Stupid, stupid, stupid. She might have her old memories again, but they didn’t change a thing. She still didn’t know how to be a person.

Watching Indu now, Tanvi saw her younger self the day she’d run away. They’d both been talked into abandoning anyone who might have cared about them, any future they could have had, to run after meaningless objects. And now look at them.

She flopped down on the floor next to Indu. “Hey. It’s me, Tanvi.”

Indu glanced over, her gaze alert. “I miss the fireflies. Can you bring them back?”

The night-lights! Flustered by all the commotion, they’d scattered. But the jar was in Tanvi’s room, and she didn’t dare leave the others alone long enough to go fetch it. “I don’t think I can. I’m sorry.”

Someone knocked, and the door opened. Venkat appeared in the ocean of runners, clearly shell-shocked. “Tanvi?”

She straightened, a thrill running through her. “Uh, surprise?”

Some of the runners attached themselves to him, clamoring for boons. He smiled, though she could tell it hurt him, and gently disengaged from them before making his way over to her.

He leaned close, his mouth almost brushing her ear, and she shivered. “What’re you doing here?” he demanded. “You’re supposed to be at home with your mother! Safe.”

“Then I guess you shouldn’t have given me back my pendant.”

“I guess not.” Srinivas bumped into him, and he held up a finger to count the runners. Then he frowned. “There should be twenty-nine of you. Where’re the others?”

Twenty-nine? Tanvi felt like someone had clubbed her in the stomach. Where were the five she hadn’t known about? “We lost one,” she confessed, “but that’s all I know.”

“Some old lady took Bharat away,” Indu piped up. “The servant ratted him out for trying to escape. He told me the old lady already got some of us, and if we tried anything, we’d be next.”

She didn’t sound afraid, at least. More outraged. Tanvi figured she hadn’t actually seen Madhu yet.

Venkat, though, fumed. “Who does she think she is?”

“I’m not afraid of her,” announced a stocky boy named Rohan, who looked just a couple of years younger than Tanvi.

“Well, you should be,” she said, furious. All he had—all any of them had—was her. “All of you should be. This isn’t a game. That ‘old lady’ wants to hurt us.”

But, lost in their own dreams and delusions, her fellow runners had already stopped listening.

Venkat sighed. “I don’t know if we should give them their things back now or not.” He explained that he’d gathered their objects from the vault and left them in the corridor. “What do you think, Tanvi?”