A set of colorful tents and stalls hung superimposed over the stores on the street, all wreathed by a gilt haze as diaphanous as an organza curtain.

“This is it,” Asha said, hauling Venkat and Tanvi before a gargantuan golden peacock that had coalesced out of the haze. She released her grip on both of them. “The Night Market.”

“How do we get in?” Venkat asked, grateful to have a different conundrum to tackle. “It looks like it’s in an alternate dimension.”

As if in reply, the peacock blinked down at them. “Meh-aao!” it called, then lowered its head. Its dagger-sharp beak opened wide, revealing the Night Market in all its decadence. Venkat could almost smell the enchantment wafting out, lures set to ensnare the eager.

No one spoke.

“Fine,” Asha huffed at last, throwing up her hands and making her bangles tinkle. “I suppose I will go first, then, you milksops. At least it is not a garuda’s beak I must face down this time.” She moved toward the peacock’s head, closed her eyes, and slithered inside.

Tanvi, though, turned to Venkat. Her smile was weak but sincere. “I know I must’ve shocked you back there, and I’m sorry. I wanted to tell you, I swear! But she threatened me.”

“Madhu?” he asked doubtfully, since Tanvi could just as easily have been talking about Asha. Madhu, a traitor? It made no sense.

Tanvi nodded. She’d folded into herself but seemed to catch it and stood up straight again. “She threatened to hurt Nitya if I told anyone.”

Venkat’s jaw twitched. She had? How could Nayan be okay with that?

“We just spent the day together, you know,” he said offhandedly. As if they weren’t standing outside the fabled Night Market of lore, its peacock portcullis eyeing them with a little too much interest. “Nayan and I. We worked on our project, and I pretended I didn’t know about the boons. I pretended everything was fine. And it was . . . really nice. Despite everything.”

He laughed, the sound as cheerful as a cremation pyre.

Frowning, Tanvi grabbed his hand. “I don’t think Nayan actually knows. She ordered me not to say anything to him.”

She was so pretty, with that determination, that life, in her face. Venkat wanted to tell her so, to rest his chin on the crown of her head, to show her how precious she was, but he didn’t. “Tell me everything,” he said instead. “From the beginning.”

He listened, vacillating from disbelief to dismay as Tanvi filled in the gaps in her story, from being called by Nitya’s name to finding her sister to the garuda attack at Nitya’s school and seeing Madhu with the garudas. “It would have been my school. I can’t stop thinking about that.”