“I’m here!” she screamed. “Help me! I’m here!”

Garuda watched her, moonlight eyes encouraging her.

So she went on screaming.

“We’re here. You’re safe,” a voice said from the ground. “You’re safe. Just wait. We’ll get you down.”

It was the last thing she heard before everything was gone again, swallowed up by the darkness.

When Esha woke up in the hospital, her grandmother was holding her hand.

That’s when the first vision had come. Her grandmother finding out that her oldest child was dead. The pain of it had seared Esha’s insides, alive, immediate. The moment, the place where Aji had found out, all of it inside Esha. All at once. Aji’s pain, Esha’s own pain, it had grown so large so fast that Esha had convulsed with it, then passed out.

Not one other person on the plane had survived. Just her.

For weeks, she was sure she was dead. She had to be. This new person wasn’t her. This person was filled with screams, her brain a screen with endless flashing light. Scenes, scrolling and scrolling and scrolling with ugliness and terror like knives hacking at it without slashing through it. An impossible-to-unravel snarl of thoughts and pain and death. Every person at the palace was inside her head, all their feelings, all their actions, all these places Esha had never seen, churning inside her, wanting to burst out of her head. She’d rolled up in a ball and rocked and rocked, and when she stopped, the convulsing would start again.

They’d taken her to hospitals. There everything only got worse. The doctors and nurses and patients and their families, more places, more thoughts, more knives hacking at her.

“I want to go home!” she had screamed. “I want to go home!”

It was her uncle, Shree Kaka, who had listened.

He’d picked her up and taken her back to Sagar Mahal, even as her grandmother and the doctors and her aunt discussed what the right thing to do was.

Once they were at home, Shree Kaka had taken her into her room and closed all the doors and windows and warned everyone to stay away from her.

The noises had died down, but they hadn’t gone away.

“Esha,” Shree Kaka said, running a hand through his hair—hair that was exactly like Baba Saheb’s, thick with silver streaks at the temples. “You want to tell me what’s going on?”

She threw herself into his lap and cried. “Aie and Baba Saheb.” It was the first time her mind wasn’t flooded and she was able to miss her parents, to hurt because they were gone.

“I’m so sorry, beta.” He cried too.

“You loved Baba Saheb.” She knew how much. She knew and now she knew; his love for her father was inside her.