“I draw things! I can’t stop an Asura king.”

“I’ll be there to help you,” she said. “I’ll be with you every step of the way.”

Uh, what?

“You want me to go with you?” I asked incredulously. “Go into my sketchbook?”

“Of course!”

“Me? The girl who can’t even ride on the London Underground without worrying about the tunnels collapsing?”

Ashwini was riveted. “Really? Are they very unstable?”

“No! They’re fine, that’s the point. I know it’s safe, but I still spend the whole time I’m down there picturing myself crushed under rubble.”

“I’m afraid I don’t see what this has to do with stopping Mahishasura.”

I felt my cheeks grow hot with embarrassment. “It’s supposed to explain why I’m the wrong person for this. I can’t even make my own brain do what I want it to!”

“Maybe not, but you can do this,” Ashwini said firmly.

“How? What can I do to stop him that you can’t?”

“It’ll be easier if I show you,” she said. Then she grinned. “I know you’re scared, but I promise it won’t be as hard as you think. It might even be fun.”

“You have an odd idea of what fun is.”

“Whose fault is that?” she retorted. “You made me.”

“What about my mother? I can’t just go with you to a different universe! What will she think if she wakes up and I’m not here? And there’s no way she’ll let me go if I ask first.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” she said. “I’ve been assured that no matter how much time you spend in the other universe, no time at all will pass here. You’ll be back before she wakes up.”

“You’ve been assured by who?”

“Um,” she hedged. “Well, if you must know, it was, um, Brahma.”

“The Brahma? Creator of all life and the world as we know it?”

“That’s the one,” she said, brightening. “When the crack between worlds appeared and it became clear that I could use it to come here, he told me about the sketchbook and about you.”

“You mean you’ve actually met—”

“Kiki, you’ll get a lot more answers if you just come with me.”

Aside from the (pretty understandable!) terror, I could feel that I was slipping once more into the familiar spiral of obsessive, inconsequential anxiety. Like what if I went into the sketchbook and never came back and then, in thirty years, Mum opened the book for the first time and saw me in there, still eleven years old, with a speech bubble saying HELP! over my head?

I honestly couldn’t believe that I had just spent my Thursday night chasing down a demon in the basket of a purple bicycle, and was probably about to jump into my own sketchbook and be eaten by a monster—and yet, somehow, the thing that my brain kept getting stuck on was the idea of my heartbroken mother discovering my whereabouts via a speech bubble.

Why was I like this?!