Shan accepted the file with a trembling hand and stared at it in silence. “Do you have a pen?” he asked at last.

A question lit Tan’s face, but he handed over a pen without a word.

Shan sat on a rock with the file in his lap. He carefully wrote his father’s name on the file and folded down the corners like an envelope before lighting a small cone of incense.

Somehow Tan understood. “A message to the dead.”

Shan nodded. “I haven’t been entirely honest with my father when I send him messages. He thinks I have been on some kind of pilgrimage with old Tibetans these past years. It’s time he understood.”

Tan did not reply, just gathered more wood to build up the fire before Shan dropped in the file.

“Congratulations,” the colonel said as they watched the last ashes float away toward the mountains. “You have officially become nobody.”

As they returned to the ambulance, Tan climbed into the back to sit by Shan. The colonel straightened the blanket over Ko, grasping his still-twitching hand when he finished. The colonel would feel the effects of his torture for weeks, Shan knew. They glanced awkwardly at each other then looked out the small window at the peaks of the Himalayas retreating on the horizon.

“On the road crews,” Tan ventured after a long time, clearly struggling to get his words out, “allowing the workers to wear their malas and gaus wouldn’t interfere with their labor.”

Shan pondered the words, taking a minute to piece them together. Tan was speaking of the prisoners in the gulag labor camps he oversaw in Lhadrung, and of the prayer beads and prayer amulets that had always been denied the Tibetan prisoners.

“No,” Shan agreed in a tight voice, “it would not interfere.”

Tan nodded without expression. “I will issue an order when I return.” His gaze drifted back toward Ko. “And I will see he has a place in the prison infirmary.”

“No,” Shan said. “He needs to be in my old barracks.”

“You mean with the old lamas.”

“The ones who are left.”

The colonel nodded a sober assent.

They grew quiet, and arranged blankets on the bench for cushions, then leaned back. Shan checked on Ko every few minutes, his heart growing heavier as he found no change, no sign that Ko would emerge from his coma. Gradually his fatigue overwhelmed him and he fell into a fitful sleep, punctuated by dreams of Ko spending the rest of his life gazing into the distance with empty eyes. When he woke, the Himalayas were only shadows on the horizon and there was a pile of damp gauze bandages where Tan had been wiping his son’s brow.

“Three hours more, maybe four,” the colonel observed. “We can stop for tea and-” Tan’s words died away.

Shan followed his surprised glance toward the bed and met Ko’s weak but steady gaze, lit by a crooked grin. Then, with unspeakable joy, he watched as his son’s hand reached out and closed around his own.