Ahmad’s mind teemed with questions, and he had no idea where to even begin. Before he could ask more, though, Vijay Bhai briskly clapped his hands together.

“No use for regrets, though. Now we need to make sure this game stops once and for all. You both need to win, and I need to reacquaint myself with Paheli in order to help you. T.T., I don’t suppose you know what happened to my balloons after I left here?”

“Balloons?” Winnie asked, confused.

Vijay Bhai smiled. “In my day, I was an aeronaut. The skies of Paheli were my domain and my only friend.”

“You—you are the Aeronaut? He is still spoken about!” T.T. squeaked proudly, bowing down a bit, graciously. “Even the new coding couldn’t take away Vijay’s reputation in Paheli! Unfortunately, though, I think the balloons might have been erased. I don’t know for sure, though.”

“Is there anyone else from the old game here?” Vijay Bhai asked. “Madame Nasirah, or perhaps Titus Salt, the old man-of-all-trades who kept up the game’s mechanisms?”

“We’ve met Madame Nasirah!” Ahmad said excitedly. “Did you know her, too?”

“Very well,” Vijay Bhai said.

T.T.’s whiskers twitched in thought. “You know, I’ve heard talk that Titus Salt might still haunt one of these alleyways. We haven’t seen a lot of him since that MasterMind settled in here, and of course, before she arrived, there wasn’t much room or holes for us to wiggle into at all.”

“We’ll just have to keep an eye out for him as we keep walking,” Vijay Bhai decided, and they continued on.

Ahmad remembered some places from his own daydreams, which was a relief. There was a corner of the marketplace devoted to ancient clocks. Not just the European grandfather type, but gold-plated sundials and even a classic water clock from Egypt, featuring a little clay man pouring water between his fingers into a marked barrel on the back of a solemn elephant. As the kids watched, enchanted, the elephant shook its head slowly from side to side.

“That one is more of a display,” the seller told them. “Nowadays, these are the best sellers.”

He tapped his fingers lightly on a round disk, and they startled backward as holographic numbers scrolled upward toward the sky, bumping into one another before settling down to note the time.

“You can personalize as you wish,” the seller continued mildly. “Some of our customers like it peaceful, like this, and others reprogram the numbers to do brief, entertaining presentations as the hour passes.”

“If I had a clock like that, I think it would be more distracting than helpful,” Winnie hissed to Ahmad.

Most of Paheli’s gadgetry seemed to fall under that description: shiny and distracting, but not always in the best way. T.T. made a point of steering them around the waiting cars at the base of the beautiful, glittering funicular rail.