The moonstone path. It had found her again.

She dipped a wary finger into the wine. Her skin didn’t melt off, at least. Instead, a cool, refreshing sensation like the caress of menthol spread from her fingertip into her body. She could almost see the stream of silver seeping into her veins.

Was she about to discover she’d done something awful before Asha had spirited her away? That she was awful?

“I do not have all day, mortal girl.” Tutting, Urvashi pointed to the line of customers that had built up behind Tanvi. Human and mythical being alike looked aggrieved. “What is your decision?”

“So irksome!” grumbled a brown bear on his hind legs. He might have been part of Hanuman’s army back in the days of the Ramayana. She stared up at him, startled at his bulk—and his claws.

Venkat put a hand on her shoulder. “You can do it,” he whispered.

Tanvi brought the tumbler to her lips. As the chandini touched her tongue, her taste buds seemed to dissolve. Pop, pop, pop . . . ahhh.

The silver wine slid down her throat in a slippery waterfall of stars and crescent moons. They devoured time on their way into the darkness. It was exactly like sipping the moon. Like drinking the night sky. Or the universe itself—constellations, galaxies, black holes.

The wine sighed through her blood, and her chest cavity expanded, opening to encompass everyone and everything in an enormous golden web. Within it, Tanvi touched those she’d loved, those she’d hated, those she’d never known. There was no place to hide from the web’s overpowering light.

The web extended outward and outward and outward until Tanvi knew she would die, or at least vomit. It would continue growing until it hit the edges of the universe, except she could feel there were no edges, only infinity. The beauty of the cosmos was terrible and compassionate at once, whittling away the oblivion she’d worked so hard to maintain, leaving her bare. So bare.

Tanvi. Her mother’s voice. Happy birthday, dikri.

Tanvi started to shake.

When she raised her head a million years later, she sat alone in her dining room, surrounded by unicorn party plates and napkins, pink and purple plasticware, and a thawing marble ice cream cake with twin unicorns on top, one with a pink mane, the other with purple. Mom had left the twenty candles—ten in pink, ten in purple—next to the cake, along with a book of matches with an insurance company logo on it.

Mom had even given them matching swirly pink-and-purple unicorn bathrobes, with a pink hood for Nitya and a purple hood for Tanvi.

Tanvi inspected her hands. They were small, with short fingers, and on her right hand, she wore the rubber decoder ring she’d fished out of a cereal box a couple of weeks ago.