He sighs and slings the bag over his shoulder. “I know a place,” he says. “Let’s go.”
He doesn’t wait for me before jogging down the steps and taking a sharp left. I scramble to follow, but when I catch up to him, breathless, he doesn’t acknowledge me. We weave through back alleys and side streets without speaking. I glance over my shoulder every so often to make sure we’re not being followed. Kadru’s warning that the Naga will never let me go thrums at the back of my mind, and a shiver goes through me as I think about being hunted like an animal.
“Are you cold?” Deven asks, and before I can stop myself, I give a bitter laugh. He looks hurt. “What’s funny?”
“Just that you can’t help but be a gentleman even when you think I’ve been trying to kill you.”
He scowls at me. “I only asked a question. I didn’t say I was going to do anything about it.”
“Fair enough.”
“I don’t even have a wrap to offer you,” he says impatiently. “So obviously I wasn’t being a gentleman.” He shoves his hands into his pockets.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “I’m not cold.”
“Good.”
We walk in silence for several minutes and then Deven says, “What do you mean I think you’ve been trying to kill me?”
I sigh. “Like I said before, if I wanted to kill you, you’d already be dead.”
“So you were poisoning me for fun?” His sarcastic tone crawls under my skin, and I stop walking After a moment, he spins to face me.
“I wasn’t poisoning you!” I shout. “I was trying to make you immune.”
Several people stop to stare and I feel my cheeks flame. I put my head down and hurry forward, pushing past strangers, desperate to put distance between me and…and I don’t know what. Because it’s impossible to run from your own mistakes. Deven catches up and falls in step with me but doesn’t speak. Which is a good thing, because I’m fuming. I know that I have no right to anger. I realize that Deven is the wronged party, not me. But my mind can’t convince the rest of my body. My stomach is boiling with rage; my heart is on fire with it.
It takes twenty minutes of silence for me to calm down. Deven doesn’t speak the entire time, and whether he is giving me space to be angry, or whether he is angry himself, I can’t tell. But either way I can’t afford to let my pride jeopardize Mani’s safety. I need information from Deven, and so I will let him say whatever he needs to say, no matter how the words slice through me.
Once my heartbeat steadies, I clear my throat. “I wasn’t the one making Mani sick,” I say. I don’t know why this feels like the most urgent thing to explain. Maybe because of all the things he believes about me, this one cuts the deepest. That I would hurt Mani. “I never even considered Mani might have vish bimari until yesterday when you said…” I shift uncomfortably as I remember the look on his face when he said what I had done was disgusting. “When you said what you said. I would never poison Mani, and I thought that I must be making him sick just by being near him, but then—”
“Wait,” Deven says. “Just by being near him? How is that even possible?”
My mouth goes dry. “I’m a visha kanya,” I say, and the disbelief on his face morphs into shock. He opens his mouth, but I keep talking before he has the chance to say something hurtful again. “Japa said people think they are only legends, but here I am. The people I work for—used to work for—made me this way as a baby. When I kiss people”—I can’t look at him anymore, so I shift my gaze to the floor—“they die. So if I’d wanted to kill you, I wouldn’t have needed to poison your drink.”
He doesn’t say anything for a moment. “As a baby?” he says finally. It’s the last question I expect. I nod and he holds my gaze for a moment. There’s something in his expression that I can’t read, and I’m not sure if he believes me or not. I decide to keep talking. “Gopal—my handler—he’s been poisoning Mani. I thought the breathing treatments were to help his lungs, but I should have known better. Japa said there might be an antidote, and so this morning I went to the person who made me a visha kanya, but she couldn’t help. And when I came back, Mani was gone and Japa was…” I swallow the words as an image of Japa’s body assaults me.
“I know how to get the antidote,” Deven says softly.
My head snaps up. “You do?”
He gives me a long look before he answers. “It’s the maraka fruit.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I say. “How can a fruit be an antidote?”
“My father grows them in his orchard,” Deven says. “They took years to perfect, but they work.”