Tanvi and Venkat watched the feather decompose. “That was the last one,” Tanvi mumbled.

A hundred reactions passed over Venkat’s features, but he only offered her the boon. “Ask for your memories to be restored. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it.”

She cracked up. “Of course.” Trust Asha to put together what had been right in front of their noses this entire time.

But then, as the boon lit up her skin, packed with all the wish-granting potential of the cosmos, Tanvi went quiet. This was it. She was about to remember everything she’d tried to erase. About to fill in all the threadbare memories that had sawed at her brain for the past two weeks, all the memories that dream runners shouldn’t have.

“Are you ready?” Venkat asked, touching his fingertips to the back of her hand. His deep brown eyes were affectionate as they took her in, and she shivered.

“As ready as I’ll ever be.” She sucked in a breath, then intoned, “The restoration of all my memories.”

The half-formed memory blisters in her head thumped horribly but refused to cohere. In her hand, the boon continued to glimmer.

Venkat’s forehead creased. “Try again, but say you invoke them?”

“I invoke the restoration of all my memories.”

The boon’s gentle shine mocked her.

Tanvi’s back grew uncomfortably warm and damp. Something was wrong, really wrong. “I invoke the restoration of all my memories!”

The boon sat on her skin, useless.

A horrible thought hit her. What if . . . ? “I invoke a candle.”

Still nothing.

“I invoke a milkshake. Any flavor. It doesn’t matter.”

The boon’s clean white light was turning dingier and dingier with each failed invocation, or maybe that dirty yellow was the color of Tanvi’s fury. She’d been cheated.

From the twitch in Venkat’s cheek, he’d had the same thought.

“I invoke my bracelet,” Tanvi spat.

Just as she’d expected, the boon wavered and dissolved. Seconds later, a perfect replica of the perfect bracelets once heaped in her closet materialized on her palm. Tanvi lobbed it at the wall, where it promptly disappeared.

Venkat fished another boon from his pocket. “I invoke Tanvi’s bracelet.”

The boon might as well have been Nitya’s moon-shaped lamp.

If Venkat hadn’t been there, Tanvi would have stomped right over to the archives and confronted Nayan. In the heat of her rage, she didn’t even care what Madhu might do to her anymore.

But Venkat was there, and unlike her, he didn’t look mad. He looked shattered, like something had broken inside him, something vital.

Tanvi couldn’t stand seeing him like that. She moved to touch his arm, maybe even to hug him, but he was already careening toward the door. “I’m sorry. I just— I need to go.”