I should have been thrilled and relieved. This was no place for a girl like me. I wasn’t strong and brave and glorious like Ashwini.

And yet I found myself saying stubbornly, “I’m not going. Not until I’ve done what I came here to do.”

“And how do you plan to do that?” Lej snapped. “You just told us there was no other way into the palace.”

“Then I’ll just have to figure something out,” I snapped back.

An enormous grin split Ashwini’s face in two, bright and sincere. “We’ll find a way together,” she said, her voice bursting with new hope. “One way or another, we’ll get to that statue.”

Lej looked profoundly unconvinced.

“But first,” Ashwini added, “breakfast!”

8

The path to breakfast involved more absurd hiding places, more thorny leaves and poisonous vines, more stinky farmers’ carts (the one transporting elephant dung was a particularly low point), but eventually, we stopped.

Ashwini smiled. “Look.”

I looked. We were in a paved square, surrounded by narrow streets and a number of tall houses of different shapes and colors. At the very heart of the square, on a perfect circle of emerald-green grass, stood a gleaming marble statue of—

I almost tripped over my own feet.

My face went so red, it felt like I was on fire. Because, well, the statue was of me.

Mortified, I squeezed my eyes shut, but the statue was still there when I opened them.

How could I have forgotten about the statue? It had been a quick, wistful sketch I’d dashed down in my sketchbook on a particularly bad day. It looked like me, down to my long, straight Kallira nose. And the pose. It was the classic superhero pose, hands on hips, feet apart, shoulders back, chest out.

I wanted to be swallowed by the paving stones beneath my feet. Swallowed. Immediately. Forever.

“What was I thinking?” I whimpered.

Lej let out a snorty sound that could possibly have been a laugh, but Ashwini shook her head at me. “Don’t be embarrassed, Kiki. The statue means so much to the people. Until Brahma told me about you, we had no idea who it was. Mahishasura can’t destroy it, you know. He’s tried. He and his Asuras can’t even touch it. It’s like the gandaberunda.”

“Wait,” I broke in, momentarily forgetting my mortification. “Mahishasura really can’t touch this statue? Or the one of the gandaberunda?”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“No one knows,” Ashwini replied. “Maybe because the gandaberunda is the protector of Mysore? Maybe because this world came from your sketchbook? We have no idea. But whatever the reason, it makes Mahishasura absolutely spitting furious. And I, for one, call that a win.”

“That statue is who we expected you to be,” Lej said.

“It’s not,” I said.

Lej raised his eyebrows as if to say, You don’t have to tell me that, but Ashwini glared at him before he could say it out loud.