Sound by Alexandra Duncan

now? I wonder. What’s she doing?
    Saturday evening. Vishva is likely at a dance club down in the Salt, sweating and swinging her long dark hair everywhere. Or else she’s off with a boy, snogging on a rowboat in the shadow of the Great Levee. I don’treally know. We were inseparable those first few years—always choosing each other as partners on school outings and running the biomimesis club together after school. President and vice president. First and second in our class.
    And then we were fifteen, and I was leaving Revati for college, and everything changed. Vishva changed.
    The month before I started classes at the university, I met Vishva and a gaggle of other girls from our class at the train stop near my house.
    â€œMiyole!” Vishva threw up her hands and tottered over to me on silver stilettos. Her long hair coiled in a sleek black chignon at the side of her head, and her flowing orange shirt had been slashed perfectly to show her shoulders. She grabbed me in a hug. “You came!”
    â€œOf course I came.” I looked down at my flat shoes and plain lavender shirtdress. Even with Vishva in heels, our heads were still level. Only I looked like a freakishly tall ten-year-old hanging out with a group of actual teenagers. “Where are we going?”
    â€œYou tell me.” Vishva grinned. “It’s your farewell party.”
    I gave her a playful shove and rolled my eyes. “I told you, it’s not farewell . I’ll still be in the city, just over at the university. We’ll see each other all the time.”
    I could have gone farther. I’d been accepted to colleges in Bangalore, Oxford, Zurich, Cairo, Kolkata, and Jaipur, too, but Soraya hadn’t wanted me straying so far from home until I was at least eighteen. So Mumbai University it was.
    â€œSo, where are we going?” Vishva asked.
    â€œUp to Malabar Hill?” I suggested.
    Vishva wilted. “Again? Seriously? And do what, sneak into one of the cafés and hope we catch a glimpse of Liam Chowdhury?” She said his name like we hadn’t both been obsessed with his movies and filled our feeds with nothing but pictures of him for the past two years.
    I frowned. “What’s wrong with Liam Chowdhury?”
    â€œNothing.” Vishva flopped her hands against her sides. “It’s just . . . chaila , Mi. Don’t you want to do something different for a change?”
    I scratched my ankle with the top of my shoe and glanced at the other girls. My second-closest friend, Aziza, was off visiting her father in Istanbul, so Vishva had brought along a group of girls I knew from class but didn’t hang around with unless we had to do a project together or something. Most of them were busy with their crows or talking, but Siobhan Nguyen and Chandra Avninder, two of the wealthiest girls in our school, were clearly listening in.
    I shifted from one foot to the other. “Like what?”
    Vishva’s eyes sparkled, and I realized she had been waiting for me to ask that all along. She glanced at Siobhan and Chandra. “Your sister lives down in the Salt, doesn’t she?”
    I eyed Vishva. What was she up to? She knew exactly where Ava and Rushil lived. She’d been to their house for tea a million times before. “Yes?”
    Vishva hurried on. “So you know your way around, yeah?”
    Siobhan and Chandra were definitely listening now. They weren’t even pretending to scroll through the feeds on their crows. And Vishva was giving me a look that said she might spontaneously combust if I didn’t go along with whatever she had planned.
    â€œYeah.” I nodded. “I know my way around.”
    â€œBrilliant. There’s this club called Pradeep’s that just opened on the hill and Chandra says they don’t check ID for girls, so we could definitely get in.” Vishva threw a smile over her shoulder at our classmates, then turned back to me.