“Be still!” Vinata raised a hand like she was going to slap Tanvi. Tanvi, who’d had plenty of experience dodging Asha, pivoted aside.

Venkat needed to hear what she had to say, and no one was going to stop her from saying it.

Sweat beaded over his forehead, and his jaw had clenched. “I can’t hold it back.”

“Yes, you can,” Tanvi insisted over the cacophony around them. “You made this, right?”

Venkat nodded.

“Vinata wants you to change the story. To fix the mistake she and her sister made. But she doesn’t know what she’s doing,” Tanvi explained. “I didn’t for the longest time, either. My sister hurt me, and I wanted to hurt her back. I thought I could erase her, too. But it doesn’t work.” She gestured to the pavilion that had become a battlefield. “This is what you get when you do that.”

There was probably a much more sophisticated way to phrase that. But she had missed out on school and books and all the things that would have taught her how to convey what she meant, so this would have to do.

Venkat studied her with the same consideration he had in all their recent conversations. The muscle in his jaw relaxed. “Gods,” he said. “You’re right.”

“This isn’t our fight,” Tanvi babbled. “Don’t you see? They think we’re toys or dolls or something they can jerk around. All of them think it, like humans only exist for them. But this whole mess? It’s not our problem. The runners are our problem. You and I are our problem.”

Vinata made another grab for her. “Still your prattle, you ignorant whelp!”

Tanvi’s cheeks heated at the insult, and she wanted to hide, like she was back in the archives on her first day here and Madhu had lambasted her for peeking at the registry. But she didn’t. “This is their problem,” she repeated. “Even if you ‘fixed’ it, that wouldn’t be the end of it. They need to be the ones to find a solution, not us.”

Behind them, the fighting, large and small, went on.

“You made this.” Tanvi touched the tapestry. “You decide what to do with it.”

Venkat looked down at it, then at Tanvi, and finally at Vinata. “You want me to invoke this? Done.”

39

Even with what he’d just learned, even with the chaos around them, Venkat relaxed. He had Tanvi.

She stood there like a warrior princess. She didn’t even need a sword—the gleam in her eyes and determination in her face were weapon enough.

He glanced around once more, at the wounded, the dead, and the battles steeped in putrid hate. A hate so old, so incapacitating, it had yellowed and gnarled back on itself like fingernails that hadn’t been cut for twenty years.