Game of Stars Read online

  To the diaspora-born—

  you who straddle universes, code switch effortlessly,

  zip between dimensions as if on a comet’s back.

  And to my son and daughter—

  born in a new place, a new time, who belong to the world

  and who are my world, my galaxy, my multiverse.

  You are the heroes we have been waiting for.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: A Demoness in My Room

  Chapter 2: Heroes and Monsters

  Chapter 3: The Application Ambassadors

  Chapter 4: Gold and Platinum Rain

  Chapter 5: Essence-Tyme

  Chapter 6: The Underwater Fortress

  Chapter 7: Demon School Dropout

  Chapter 8: The Secret of the Gardening Shed

  Chapter 9: An Auto Rikshaw in Space

  Chapter 10: Who Wants to Be a Demon Slayer?

  Chapter 11: The Password

  Chapter 12: The Order of the Magical Banana

  Chapter 13: The Owl and Monkey Princes

  Chapter 14: The Pink-Sari Skateboarders

  Chapter 15: Princess Demon Slayer

  Chapter 16: Ms. Twinkle Chakraborty’s Talk Show

  Chapter 17: The First Test

  Chapter 18: The Instructional Video

  Chapter 19: Mission Ridiculous

  Chapter 20: Demonic Dentistry

  Chapter 21: The Flying Fangirls Revisited

  Chapter 22: A Demonologist of the Highest Caliber

  Chapter 23: A Prisoner Parade

  Chapter 24: The Honey-Gold Ocean of Souls

  Chapter 25: The Second Test

  Chapter 26: Rescuing My Prince

  Chapter 27: The Arena

  Chapter 28: The Truth about a Prince

  Chapter 29: The Final Test

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Sayantani Dasgupta

  Copyright

  The first time the Demon Queen appeared in my bedroom, I tried to decapitate her with my solar system night-light.

  I was fast asleep, but got woken up by the freaky sound of buzzing. Then I smelled that rancid, belchy, acidy odor I’d come to associate with the rakkhoshi during my adventures in the Kingdom Beyond Seven Oceans and Thirteen Rivers last fall. As soon as I opened my eyes, I saw her outline: pointy crown on her giant head, sharp horns peeking through her dark hair, and evil talons reaching from her long arms. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, the demoness had with her some giant, evil-looking bees.

  I reached for my magic bow and quiver under my bed, but when my hand came up empty, I remembered I’d left them in my locker at school. So instead, I laced my fingers through the plastic rings of Saturn, yanked my old night-light from the socket, and spun the entire solar system like a flying discus right at the Rakkhoshi Rani’s head.

  Unfortunately, the sun and orbiting planets never managed to hit her. To my shock, the plastic solar system just sailed through her see-through, sari-clad body, crashing on the front of my Princess Pretty Pants™ dresser, part of the disgustingly princess-themed bedroom set my parents bought me when I was, like, six.

  “Honestly, Moon Girl! Is that any way to greet the mother of an old friend?” The rakkhoshi’s fangs glinted in the moonlight that streamed through my curtainless windows. As she spoke, bees flew out of her mouth as if carrying her words on their wings. She stretched her clawlike hand toward the fallen night-light, making the plastic explode with a bang.

  “Stop that!” I ran out of bed, throwing my bedside glass of water on the place my bubble gum–pink carpet was burning. It did basically nothing to squelch the flames, though. I backed off super quick as the bees swarming around the demoness’s head seemed to speed up their swirly flying patterns.

  “You’re going to burn the whole house down!” The smell of melting plastic gagged me as Mercury and Venus started ooblecking right before my eyes.

  “Spoilsport!” the Demon Queen drawled. But she did lean over and breathe an icy gust of wind onto the burning planets—a little mini hailstorm—leaving a charred and smelly solar system on my bedroom floor.

  The thing is, being a hero always seems so awesome in the movies. It’s all finding your inner bravery and embracing your destiny, fighting monsters and saving the innocent. If you’re lucky, you get your own theme song, a wisecracking sidekick animal, or a bunch of heroic friends helping you on your spectacular adventures. But that wasn’t the way it worked out for me.

