So I shoved the knife into my pocket and started to climb.

The ridges of the dome gave me somewhere to put my hands, but the marble was slippery. My hands shook and I forced them still. The smallest mistake would send me hurtling to the ground and that would be the end of me and of any chance we had at breaking the gandaberunda’s eye.

Slipping and scrabbling at the marble, I pulled myself up, inch by painful inch. The wind whipped my ponytail into my face and I had to spit it out of my mouth before I could keep going.

“You’re almost there!” Ashwini called up to me. “You can do this, Kiki! You can fix this for all of us!”

Somewhere else, much too close, I heard the shriek of an Asura. I shuddered and my hands slipped, but I snatched at the base of the statue and latched on just in time.

I pulled myself up and balanced on the gandaberunda’s clawed feet. The statue was silent, waiting. Four stern eyes looked down at me, sparkling in the sun. If I stood on my toes and stretched as high as I could, I would just about reach the golden eye.

“Hurry!” Ashwini shouted. “I can’t protect you while you’re up there!”

I reached for the knife in my pocket and then put one hand on the statue’s chest. It was warm, warmer than I’d ever believed gold could be, and I could have sworn I felt the soft, quiet pulse of a beating heart.

Unable to stop myself, I looked back over my shoulder. Some distance away, hovering in the air, was a huge bird Asura, a mixture of vulture and crane. It let out another shrill cry. As its enormous wings slowly rose and fell, its vicious eyes were fixed not on Ashwini and her sword below on the balcony, but on me.

Wait.

Why wasn’t it attacking me? What was it waiting for?

Again, under my hand, I could feel the faint, persistent heartbeat of the gandaberunda. I hesitated, one hand on that heartbeat, the other holding the sheathed knife so tightly that my knuckles had gone white. It seemed utterly wrong to destroy the eye of the creature whose heart I could feel humming right there under my hand.

“Kiki, what are you doing? You’re running out of time!”

But the Asura didn’t come any closer.

I could still feel the heartbeat, a little fiercer now.

“Kiki!”

I had to move. I had to do this. It was our one chance. I had to keep Mum safe. I couldn’t let her down the way I had let Pip down.

Suddenly, all I could see was Pip in his final moments. His chin tipped up, his face full of defiance, so totally and utterly alive.

He wasn’t anymore, but he had been. He had been so very alive. Jojo and the twins and even Lej, they were all alive. Ashwini, right below me, was alive. And Simha and Chamundeshwari and the other people of this city, and even the Asuras themselves, they were all alive. What did it matter that they had come from my sketchbook? What did it matter that none of this was meant to happen? It had happened. They had been transformed and now they lived, they breathed, they were real. And if I broke the gandaberunda’s golden eye, if I unmade this world, then none of them would be alive anymore.