Tanvi was down to her last two feathers. She’d pieced together fairly quickly what Asha had meant by “single use,” since the first feather had crumbled the second Nitya hung up, just like the plant that had shed it. And feeding the feather—that was the blood. Tanvi’s palm had three painful puncture wounds, ugly and scabbed over. Stupid vampiric feather phones.

The cost was worth it, though, even if her conversations with Nitya were hard and stilted. At least the two of them were starting to work past the awkwardness. Yesterday, after their tentative hellos and a long pause, Nitya had slowly opened up about coping in the wake of Tanvi’s disappearance; about Mom, Dad, and her simultaneously coming together and drifting apart; about the divorce and how empty the house felt now; about what Mom was doing these days—apparently she’d resumed her Ganesh pooja and joined a roller derby league.

I told her she should do them at the same time, Nitya had said, rolling her eyes and laughing. Shri Ganeshji on wheels! Can you imagine?

Each word had been bait on a fishhook, reeling Tanvi’s heart in. Mom. Dad. More and more memory blisters had swelled up in her head as Nitya went on about her friends, including names that pinged at Tanvi, each one as agonizing as a zit perched on a nerve ending. She should have asked Nitya to stop, but she didn’t. She couldn’t.

As the morning wound on, Tanvi idly twirled the remaining green-and-blue feathers, torn between wanting to hoard them and dying to know if Nitya and Mom were still all right. If the garudas were still keeping their distance. The daily updates, along with Venkat’s visits, were the only things making being trapped in her room at all tolerable.

But Nitya was in class right now, and Mom obviously wasn’t an option.

One of the quills abruptly jabbed Tanvi deep in the meat of her thumb. She gasped. Blood pooled around the cut, triggering the feather.

Mom’s face, older than Tanvi remembered but still so familiar, appeared on the screen. “Hello?” She nodded at someone outside the frame. “Right there is perfect. Thanks, Bryonie.”

Heart shrieking against her ribs, Tanvi tossed the quill away.

“Hello?” Mom asked again. “Is anyone there?” She must have hung up then, because the feather turned to dust in midair.

Mom. Tanvi had almost talked to Mom. Almost let Mom see her. Too close, too close, too close.

Whatever the nosy feathers might think, this was a job she was doing, nothing more. Tanvi wasn’t looking to get roped into any emotional tangles. She absolutely, definitively, one hundred percent did not need to call Mom.

Not even if a secret part of her longed to hear her mother say her name.

Her shoulders tightened. Now she was down to one quill. One last call with Nitya.