“You don’t know that,” she said.

“We all know that,” Lej snapped.

“Wait.” I looked between them with growing horror. “Why would Brahma want me to do this? He must have known what would happen.”

“Brahma never wanted you to break that eye,” said Lej.

“But he said—”

I stopped abruptly, one hand flying over my mouth. Because I understood, at last, what Lej was getting at.

What if Brahma hadn’t said anything at all? After all, only one of us had ever talked to him.

“No,” I choked out.

“Do you know where she was before the storm?” Lej asked me. “Last night, after everyone went to bed, Simha saw her sneak out of the house. He was worried, so he followed her. She went to Lalith Mahal. She went in, right past the guards, like she’d been there before. And when she came out, he said, the storm started.”

I looked into Ashwini’s eyes. They were dark and defiant, a stranger’s eyes. “You knew what would happen if I broke the eye,” I said. “You knew the whole time.”

And she said, “Yes.”

26

“I’ve never met Brahma,” said Ashwini, letting out a breath as if it was almost a relief to tell us this. “He wasn’t the one who told me about you and the sketchbook. It was Mahishasura.”

There was a dull, painful roar in my ears, the sound of my heartbeat and my noisy brain and the wind all at once, and I felt like everything was being ripped out from under me. Everything I had known, everything I had trusted, was crumbling. She was the one who had been with me right from the beginning, the one who had appeared in London with her gleeful grin and her bravery and her fondness for cookies. She had been my friend. I’d trusted her. She had saved me, and I had saved her, and we’d taken almost every step of this weird, impossible adventure together.

How was it possible that none of that had been real? How was I supposed to reshape everything I remembered and believed to fit this new, ugly picture?

There was a horrible lump in my throat. “Everything you told me in London was a lie. Everything you told everyone was a lie.”

“It was easy to pretend Brahma had asked me to come find you,” she said. Her face was flushed, as if she was embarrassed or maybe even ashamed, but her voice stayed clear and defiant. “Who could contradict me? Didn’t you ever wonder why the tear between worlds wasn’t guarded before you got here, but was afterward? Mahishasura didn’t want you to be able to go back, speak to Brahma yourself, and find out the truth.”

I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t want to believe it.

I could feel the sting of tears in my eyes, but I made myself speak. “Y-you’ve been helping him the whole time I’ve known you?”