“Quit eating my ants!” demanded a kid named Srinivas, his once-blank face screwed up in rage. He wouldn’t stop accusing another runner, an older girl named Mona with curls that hung to her shoulders, of stealing his chocolate ants.

Which made no sense—unless he’d been dreaming of chocolate ants.

“Shh!” Tanvi admonished. “Somebody’ll hear you.”

Who knew the other runners could be so chatty? They fired off question after question, as if they’d only just realized their vocal cords worked: Why were they here in Indu’s room; who was Tanvi really; where was Venkat; what happened to their dreams?

Her glamour hadn’t worn off, either, which made it harder to convince the runners to listen to her.

“My head hurts,” Indu whined. She’d closed her eyes and sat huddled with her knees to her chest.

She wasn’t the only one in pain.

Twenty-two kids, all younger than Tanvi, all confused and possibly dreaming, all crammed too tightly into this tiny cell. They fought, they cried, they clung to dreamstones. Between the vials and their kurta pajamas and chaniya choli, this had to be the most color the sparse room had ever seen. What with all their shouting and complaining, the most action, too.

Herding twenty-three runners into a single room had been hard enough, and she’d lost one, a recent recruit. She’d asked everyone to hold hands in the hallway, but the boy had wriggled free and taken off, cheetah-fast for having such stubby legs.

If Tanvi had been alone, she might have chased him down. With twenty-two other charges to keep together, she’d had no choice but to let him go. Though she’d never met the boy before that moment, the thought of him ending up in a guard’s clutches made her throat ache.

And what if he got them all caught?

Her plan had seemed so simple back on Prithvi: use the pendant to sneak into the palace as a wedding guest, round up the other runners, locate wherever Madhu had locked up Nitya, and devise a way to get them all out of there. Of course, now that Tanvi was here, listening to the runners bicker, she had to admit the second half of the plan was mostly wild hope propped up by wishful thinking.

“I didn’t touch your gross ants!” Mona bellowed. She shoved past Srinivas. “Get out of my face.”

“Worst babysitting job ever,” Tanvi muttered. Her pulse beat in her temples, promising a headache as bad as the ones from the memory blisters.

Even if she could somehow get the other runners out of the palace, where would they go? Didn’t people on Earth need paperwork and money and things? They definitely needed their families, but how was Tanvi supposed to find them? Or Venkat, for that matter?