Ox Mao uttered a sound like a snarl, but lowered his hand.

"Xu and Sui," Fat Mao said, looking from the Kazakh to Jowa, then to Shan. "They were riding together in the days before Sui was killed. They were at Glory Camp together. Sui didn't have a car when he died. He was riding with someone. It must have been Xu. She killed him to create a reason to eliminate all of us."

Shan sat up against the corner of the toilet, folding his knees to his chest. "Xu doesn't kill people," he said in a thin voice, gasping every few seconds. "She disgraces them. She imprisons them. She breaks them. Killing-" he said, and grabbed his stomach as a wave of nausea swept over him. "She doesn't need to."

"I thought you saw the cemetery at Glory Camp," Fat Mao said with a chill.

Shan tried to nod but the effort made his head explode with pain. "She doesn't kill people with guns," he conceded. "But Sui," he groaned, "Sui was killed by a competitor." Although he had not even formed the thought in his own mind until that instant, he knew he was right.

No one seemed to have heard him. Ox Mao was glaring at Jowa, Fat Mao was looking at each of the two men in turn. Jowa seemed to size the two Maos up, and took a step back.

Ox Mao turned with a satisfied grin. "You're going to tell us, tell us all about you and Xu." But as he took a step forward, a toe of a boot appeared in his groin and an arm suddenly appeared around his throat. The big Kazakh collapsed with a groan, falling back on the floor, and a figure flew past Fat Mao, who stood with his mouth open, as if trying to understand what had happened.

The figure stood in front of Shan now, shouting, facing the Maos and Jowa. "It's all you know, isn't it? Violence. Fighting. But you never know who your fight is with!" Jakli had returned from making hats. Her fury seemed a tangible thing. Her hands clenched and unclenched, like a tiger extending its claws. The stout woman appeared and pulled Ox Mao back into the kitchen, shaking her head.

Jakli bent over him, then grabbed one of the towels, moistened it under the faucet and wiped his brow. "I never should have gone," she said with a remorseful tone and helped him to his feet. "The gates were locked."

She took command. She arranged the Maos on one side of the table in the kitchen, found a coat for Shan to wear, told him to remove his soiled clothes, and dispatched the stout woman with them to be cleaned.

Jowa brought Shan a cup of fresh water, then found him a mug of hot tea. "I was going to-" he said to Jakli, but left his sentence unfinished. Jakli looked at him, and he hung his head. "How are we supposed to know?" the purba asked her, in a voice taut with pain.

"Know?" she asked tersely. "You come all this way because of Shan, and you don't know what to do?"

"No," Shan said. His vision was rapidly clearing. "Jowa came because of the lamas, not because of me. What we have to do is written nowhere. He has reason to be confused. I am confused." He pulled out the chair beside him, inviting the Tibetan to sit. "But not as confused as I was."

"What do you mean?" Jakli asked.

"I had to talk to Xu, I have to understand where she is in this. She told me something that makes me believe Sui was killed by someone over money, a competitor."

"There is only one lieutenant assigned to Bao," Fat Mao said with a frown. "Sui had no competitor."

"Not a competitor for rank," Shan said. "For bounty." He swallowed more of the tea and explained what Xu had told him.

"The bastards," Fat Mao muttered when Shan finished. "They're unaccountable to anyone. It's not even about their socialism anymore. Just money."

"They can be accountable to us," Ox Mao grunted.

Jakli seemed to recognize the glint in the big Kazakh's eye and held up her palm as though to stop him. "Nothing. Don't do anything. Not until all the boys are safe."

"But you heard him," Ox Mao said with a conspiratorial nod toward Shan, as if he had decided to forget the episode in the toilet. "The general comes in a few days."

Shan looked at Jakli. The general was coming. The boys were being stalked. But the clans were gathering. One last time, the clans were gathering. And Jakli had to get to a new life.

The stout woman returned with Shan's clothes, still damp, and began cooking a meal for them. When he dressed and reappeared, she inspected him with a matronly air. Seeing dirt on his shoe, she rubbed it with her dish rag. It was her way of apologizing, Shan knew, and he accepted her hospitality with quiet nods as they started the meal, the woman serving Shan first.

When they had finished Fat Mao rose and pulled folded papers from a jacket hanging on the wall. "That truck driver," he announced, "the one who found Sui." He pushed the papers across the table to Shan. "We realized Sui had no money on him. We had the man's license number, so we tracked him down in Kashgar. After a couple of hours of persuasion he admitted stealing the money, but said he spent it all in a bar in Kotian. About a dozen drinks and a particularly enthusiastic mai chun nu." The phrase meant girl selling spring. A prostitute. "But when he grabbed the cash he grabbed some papers with it. He was glad to get rid of them, said they scared him when he finally read them."

There were only two sheets. One was a list of the zheli, the official list printed from the school computer, with Khitai's name underlined and a note beside it that said Red Stone camp. At the top of the page Lau's name had been written, with personal information. The room number of her office at the school. A description of her horse. Brown horse, white face, it said. There was another name Shan did not recognize. North Star Enterprise. He pointed to it.

"A garage," said Fat Mao. "Not just a garage- a blacksmith, a stable. Lau kept her horse there. Ox Mao checked it today. The afternoon before Lau died, she took her horse. Ten minutes after she left, a man who looked like Sui came in and rented a horse. In civilian clothes. Brought the horse back the next morning, drenched in sweat, worn out. The owner yelled at him, but Sui just smiled and threw him something that shut the man up. A piece of gold."

"A Panda?" Shan asked.

Fat Mao shook his head. "Gold in the form of a two-inch Buddha."

Jakli moaned and looked at Shan. They had seen the little solid-gold Buddhas before, in the sanctuary room at Karachuk, the room where Lau had died.

The other page held handwritten notes. In one corner was a series of numbers, sums of money, underlined repeatedly. Calculations of bounties, in multiples of five thousand. The price for an orphan. And in the center, a rough map, with a date on it. Over his shoulder Jakli gasped. "It's tomorrow. The map is to Stone Lake. Sui was going to Stone Lake for the boys."

"But he lost the competition to a better murderer," Fat Mao said grimly, "and now that killer is going instead."

Stone Lake was an abandoned oil field camp, a place on the fringe of the desert where fossils were found in the outcroppings. As she drove, Jakli explained that Lau often took the zheli there in the autumn, between the summer and winter temperature extremes to collect fossils and imagine the world as it existed when the fossil forms lived. They drove on a rough track cleared and compacted for oil crews thirty years earlier, across a coarse, gravelly plain dotted with clumps of ephedra and the other tough stunted shrubs that, like some of the clans, had learned to survive where few other life forms could exist. Sand could be seen in the lee of boulders. Sometimes, as they crested low hills, Shan saw the endless white expanse of the Taklamakan in the distance.