The robot lay on its back, deactivated, limbs curled like the dry dead spiders I found in the corners of my room where ayah Harpal was too lazy to dust.

“That was a stupid, dangerous thing to do,” my father said. “What would have happened if our jawans had not found you?”

I set my jaw and flared my nostrils and rocked on my cushions.

“I just wanted to see. That’s my right, isn’t it? It’s what you’re educating me for, that world out there, so it’s my right to see it.”

“When you are older. When you are a... woman. The world is not safe, for you, for any of us.”

“I saw no danger.”

“You don’t need to. All danger has to do is see you. The Azad assassins—”

“But I’m a weapon. That’s what you always tell me, I’m a weapon, so how can the Azads harm me? How can I be a weapon if I’m not allowed to see what I’m to be used against?”

But the truth was I didn’t know what that meant, what I was meant to do to bring that tower of blue glass collapsing down into the pink streets of Jaipur.

“Enough. This unit is defective.”

My father made a gesture with his fingers and the steel monkey sprang up, released. It turned its head in its this-way, that-way gesture I knew so well, confused. In the same instant, the walls glittered with light reflecting from moving metal as the machines streamed down the carved stonework and across the pink marble courtyard. The steel monkey gave a strange, robot cry and made to flee but the reaching plastic paws seized it and pulled it down and turned it on its back and circuit by circuit, chip by chip, wire by wire, took it to pieces. When they had finished there was no part of my steel monkey left big enough to see. I felt the tightness in my chest, my throat, my head of about-to-cry, but I would not, I would never, not in front of these men. I glanced again at Heer. Yts black lenses gave nothing, as ever. But the way the sun glinted from those insect eyes told me yt was looking at me.

My life changed that day. My father knew that something between us had been taken apart like the artificial life of the steel monkey. But I had seen beyond the walls of my life, so I was allowed out from the palace a little way into the world. With Heer, and guards, in armoured German cars to bazaars and malls; by tilt-jet to relatives in Jaisalmer and Delhi; to festivals and melas and pujas in the Govind temple. I was still schooled in the palace by tutors and aeai artificial intelligences, but I was presented with my new friends, all the daughters of high-ranking, high-caste company executives, carefully vetted and groomed. They wore all the latest fashions and makeup and jewellery and shoes and tech. They dressed me and styled me and wove brass and amber beads into my hair; they took me to shops and pool parties—in the heart of a drought—and cool summer houses up in the mountains, but they were never comfortable like friends, never free, never friends at all. They were afraid of me. But there were clothes and trips and Star Asia tunes and celebrity gupshup and so I forgot about the steel monkey that I once pretended was my friend and was taken to pieces by its brothers.