“She died in here,” I said, dully.
“This is not a guessing game, and no,” Aadhya said. “My parents were really young when Udaya was born. They were living with my dad’s parents, and his dad was incredibly old-school. He insisted that my mom homeschool, and we were never allowed to go anywhere, not even the playground down the block. We couldn’t even play in the yard without a grown-up right there. I actually do remember that; he put a ward on the back door that zapped us if we tried to go through it alone. Udaya got sick of it. When she was eight, she climbed out the window and headed to the playground. A clothworm got her before she made it halfway down the block. They would come around our house sometimes to lay eggs, so their babies could sneak in through the wards and chew on my mom’s weaving. It just got lucky.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling stupid in the way I’m sorry always feels stupid when you mean it.
Aadhya just shrugged back. “Mom asked her parents to stay in the States after the funeral. My aunt had married into Kolkata by then, so they could. She took me to live with them in a one-bedroom and put me in a mundie preschool next door. Dad joined us after a month. A couple of years later, they took everything they’d been saving to buy into an enclave, turned it into cash, and got our house across the street from a good school, and they made sure it was always full of tons of food and toys so all my school friends would want to come over to my place, even though it meant they couldn’t do magic when my friends were around. Daadi came to live with us when I was in kindergarten. Daduji was dead by then. Nobody’s ever told me for sure, but I’m pretty sure it was suicide.”
I was, too; there aren’t that many causes of death for wizards between the ages of eighteen and a hundred. Cancer and dementia eventually get too aggressive to stave off with magic, and if you live outside an enclave, sooner or later you become the slow-moving wildebeest and a mal picks you off the end of the pack, but not until then.
“I yelled at my mom for hiding it from me,” Aadhya said. “She told me she didn’t want me to be afraid. Daduji loved us, he wanted so bad to protect us, that’s all he was trying to do, but he couldn’t. And Mom wanted to protect me, too, but she also wanted me to live as much as I could while I had the chance, because Udaya never got to live at all.”
Really, it wasn’t a shocker or anything. It was just maths. Have two wizard kids, odds are you’re not going to see them both grow up. Possibly not either. Udaya had only got a little more unlucky than the average. Or a lot more unlucky, if you considered she’d spent every scarce minute of her entire life shut up in a nicer version of the Scholomance itself.
“Anyway, that’s how long I’ve known that I was probably going to die before I was old enough to vote,” Aadhya said. “And I don’t want to die, I want to get out of here, but I’m not going to put off being a person until I make it. So I’m not going to pretend like I didn’t know. I knew when I asked you to team up, I knew that I’d just gotten lucky. It wasn’t anything I did. I was just a loser girl like you and a desi girl like you, and I wasn’t a complete jerk to you, so you let me get close enough to figure out that you were a rocket and I could grab on.”
“Aad,” I said, but I didn’t have anywhere to go from there, and I don’t even know if she heard me. It came out as thin and crackly as broken glass, and she wasn’t looking at me; she was staring down at the desk and tracing back and forth over the graffiti on the edge with her thumb, LET ME OUT LET ME OUT LET ME OUT, and her mouth was turned down.
“Somebody always gets lucky, right?” she said. “Why not me? Why shouldn’t I be the one who wins the lottery? I told myself that, but I didn’t believe it, because it was too lucky. I knew I had to do something to deserve it. Like I knew you’d had to do something to deserve that book you got. And I hadn’t. So first I kept waiting for you to ditch me, and then I kept waiting to have to do something, but I didn’t. And I’m telling you about Udaya because, in my head, at some point, I think I decided, okay, it was like a trade. I didn’t get to have my sister, so I got you.”
I had a horrible gargled noise stuffed up in my throat, because I couldn’t ask her to stop. I couldn’t want her to stop, even if I had my hands pressed over my mouth, and there were tears building up along the ledge of my fingers.
Aadhya just kept talking. “I knew that was bullshit, but it made me feel better about not doing anything. So all these months, I’ve been letting that sit in my head, and that was stupid of me, because if you’re who I get instead of my sister—I can’t just leave you behind and still be a person.” She looked up then, and it turned out she was also crying, tears trickling down her face and just starting to drip off her chin, even though her voice didn’t sound any different. “I’m not leaving you behind.”