I hadn’t been able to stop my own mind from turning on me.

I pushed myself off the door and crumpled into the bed. The rainbow unicorns on my pajamas sparkled in the moonlight, but for once the colors didn’t cheer me up. I wished I was home with Mum. I wanted the boring, normal things again: eating cake while Mum and I watched TV, feeding ducks in the park with Emily, reading books, pulling out a pencil and drawing any old thing that happened to catch my attention. I wanted my mother to make me feel better. I wanted to go home.

I used the back of one hand to scrub the tears off my face, then pulled my pencil out of my pocket. There was paper on the other side of the room, but I pressed the pencil to the white surface of the windowsill. The first marks were random, but then I pressed harder because the fist squeezing my heart needed something else to crush.

Art had saved me before. Maybe it could save me now.

Why couldn’t it have saved Pip?

A small bird took shape on the windowsill, quick strokes of wings and beak and bright eyes. I pressed harder. A pair of tiny feet.

The pencil broke with a loud snap.

And the bird shook itself free of the windowsill and flew out into the warm, silver night.

21

Astonished, I gawked into the night until the little white bird vanished over the rooftops of Mysore. Then I looked down at the windowsill, where the painted-white wood had been smooth and where now the two halves of my pencil lay in a bird-shaped dip.

Had I just sketched a bird to life? Yes, I was in a pocket universe that had been created out of my sketchbook, so you would think that nothing could possibly surprise me anymore, but this was a whole new level of weirdness. Mahishasura’s power had brought my sketchbook to life, and I had just about wrapped my head around that, but this? This was me.

I picked up the half of the pencil with the nib still intact, but my hand trembled. A part of me wanted to try drawing another picture, just to find out if everything I drew here would become real, but a bigger part of me was terrified. I couldn’t trust myself. This world was already full of my monsters. Pip had been killed by one of those monsters.

I had broken too many things already.

I tucked the pencil piece back into my pocket. The fist around my heart squeezed tighter.

There was a soft knock at the door. It was Ashwini. Her eyes were red and her face was swollen from crying, but she looked calm. She shut the door and sat quietly beside me on my bed. “I’m sorry about what happened downstairs,” she said. “Lej wasn’t fair to you.”

“He was right,” I said.