Ahmad turned to follow him as he scampered away but glanced one more time at Titus Salt. The man was crooning at the gear in his arms as though it was a baby, tramping over the sand toward one of the tents.

A shudder ran down Ahmad’s spine, and he rushed to catch up with his friends.

“Vijay Bhai, what was that about?” he asked anxiously once they were back out on the main avenue. “What did he mean about the gears and the oil and . . .”

Vijay Bhai tapped Ahmad’s head with his knuckles.

“Just an old man’s ravings, kiddo,” Vijay Bhai said with a grin. “Don’t worry about it. I forgot how unhelpful that old creep could be.”

But his smile looked strained.

In the dark, once they got back to the car, they fumbled in the glove box to find rather lukewarm rotis and perfectly charred kabobs. A gift from Madame Nasirah, no doubt. They pinched off the bread half-heartedly and shared a skewer before nestling together.

They didn’t intend to sleep.

The Minaret would surely sound at some point.

But it didn’t.

Restless and fearful, they stayed awake, waiting for it.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE HISS OF THE Minaret slid down Ahmad’s ear canal like a droplet of water. He awoke, trying to shake it out. He accidentally thwacked Winnie with an errant arm as he wiggled. She shot up, a groan on her lips.

“Ouch! Ahmad!”

“Sorry! But didn’t you hear that?”

Ahmad blinked, feeling disoriented. The last thing he remembered, he had been trying to clear his mind from Vijay Bhai and Titus Salt’s confusing conversation by distinguishing the programmed stars from what might have been layers of the real world—his world. It was unsettling to him how readily he was forgetting the actual sky. Not that there were many stars visible at all from Manhattan, where the city lights outshone them.

He remembered the blanket, and T.T.’s whistling snores, and staring until his eyes ached toward the distant Minaret, willing it to blaze with cold green flames. But now, there was dry earth under his hands.

Also, it was oppressively warm.

He sat up straight. Winnie did too, her eyes wide. They were in the middle of a jungle, bristling with garishly green foliage and tangled undergrowth.

The branches of a tall banyan swayed in the breeze, the pixel surfaces shifting with shadows in a way that made them seem real. There were bizarre trees nearby too, trees with trunks that glittered, as though they were injected with the genes of some deep-sea jellyfish, and had leaves shifting through every color imaginable.

“Great. Just great,” Ahmad muttered, trying to smooth down his sleep-mussed hair.

Winnie’s eyes were wide. “How did this happen? We were in the city!”

“I guess the Architect didn’t want to wait for us to get here on our own time.”