Nitya’s eyes went wide again. Her words came through gritted teeth. “You’re alive. How?”

Tanvi didn’t know what to say. She didn’t remember leaving this house. All she knew was her life in Nagalok.

“Did someone kidnap you?” Nitya’s voice got shriller and shriller with each word. “Did they hurt you? How did you get away?”

The rapid-fire questions made Tanvi want to shout back. “Stop it!” she forced out. She still couldn’t get enough leverage to pry Nitya’s fingers loose. “Nobody kidnapped me. I don’t think.”

This house, this living room, felt like a movie set. She knew it so well, except she didn’t. Those leaf-patterned window sheers in the kitchen hadn’t been there. And the velvet toran with the silver bells hanging over the entrance to the living room—it had been sky blue, not chocolate brown. Tanvi was sure of it. It must have changed color from years of sunlight streaming in through the bay windows, years she hadn’t been here. Even the silver mandir on the side table seemed smaller than she remembered.

Nitya pressed so hard she was actually cutting off the circulation in Tanvi’s wrists. “You don’t think? Where were you?”

“Let go of me!”

“No.” Nitya’s voice wobbled. “How are you even here? How are you not dead?”

“You thought I was dead?” Tanvi laughed, though none of this was funny. “I was in Bhogavati.”

Nitya gawked at Tanvi like she’d never heard anything so stupid. “Of course we did!” she snapped. “You’ve been missing for seven years. Seven. Years.”

“I wasn’t missing. I told you, I was in Bhogavati.”

“Is that some sort of cult?”

“You don’t know what Bhogavati is?” Now Tanvi was the one gawking. “The capital city of Nagalok?”

“Nagalok?” Nitya scoffed. “That’s just a story.”

Just a story. Something about Nitya’s tone, maybe how derisive it was, made the old pain of that day rush back in one violent surge.

“You laughed at me!” Tanvi yelled. “All of you!”

Nitya’s grip finally slackened. “What are you talking about?”

“Our birthday party.” Tanvi spat it at Nitya, the girl who shared her face, the girl who’d once been her best friend and biggest rival. Right then, she resented Nitya for that. For not being the sister she should have been. For chasing Tanvi off. “You know, when we turned ten.”

She braced herself for Nitya to say she was making it up.

But Nitya didn’t. “Mom and Dad called the cops when you never came back. The whole neighborhood was out looking for you!”

“You told everyone I wet the bed!” Reliving the humiliation felt like a scab being torn off too soon. It hurt so much. Nitya should be feeling the wound, too, Tanvi decided, how it bled and stung.