“Oh, yes. This is her world. She is aware of everything that occurs here.”
“So what now?” I gazed up at the prince and bit down on my lip, hoping he’d have a good idea or two, since I hadn’t a clue. “Where do we find them? Where do we go? What do we do?”
But even though I was fully resolved to following his lead, Prince Kanta just looked at me and said, “The journey is mostly here.” He tapped the side of his head, the space between his temple and ear, before adding, “And less here.” He arced his arm out before him, motioning toward an expanse of scorched earth.
And seeing that, well, I have to admit it took pretty much all of my willpower not to groan and roll my eyes, but somehow I refrained. No matter how grateful I was to have him around, there was no doubt he was a bit of a nutcase. Still, he had been through an awful lot, experienced the kinds of things that would definitely end up testing the sanity of just about anybody, and so, with that in mind, I decided to do my best not to judge, which, I hate to admit, was really quite a stretch for me.
So instead I just said, “Um, care to translate?”
Watching as he moved until he was standing a few feet before me, taking a moment to survey the land with his hand pressed tightly against his brow, shielding his eyes from the deluge of ash that continued to fall. Then dropping his hand just as quickly, he snatched up an old, burned-out tree branch from the ground, using the pointy broken end to draw a small circle deep into a bed of ash as he said, “This circle represents you.” He glanced at me, making sure I understood, before he went on to draw a much bigger circle just outside of it. “And this is the bubble.”
I nodded. So far, so good, I was able to follow.
Then after drawing a zigzaggy line that filled up the entire area between the small and large circles, he added, “And somewhere in here are your friends.”
“Yeah, Bodhi and Buttercup,” I said, eager to get on with it, sure he was just about to get to the good part—the part that would tell me exactly where to find them.
“And so, knowing what you know about this Bodhi and … Buttercup.” My dog’s name sounding almost hilariously foreign on his tongue, he tapped the ground with his stick and asked, “Where would you begin looking for them? What would be the very last place they’d ever want to revisit? What would be the place that holds the most trauma—the most anger for them?”
My cheeks began to flush, and I quickly averted my gaze. I had no idea how to answer, and I couldn’t help but feel deeply embarrassed for that.
Sure, Bodhi’s untimely death by bone cancer seemed like the obvious choice, but when I remembered the casual way in which he told me, the way he just shrugged it off and said something like, “But that’s the way it goes sometimes, right?” well, I wasn’t so sure.
I mean, was that just a bit of bravado?
Some big, phony, tough-guy act he put on because he wanted me to respect him and make a good impression?
Had he really been so accepting of his early demise?
Or did that acceptance come only after the point when he could no longer change it—when he was already dead and couldn’t do a dang thing about it?
Because when it came down to my own untimely exit, I fully admit that even though I was learning my place and finding my way on the other side, I still had my moments when I couldn’t help but feel outraged that I’d never, ever get to be the only thing I really wanted to be: thirteen.
The only real, actually feasible, seemingly attainable goal that I’d had was to be a bonafide, real-deal teenager—and just like that it was stolen from me.
But still, maybe that was just me. As far as I knew, Bodhi had an entirely different way of seeing these things.
I turned back to Prince Kanta, my
shoulders lifting as I said, “There was a girl. A really pretty, dark-haired girl. And even though I know it was Rebecca in disguise, Bodhi couldn’t see that. To him, it was someone he recognized, and he raced after her like…” I paused long enough to replay the scene in my head, remembering the look on his face, the longing in his voice, before I looked back at the prince and said, “He raced after her like he really, really missed her. Though I’m afraid I don’t know anything more.”
The prince’s gaze narrowed and darted as though he was alerted to a sudden change in the area, his back stiffening, shoulders squaring, as he said, “Now just keep that in mind. No matter what happens next, no matter where you find yourself, just stay focused on your friend. Do not allow her to get to you. Do not allow her to introduce anything personal. The moment you focus on yourself, the moment you let your mind stray from your friends, you lose.” He looked at me, our eyes meeting briefly before he looked away again. “Can you do that?” he asked.
And even though I wanted to smile and nod and give him two big thumbs-up along with a superconfident reply of Heck yeah, I can do it, no problem—no problem at all!
The reality is, I just stood there and gaped.
The words “The moment you let your mind stray from your friends, you lose” running amok in my head.
Because the truth was, there was no denying the fact that I wasn’t all that great at staying focused. In fact, I had a really bad habit of jumping from one thing to the next. And as far as my thoughts were concerned, well, most of the time my mind was nothing but a big ol’, jumbled-up mess.
But unfortunately, I didn’t get to express those concerns. Instead, I just stood there, wide-eyed and mute, as Prince Kanta whispered, “She’s here.”
And that’s the last thing I heard before I was separated from the prince and sucked even deeper into her world.
14
It’s like, one moment I was standing before the prince like the world’s biggest shell-shocked doofus, and the next I was somewhere entirely different. Noticing how the scorched landscape had made way for a carpet of patchy weeds and rich, red-tinged soil, while the relentlessly falling ash had transformed into a clear and sunny day, allowing me a beautiful view of a pristine blue lake.