It was bizarre, seeing the room I remembered putting down on paper—including my sketches on the walls!—now filled with the personal possessions of people I didn’t know. Someone’s rumpled striped sweater tucked into a corner of a sofa, someone else’s half-drank mug of hot chocolate, a pile of books and a notebook with neat handwriting, a doll, a peculiar cactus, someone’s reading glasses, a roleplaying board game called Giants & Gargoyles. Whole lives were on display in this room, real lives, and it made my head spin.

“This is where we all hang out,” Ashwini explained a little unnecessarily. “So the room kind of looks like all of us.”

A second door across the hallway from the front room branched off to the kitchen, which Ashwini bypassed for the moment, and we went down the hall, past a crooked, narrow flight of stairs, to a third door at the end. It was open, but Ashwini gave it a courteous tap anyway before standing back to nudge me in ahead of her.

The presence of a cozy, neatly made bed pushed against the wall told me this was a bedroom, but otherwise I would have been sure I’d walked into a tailor’s shop. Scissors, pins, a glue gun, bolts of fabric, and a rusty old sewing machine cluttered the surfaces of two tables on either side of the room, and there were scraps of a dozen different kinds of materials—was that chainmail?—all over the floor. Mannequins made out of twisted pieces of wire were dotted around what little space was left, each draped with some kind of half-finished item of clothing.

There was a boy in a wheelchair at one of the tables. He looked like he was about Ashwini’s age, and he had dark brown skin, curly black hair, faded blue jeans and a gray T-shirt, and socks with tiny elephants all over them. He gave me a quick, shy grin when he saw me in the doorway.

“This is Jojo,” said Ashwini.

“Hi,” I said, and went on in awe, “this is amazing. Did you make all this yourself?”

“Jojo makes our costumes,” Ashwini explained as Jojo nodded, gratified by my reaction. “He also patches up all our clothes, which is handy considering new clothes are hard to come by.”

“I’m also the Crows’ archer,” Jojo added, gesturing to a bow propped up against the wall.

“Hang on,” I said. “Costumes?”

“You know, the clothes we wear when we fight Asuras? Our colors?”

“Black with red and gold,” I said, suddenly remembering the superhero-style battle-gear ideas I had doodled in my sketchbook months ago.

“That’s it,” said Jojo. “I’m working on yours right now.”

My smile faltered. The memory of Mysore Palace and my total failure came rushing back. “That’s really nice of you, but I don’t think I’ve done anything to earn a costume of my own.”

Jojo’s brow furrowed in confusion, but Ashwini quickly intervened. “You brats haven’t eaten already, have you?”

“As if Suki would have let us wait for you,” he scoffed. “You know she’s a bottomless pit. Not that any of us would say no to a second breakfast . . .”