I hadn’t been happy about doing this for a few days now, but it had seemed like the only way. No, it had seemed like the easy way. Brahma had insisted on it, but Vishnu had told me to fight Mahishasura, and that had been too terrifying, too impossible, so I’d let myself believe Brahma’s way was the right one.

I’d had a choice, and I’d chosen this.

But it wasn’t too late to choose differently.

I let the knife slip out of my hand and listened to it clatter down the slope of the dome. Then, with one final look at the gandaberunda, I followed the knife.

“Good,” the palace whispered.

As I found my footing on the balcony once more, Ashwini’s eyes blazed furiously at me. “Why didn’t you do it?”

“I couldn’t,” I said. “I know it was the easy way, but I couldn’t do it.”

“Why?”

Tears filled my eyes. “You’re all so alive. I know you said you were never supposed to be, that none of this was supposed to be real, but it is. I’m sure it would be easier for me if I could just go home and pretend this world was only ever just a bunch of stories in a sketchbook, but I can’t do that. Like it or not, this world is real, and so are you and the Crows and the hundreds of other people who live in it, and I won’t just undo all that. That can’t be the right answer.”

“What about your mother?”

“I don’t know,” I said, a lump in my throat as I thought of her. “I’ll keep her safe. I won’t let them win. I don’t know how I’ll stop them, but I will.”

Ashwini opened her mouth, but then her eyes darted over my shoulder and her lips set in a line. “I told you to stay at home,” she said, but not to me.

I turned and, much to my surprise, saw Lej step out of the window. His face was hard and cold. I had never seen him look so furious, which, frankly, was saying something.

“How did you get up here?” I asked, astonished.

He gestured to something shiny on his back. It looked like a peculiar metal backpack at first glance. “I flew,” he said. “Right into a window on the top floor, where I saw you two climb out of this window.”

I was so distracted by the revelation that he’d actually found someone who could build him wings, or something like wings, anyway, that it took me a second to notice the furious look on his face was gone.

“You didn’t do it,” he said. “You could have been home with your mother by now, but you stayed. You saved us instead.”

“I lost Pip,” I said, my voice breaking on his name. “I’m not losing the rest of you.”

Ashwini scowled at Lej. “Why didn’t you stay at home?”

He scowled back. “I think you know why.”