Guilt made my chest tighten, but I said, “I don’t know, I think Ashwini likes being the boss of everyone.”

“Does she?” said Chamundeshwari, shifting her solemn eyes to me. “I think it would be difficult to be thirteen years old, a monster hunter, and the sole protector and caretaker of several children.” Whatever she saw in my face made hers soften slightly, and she patted me on the shoulder. “You did not know.”

After a moment, I said, “Did I mess everything up for you, too?”

“Well,” she said gravely, “I could do without the glitter.”

For a moment, I was mortified. Then I saw the tiny twinkle in her eye, and I sputtered a laugh. “Sorry.”

“You should not be so quick to assume you have, as you put it, messed everything up,” she said more seriously. “Be gentler to yourself, Kiki. You are here, are you not? That tells me you are kinder and braver than you give yourself credit for.”

A few moments later, we got on a totally out-of-place red London bus (the only one still working in Mysore, Ashwini told me) and it took us the rest of the way to Tamarind Station.

Tamarind Station was a ruin. In my Mysore-Before-Mahishasura, it had been a quaint, bright place, with impractical pastel-pink railway lines crisscrossed around it. It resembled a thatched cottage, with far more space inside than it looked like from the outside, and the platforms had all looked like little porches leading out to the tracks. The trains had been just as merry, bright, and red as the bus, chugging their way up and down the city.

In Mysore-After-Mahishasura, the railway lines were buried under rubble and dust, and a handful of train cars stood abandoned on the tracks, the red faded to a dull rust. Tamarind Station was a shell, the straw roof mostly torn off, the stone walls half crumbled, the door gone.

There had been a battle here. I remembered drawing it, remembered the colors. Chamundeshwari and Simha had fought in it.

I stood still for the moment, staring at the station. At what had once been a sunshine thing, now ruined.

But then Ashwini grabbed me by the hand and trotted enthusiastically into the remains of the station, and I gasped out loud.

What was dead and ruined on the outside became astonishingly, brilliantly alive and vibrant on the inside. The old station walls had been painted a clean, bright white, the terra-cotta tiles on the floor gleamed, and hundreds of sparkling orbs of bottled sunlight floated above our heads. There were stalls everywhere, selling everything from chutney, apples, and rice to distilled moonbeams, spellbooks, and fabric stitched out of stars.

It was too noisy and busy for me, and it kind of hurt my head, but it was also incredible to see how alive this city still was.

“Over there,” Ashwini whispered in my ear, bouncing up and down with excitement. “See that stall? They must be from the Witches’ Guild!”