We accompany Taraana back to Jbeil and leave him safe with Assi before, with a pause in between to gather our spirits, we walk toward the next door, our next destination. After some discussion, we decided that if we are going to fight Baarish, we need more information about him. As such, we are going to go to the city in which he lives to do some reconnaissance.

Paheli opens the door to Agra without much thought, but the Between must be hiccuping, because the city on the other side of the door is definitely not Agra. For one thing, it’s snowing in this city. She closes the door and then turns to us, her eyes confused.

“Try again,” Valentina commands. Paheli silently obeys, and this time the door opens to the city it is supposed to.

We pile out of the Between and out into a courtyard in front of the Taj Mahal. After spending a few minutes staring at the monument, we leave quickly and enter the city proper. Agra, built on the banks of the Yamuna River, is eminently suitable to be the location of the residence of the Keeper of the Rivers and Lakes in Uttar Pradesh.

We become visible to humans and make our way to Kinari Bazaar to exchange money. It is a shrill Saturday morning, and the sun is entirely without mercy. The market is bustling with people and purpose, colors and smells. Vendors hawk their goods in raucous voices. People haggle over each cent they unwillingly spend. In a corner of the market, right beside a vendor selling fragrant bunches of gajra, is a very old woman sitting in the middle of countless corked bottles. At first glance, the bottles seem empty, but a closer look reveals a smoky substance inside. Nobody stops at her stall; nobody even seems to realize she is there.

We linger in front of her cart and wait for her attention. At first, she seems disinclined to give it to us, so Paheli takes out a Between diamond and holds it up to catch a spark of the sun. The old woman’s eyes flicker, a reptilian blink, and one side of her mouth creeps up in a ghastly facsimile of a smile.

“Well, well, well,” she says. All right, she speaks in Hindi, so she doesn’t say exactly that, but bear with us. Some things are lost in translation. While not all of us know Hindi, Taraana’s tears in our palms let us communicate in all the existing languages in the world. It’s a perk we enjoy. The woman licks her lips. “What have we here?”

Paheli steps up. “We would like to exchange some Between diamonds for local currency,” she says carefully. She’s wearing a festive blue dress, and thanks to Kamboja, her light pink hair is arranged in complex braids.