“I guess we have to find a different way,” she said, eyes wide.

We retraced our steps until we found a small gap in the hedges that hadn’t been there before. On the other side was a fork, two paths leading in opposite directions, both turning sharp corners around tall, thick trees so that we couldn’t see where they led.

“Which way?” Ashwini asked me.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “The maze will keep moving, closing off our paths and opening new ones. It’ll never stay still.”

“Then how are we supposed to find a way out of it?”

“You’ll see,” I said, my whole body tight with dread.

“Kiki,” said Ashwini, with certain doom in her voice. “What have you done?”

“I wanted to make it scary. So I added stuff I was scared of.”

She looked up at the sky, probably to implore the universe to explain why I had been foisted upon her.

As we picked our way through the maze, backtracking each time our paths were blocked, my nerves felt more and more frayed, the dread unbearable.

It was almost a relief when it finally happened, when we heard the clicking, skittering sounds ahead of us.

“That is how we get out,” I said, gulping nervously.

They spilled out of the hedges and trees, swarming the path, dozens and dozens of them, each the size of a small cat, all of them clicking and skittering and fixing their beady black eyes on us.

“Mechanical spiders?” Ashwini demanded, appalled. “Are you kidding me?”

“I’m sorry!”

“So the maze will let us out if we—what? Defeat this army of hideous oversized spiders?”

I couldn’t take my eyes off the awful creatures, but I nodded. How had I ever found a tiny spider in the corner of my bedroom frightening? That was nothing compared to this horror I had created for myself!

But, unexpectedly, Ashwini perked up. “Well,” she said, “at least I get to use my sword now.”

With a screech of steel, she pulled her sword off her back and leaped into the seething mass of mechanical spiders. She hacked away at the army, sending spiders flying into the trees and splitting the air with the shriek of metal parts breaking apart.

As she knocked them back a few at a time, I saw the wall of trees up ahead part in half, leaving us an opening beyond the spiders.

“I can hold them off,” she shouted, spotting it, too. “Run!”

Every part of me wanted to run. I could probably jump over the spiders and race for the exit while she held them back. There were so many of them, and several of them had peeled away from Ashwini and were coming toward me, and I didn’t have a sword or bow or even a stick with which to keep them at bay.

But I’d run away and left her behind once before. I wasn’t going to do it again.

So I dropped my satchel to the ground and knelt beside it, scrabbling frantically inside. Where was it? Where was it?