“Doesn’t really matter? If they find me, they’ll find all of you, too. Crow House won’t be able to protect any of you anymore!”

“They won’t find any of us,” Ashwini insisted. “I’m telling you, I know what Mahishasura’s like. If he hasn’t used a locator spell already, he’s not going to.”

“It would be better to make sure—”

“We cannot go back to the tear, Kiki,” Chamundeshwari cut in gently. “I am sorry. It is heavily guarded. Even I cannot get near it, or else I would have gone, I promise you.”

My shoulders slumped back into the hard bus seat. “There has to be a way.”

“Kiki, let it go,” Ashwini said, her tone both bossy and kind. “I know you’re worried, but it’ll be okay. I won’t let anything happen to you or the others.”

I bit my lip, but I said nothing. How could I explain? How could I tell her that I wasn’t just worried? Worrying was bearable. Even fear was bearable. But the horrible scratchy feeling inside my brain was not.

I knew how to make it stop. I had to go see if my desk and curtains were still next to the tear or if Mahishasura had taken them to track me down. Once I knew for sure that we were all safe—the Crows, Mum, and I—then the Something that was in my brain wouldn’t scratch at me anymore.

And of course I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t go check. Ashwini and Chamundeshwari were right; it was too risky.

So I just had to stop thinking about it.

Any second now.

I was still thinking about it.

“We have to get to the statue of the gandaberunda,” Ashwini was saying. “Everything else is a distraction.”

But we got back to Crow House, told the other Crows what had happened, and let the hours of the day go by, and still we had no way to get to the statue.

Meanwhile, I could think of nothing but my burned desk and curtains. I was so anxious that I was a hazard to anyone who came near me. I tried to help Jojo make a glamour jacket, which would make Asura eyes slide past the wearer, and ended up ripping a hole in the fabric and wasting a whole lot of precious stardust. I tried to help Suki brew more of the freezing potion and ended up spilling some on her foot, which left it frozen in place and forced her to hop around until it wore off. I was absolutely useless in a game of Giants & Gargoyles with Pip, Samara, and Simha. It got to a point where even Lej, who had done his best to avoid me since I’d arrived in Mysore, went out of his way to ask me who spit in my soup.

“You’re the worrying sort,” I said to him. “Don’t you think we should go make sure the desk and curtains are still there?”

“Yes, I do,” he said bluntly. “I also know we can’t do that, so I’m sensibly worrying about other stuff instead.”