  Last Halloween, when I discovered that I wasn’t just an ordinary middle schooler from Parsippany, New Jersey, but an interdimensional Indian princess destined to fight demons and monsters (as my parents had hinted at my whole life), I thought I had it made in the shade. I’d always had an allergy to traditional tutu-and-tiara-type princesses, like the nauseatingly sweet Princess Pretty Pants™ franchise, but as it turned out, being a warrior princess was something I could hang with. I figured I’d be going out on weekly demon-butt-kicking adventures with my talking bird sidekick, Tuntuni, and my new posse of friends—the half brothers Prince Lal and Prince Neel and my adopted cousin, Mati. I didn’t even mind not having a theme song. Not too much, anyway.

  But when I got back to New Jersey from the Kingdom Beyond Seven Oceans and Thirteen Rivers, there were absolutely no heroic perks. I had to keep my identity a secret, make up a bunch of homework I’d missed, and go back to my boring life avoiding the school mean girl, Jovi, and doing stockroom inventory at my parents’ convenience store. There was no glory, no fan club, no me-shaped action figure with bendy arms and karate-kick legs. (I was really hoping for a me-shaped action figure with bendy arms and karate-kick legs.) And worst of all, my new friends from the Kingdom Beyond had stone-cold dropped me like I was a demon with bad breath. I knew intergalactic cell service was crapola at best—but my friends hadn’t visited or sent a message by flying horse or anything. For months.

  So when Neel’s mom, the Demon Queen, started visiting me in my sleep, I figured my feelings about getting dumped by my friends must have something to do with it. It was a weird, recurring nightmare, that was all. A weird, recurring nightmare in which I was visited in my suburban New Jersey bedroom by a flesh-eating rakkhoshi monster and her personal swarm of venomous insects. No biggie.

  “You’re not real,” I told the flesh-eating rakkhoshi monster. “You’re not really here.”

  “Oh, I’ll give you such a tight slap, you dubious dullard!” The Demon Queen rubbed her hand on her chest and shot some bees out of her nose. “I’ll tell you what is real—this heartburn! This esophageal reflux! I’d give my left fang for a chewable antacid!”

  “This isn’t happening.” I blinked my eyes, trying to wake myself up. “I’m imagining this.”

  The demoness belched. Loudly. The bees buzzed even louder. “Loonie-Moonie, you don’t have enough imagination to conjure the likes of me!”

  Hoping to catch her off guard, just in case I was wrong about the whole being-a-nightmare thing, I launched myself at the rakkhoshi with a ferocious yowl. But she just yawned and let me go flying right through her vaporous form.

  I slammed into my dresser, hitting my head hard on a tiara-shaped drawer knob. “I knew you weren’t real!”

  “Oh, fie on your underdeveloped cranium, you pea-brained tree goat!” The queen picked her teeth with a long nail. “Listen up, I have something important to tell you. It’s a matter of life and death. About …”

  “What?” I prompted from the floor.

  “Oof!” The demoness made a choking sound, grabbing at her throat like she wasn’t getting enough air. “Oof! Eesh!”

  Her image flickered, like she was a broken mov
ie reel. The bees swooped around her. And then they all disappeared.

  It went on like this, night after night. The Rakkhoshi Rani showing up in her smelly-but-see-through form along with her insect minions, first insulting me, then trying to tell me something but being stopped by some invisible force. Then she’d disappear.

  “Underwater fortress,” she said one night.

  “Winged key,” she managed the next.

  “Just one breath,” she said another time.

  Buzz, buzz, said the bees, zooming in and around the Demon Queen’s lips and hair. Yeesh, they gave me the creepy-crawlies. And I’m saying that as someone who’s been trapped in an underwater serpent cavern with a bunch of slimy evil snakes.

  If the demoness were real, I would have guessed this was all some kind of trick. But since she obviously couldn’t be, I could only conclude I should stop sneaking so many chocolate chip cookies before bedtime. Because, wowza, was this a super-weird dream. Every time we got to the part where she wanted to tell me her secret, the rakkhoshi would open her mouth and flap her lips. She would claw at her throat. Her mouth would move, but only bees would come out—no sound. Eventually, her image would flicker and fade altogether.

