing to the still life of Central Park. “We don’t have anyone to rely on in this but us.”
He bit back the words that were coming next: “I know that better than anyone else.”
“Ahmad,” Winnie said softly. There was a look in her eyes that he didn’t like: the same look teachers gave him the day before a parent-teacher conference or when, even with extra time to finish a test, he struggled for the right words to write down.
“No matter how we do it, we need to play,” Ahmad said firmly, before she could say anything else. “We need to do this for our parents, and we need to do this for ourselves. I don’t think we can count on anyone else.”
“We can count on each other,” Winnie replied. She reached out and gently pressed her hand against his arm. “We’re going to do this together. As long as you can promise me that, I’m in.”
Ahmad looked her in the eye for a long moment. And then he nodded. “Together.” The word felt unfamiliar in his mouth.
They awkwardly grasped each other’s hands and turned to face the shimmering doorway left behind by the MasterMind’s screen.
They stepped forward, bracing themselves on each other, and looked downward as the wind lashed at their hair and faces—thankfully, free of sand for the moment. There was a small platform waiting for them. Together, they leapt down.
As the wind whooshed hot and heavy into Ahmad’s ears and head, he thought he heard a familiar voice call to him from the stillness they’d left behind. A voice that said, “Don’t go—”
But it was too late now. Because they were falling.
Falling.
Falling.
Longer than they should have been. But then Ahmad felt his feet settle on solid ground, and looked down.
If New York City could see what was below them, it would wither with envy—because the city they gazed at was gorgeous.
The city from the game rose up with elaborate floating skyscrapers that reminded Ahmad of the pictures he’d seen of Dubai. The occasional faint glimmer of an anchorless oasis darted in and out between the unmoored buildings. Laughter bobbed up to them on the breeze, broken through with snatches of songs. There were tunes Ahmad could recognize from his aunt’s favorite Bollywood films and his father’s classic Bengali music CDs, smuggled back to the States under layers of his uncle’s clothing and homemade sweets.
They leaned back into the doorway to avoid a stray flying rickshaw, skittering forward with no visible driver, and a passenger shrouded in gloom behind the thick curtain within its carriage. Ahmad, though, couldn’t crane his head like Winnie to try and curiously ogle the person within.
Not when he saw it.
“No way,” Ahmad said breathlessly, his eyes drinking in the sight of a gilded, glowing funicular rail. It was right in the place where he had once sketched it out on a stray piece of notebook paper during math class. It was right where it had always been in those dreams.
Just beyond it, at the very center of the digital city, was a minaret, tall and towering, glimmering at its tip with a green flame.
Glowing words bobbed just above it: WELCOME TO PAHELI.
“It is my Paheli,” Ahmad mumbled to himself. “But . . . how?”
“Hey, Ahmad, you okay? The height getting to you?” Winnie placed her hand on Ahmad’s shoulder. He hadn’t realized until that moment that he was swaying back and forth.
“It’s not—it’s just—”
Of course, this would be the moment that his traitor tongue started its stumbling routine again.
“It’s Paheli,” Ahmad said again, looking into Winnie’s worried brown eyes. “Not entirely the way I’ve always pictured it, with all this high-tech stuff and the flying cars. But it’s here. And I don’t know why.”
Winnie was silent for a moment. “Isn’t this amazing, though?”
Ahmad looked up in surprise. Winnie’s brown face glowed, that familiar smile stretching from ear to ear.
“It’s your dream world, brought to life!” She spread out her arms and spun, teetering dangerously close to the doorway.
Ahmad tossed out a hand. “Be careful! Gosh, Winnie.”
“Relax. Okay, maybe ‘relax’ isn’t the right word,” she said. “Yes, things are terrible right now. But did you ever think you’d see your city—your Paheli—alive like this? It’s amazing! And it’s yours!”
This was the last reaction Ahmad possibly expected from Winnie Williamson. She reached out and pressed down on his shoulders, turning him back to face Paheli.
“Look at it,” she said, and Ahmad tried to see it through her eyes.
Maybe she was right, a little.
Yes, the domes were shot through with pulsing electric veins and the palaces tugged at their roots and floated up in the air. But it was still familiar.
More alien and weird was the fact that Winnie Williamson was holding his shoulder and he didn’t feel squirmy and awkward and wrong-footed. He felt comforted. He felt like he wasn’t alone.
Was this what it felt like to have a friend? He still wasn’t sure, but he was glad Winnie was with him. For now, that was enough.
“Yeah,” Ahmad said softly. “Yeah, it really is awesome.”
They stared together in silence for a moment. Ahmad cleared his throat. “So, uh, any ideas on what we should do now?”
“Well, we need to play whatever this game is,” Winnie said thoughtfully. “And we can’t do that by just standing here and staring at Paheli from a distance.”
She hummed to herself for a moment, watching as a train slithered through the air beneath them like a serpentine dragon. When she looked back up, there was a glimmer in her eye that made Ahmad suddenly uneasy.
“What?” He backed up slightly. “Winnie, what are you planning?”
“It’s not really a plan. It’s more like following an instinct, and a rule of the universe.” Winnie reached out and grabbed up his hand.
“Winnie, I don’t think this is a good idea.”
“What goes up, must come down!” Winnie giddily cried.
Someone else cried out with her. At the moment, Ahmad was sure it was his brain. It was too quick and too far to tell, anything but the one word shouted.
“Wait!”
And she jumped.
Down Ahmad went with her, shrieking.
Tumbling into the lyrical lights and foreboding shadows.
Hurtling into the canals of both stone and clockwork, the hologram swords that cut through him and slid out as easily as a magician’s prop, and the silk awnings over vendors’ stalls.
Together they descended into the lap of the layered city, Paheli.