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face beneath his beard looked stark and pale.
    "God forgive me," he said. "God forgive me for bringing you to him."
    "He didn't hurt me." He had, but it was gone now. What was broken was healed, except for the hidden things, secret things, which would never again be whole.
    "It doesn't matter. Samarjit, your name is on his wall ."
    "He said you'd tell me the truth. Please. Tell me—" She reached out to him, but he backed away. And on some horrible level, she understood why. She felt numb now, and the sound of chalk scraping on stone continued relentlessly in her ears.
    She felt a shudder go through the stone beneath her feet, an awful, unsteady pulse, and grabbed for the stone of the wall beside her. "What is that ?"
    "It's him." Her father strode to the keypad and entered his code; he hesitated before he hit the last button and looked at her with unfathomably sad eyes. "You wanted to know what I called him," he said. "You named him one of the five evils in our religion. Kaam , for lust. For me, he was Moh ." Moh was attachment. All Sikhs sought to keep their passions in balance—lust, greed, pride, anger. Even attachments like love. She had always been her father's biggest struggle, because his love for her had been too great, too out of balance. "He makes us destroy ourselves, Sammy. It's the only power he has. We have to go. Now ."
    He put the last number in, and the plastic gates slid open.
    Her father plunged through.
    Sammy didn't follow.
    Chatar Singh realized at the last second and turned; the full blue skirts of his chola flared as he spun around toward her, but the gates were already crashing shut between them. Soundproofed, she realized. She couldn't hear his scream. Couldn't hear the shouts of the guards as they restrained him from the keypad.
    She wished she could have explained it to him. She only knew that somehow, she had no choice.
    He makes you destroy yourself, her father had said, and maybe that was true. But she also understood something else, something deeper than that. We are his demons. This is his hell.
    She had to try to free the captive.

    * * * * *

    The world shuddered again, and when she blinked, there wasn't a gate anymore. Where the gate had been was a black rock wall. The boxes of chalk were still in the room, and despite all the lurching and falling, not a single one had shifted on the shelves.
    Something fundamental had shifted.
    She could hear Kaam still writing, three floors up, the constant raw hiss of chalk on stone. She wondered if it was her name being written, over and over, like an incantation. It terrified her to think that it might be . . . and, she had to admit it, it thrilled her.
    Sammy took the stairs two at a time, up two floors, then the third at a slower pace. Her ears led her straight to him. He'd moved again, into a pristinely clean room, and was just starting a new wall. He was lying flat on the stone floor, writing backward from right to left, and as he finished the first line, he moved up just enough to allow the letters space and began the next.
    "You didn't leave with him," he said. "Sammy, that is not wise. How do you know I won't kill you?"
    "Maybe you will," she said. "But I'm your demon, right? You're not mine. And as long as I stay away from you, you can't stop writing long enough to kill me. Can you?"
    He tapped his right hand gently on the floor as he continued to move chalk over stone, and a bone exploded in her own hand and blew shards bloodily out from the skin, as if she'd been shot with an invisible bullet from the inside out. She screamed and clutched the hand to her chest, and blood flooded out over her shirt, sticky and hot. She almost fell.
    He tapped again, and it was all gone. All fine. Her hand worked, the bones intact, skin unbroken.
    She was still splashed with fresh blood.
    "And now we understand each other," Kaam said. "But it's too late now, Samarjit. Too late to run from what you are."
    She was shaking so hard that she sank down to a