  The closest she got to telling me her secret was one night when she managed to tell me some kind of riddle poem that made absolutely no sense when I first heard it:

  Elladin, belladin, Milk-White Sea

  Who seeks immortality?

  Jewels, stars, eternity

  Life and death in balance be

  My heart in chains where my soul sings

  The prison key a bee’s wings

  With father’s tooth, you crack the case

  Humility must wash your face

  Fire, water, air, and land

  Rakkhosh-kind will lend a hand

  Without the dark, the light will fail

  Heroes and monsters both will rail

  Elladin, belladin, Honey-Gold Sea

  Who seeks immortality?

  “What is all that supposed to mean? What’s that ‘elladin, belladin’ stuff anyway?”

  “Oh, this pancreatic pain! This gaseous gallbladder!” the Queen groaned. “Try to listen between the lines, khichuri-brain!”

  “I’m trying!” It was hard to win an argument with a figment of my imagination. “If I figure out your riddle, will you leave me alone?”

  “Oh, the intestinal agony of your stupidity!” The rakkhoshi grew so big, her crown grazed my ceiling. She blew green smoke out of her ears and nose, and bee-burped like she was lactose intolerant and had just eaten a cheesy burrito chased by a dozen milkshakes. “This is all the fault of that idiot-boy Lal! And Sesha, that snaky loser! Most of all my ex-husband, that pathetic excuse for a Raja!”

  The Demon Queen was so upset it reminded me of something my best friend, Zuzu, and I had read in one of her oldest sister’s cheesy self-help books, the one called Healing Your Broken Heart Chakra: A 17.5-Step Guide. (Zuzu’s sister Athena had a lot of books like this because she had a lot of experience getting her heart broken. She was practically a professional.)

  “So, are you just a manifestation of my angry subconscious telling me I need to bear witness to my … er … emotional isolation?” I asked, trying to remember the words from the book.

  “Bear whoziwhat?” Neel’s mom yelled. “Don’t give me your touchy-feely psychobabble, you pathetic puppy from Parsippany! Oh, I knew it was a mistake to come to you, you dim-witted moon reptile of a chit! You just can’t understand how much depends on you, can you?”

  “Of course I can’t understand! Because you’re. Not. Real!” I shouted so loud I actually woke myself up.

  Coming back from the bathroom, though, I couldn’t help but stare at the dents in the ceiling, the flakes of plaster on the foot of my bedspread, the half-melted solar system on my dresser, and the charred spot on my carpet. Plus, my bedroom smelled all gassy, like it was at the receiving end of an exhaust vent straight from a garbage dump.

  But that was all just my middle-of-the-night imagination. Maybe some cookie-induced sleepwalking. And a night-light so old and decrepit it had just spontaneously combusted. And the smell was probably a combination of melted plastic and some nasty gym clothes that I’d forgotten to wash. Or so I tried to convince myself.

  But the thing about subconscious dreams that aren’t actually subconscious dreams? Eventually, they come back to bite you in the chocolate chip.

  The Rakkhoshi Queen had been visiting my dreams for weeks, when my mother startled me one Sunday evening, screaming bloody murder. “Kiranmala! Come quick!”

  My nerves were a little jangled already, what with all the middle-of-the-night visits from a flesh-eating demoness. So when I heard my mother yell, I couldn’t help but imagine the worst. I sprinted from my room and down the shallow steps of the split level, grabbing my father’s old cricket bat from the front closet.

  “Take that, you fieeeeeeeeeeend!” I shrieked as I dashed into the living room, swinging the flat bat in a huge arc.

  If not the Rakkhoshi Queen, I at least expected to find a snot-trailing rakkhosh in the middle of attacking my parents; some kind of bloodthirsty demon snacking on their limbs in the hopes of using their bones as toothpicks. But instead, what I found was a smiling Baba, fiddling with what looked like a small spaceship. Ma, who was closer to the doorway, got the brunt of my attack. Luckily, I didn’t actually hit her, but I did knock the aluminum tray she was holding clean out of her hands. The sugary desserts she had obviously just made went flying everywhere, one beaning me wetly on the forehead.

  “Darling?” My parents’ shock kind of took the wind out of my heroic sails.

