He was not well, he knew that, even though Pala had wrapped the wounds so capably, stopping the flow of blood with a torn piece of his own clean shirt. Three days traveling down the Pacific coast and he had slept so much, but he still did not feel rested. He had not wasted money in the dining car. When the train stopped, he had struggled into the depots and found only almonds and toast for sale and washed them down with milk. The heat had alarmed him. The car had been a prison; the small windows, mounted high, had allowed only a whisper of a breeze. In Portland, they had taken on a hundred new passengers and the cars had been overcrowded, grown men sitting shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee, backs forced upright. He had struggled to walk through several cars before he found one in which he could rest. He didn’t mind the sound of the whistle and the ash coming off the engine. Other passengers stared at him. But he could lie on the bench while the train groaned and shuddered and rocked underneath him. He used his folded blanket as a pillow, covering his face with a bandana to block the light. With his back jammed against the hard bench, half-conscious, he heard the sounds of the attack again: The smashing of glass. The snap of axe against wood. The sounds woke him in daylight, just as they had that night; he could not escape the fear. He imagined his mother coming to soothe him. As a boy, when he had startled awake while napping on his charpai, she would whisper that dreams dreamed under the moon came true, those dreamed under the sun did not.

After two days, the pain in Ram’s chest had begun to lessen. After four, he’d begun to use both arms.

With each stop, the train had moved farther away from the lumber mill and he had felt safer, looking forward to this moment of seeing Karak Singh again. But now that he had arrived to stand in the dry heat on this wooden platform, reeking of sweat and soot and the third-class car, blinking as the dust plagued his eyes, now that he had trusted Karak Singh and his invitation so completely, he wondered if he should not have come.