  “Sorry!” I swiped at my sticky forehead, then scrabbled around, helping Ma pick up the smushed desserts. “I guess I’m a little tense. What with our history of intergalactic demon break-ins and everything.”

  “Don’t worry, sweetheart,” said Ma, slapping Baba’s hand away as he tried to eat another one of the fluffy white desserts that had fallen on the floor. “There are more chomchoms where that came from! I’ve been trying out a new recipe!”

  I didn’t need to look at the February calendar to know that Ma was planning for me to take these treats to school on Valentine’s Day. From the drippy rasagollas and sandesh she handed out to unsuspecting trick-or-treaters on Halloween, to the turkey curry and cranberry chutney she made on Thanksgiving, Ma was the queen of fusion holiday celebrations. No matter how many times I explained to her that I was too old to take valentines to school, or that drippy Bengali sweets weren’t meant to be put into heart-shaped envelopes, it wouldn’t matter. Best ignore the issue for now.

  “Why were you screaming anyway?” I asked as Ma finished sponging off the sticky spots from the carpet. “I thought you were in trouble!”

  “We wanted to let you know that the Thirteen Rivers satellite company finally sent the new intergalactic remote!” Baba waved the spaceship thing with all its levers, buttons, and weird-looking gears. “We can watch the news from the Kingdom Beyond again!”

  My parents may have immigrated to a new dimension, but that was no reason, in their minds, for all of us not to stay up-to-date on the latest news, weather, and sports from the Kingdom Beyond Seven Oceans and Thirteen Rivers. Especially now that I knew the secret of our origins. But that wasn’t the reason Baba’s announcement made me smile.

  As if he was reading my mind, my father said, “Perhaps we will see some of your Kingdom Beyond friends on the television! It has been a while since they have been in touch, hasn’t it?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” I tried to sound like I didn’t care as I settled on the sofa between my parents. “I’m sure they’re just busy.”

  “But you must be wanting to know how the handsome Prince Neelkamal is doing!” Ma waggled her eyebrows in a totally ridiculous way.

  “No,” I sputtered, even as I felt my face heat up. “Why do you say that?”

  “At your age, you are going to be having many new types
of feelings,” Ma singsonged. “Maybe we should talk about what happens when you are on the wandering path of your girlhood, and then suddenly blossoming into the garden of your womanhood …”

  In the movie version of my life, this is the moment that the action would come to a record-scratching halt, and I would look directly at the camera and make a wry confession. Like, *screech*

  Okay, fine. Maybe I had spent the most time with the half demon Prince Neelkamal when I was in the Kingdom Beyond. And maybe Neel was the one who had promised to sneak across a wormhole to go to the movies with me, and maybe I even kind of, not really, well, maybe, just possibly, like-liked him. But there was absolutely no reason to admit any of that out loud. I mean, this wasn’t one of those celebrity heartthrobs Zuzu and I looked up on websites like Cute Boys Wear Lederhosen Too. (Really, who doesn’t like pictures of famous dudes wearing suspender shorts while yodeling?) But what I felt about Neel had no high-pitched goat singing involved. It was real life. And that made it weird, if not downright scary.

  Plus, I so did not need to hear my mother talk about womanhood and feelings and blossoming. I mean, gag. The imaginary movie action resumed with me saying, “I know, Ma! I know what happens. The blossoming. The garden. Everything. I don’t need to talk about this.”

  “Don’t need to talk about what?” Baba hadn’t been listening, as he’d been polishing off a few more chomchoms. He was also distracted by the complicated remote, which seemed to be making some rattling noises, and also smoking a little.

  “Our princess is growing up.” Ma wiped a tear from her eye with the corner of her sari.

  “No I’m not!” My voice squeaked a little embarrassingly.

  “From the moment we found you in that clay pot, floating down the River of Dreams, and adopted you, I knew this day would come.” Ma sniffed in a proud way that made me want to absolutely die. “If you have any questions, darling, about your feelings, about your body …”

  “You’re having trouble with your bowels?” Baba demanded, entirely misunderstanding Ma’s point. “I’ve told you, sweetheart, fiber intake is very important to maintaining regularity.”