The silence of the grave. It was weighing on the American too, Shan knew. The silence seemed to shout. It seemed physical, as if pressing down, as if the tunnel were shrinking around them. He raised his fingers slowly, until they made contact with the top of the tunnel.

"I don't understand," Shan said.

"What?" the American asked. It seemed as though sound itself had slowed, as if ages passed between his words and the reply.

"I don't know. You. Why you and your wife came to Xinjiang. Why you would send your son to clansmen you don't really know."

Deacon was quiet so long Shan wondered if he had stopped breathing. "A splinter," he said. "It's all because of a splinter."

"A splinter?"

"We were in the Amazon jungle. It got infected, real bad. Warp was with me, and two Indian guides. We were doing an article on weaving techniques in one of the disappearing tribes. I was delirious off and on, I was going to die, I knew I was going to die. Fever. In and out of consciousness. She sat with me, wiped my brow, talked with me while the Indians looked for medicine in the jungle. I made a vow that if I lived it was going to be different. We were going to make a difference."

Slowly, sometimes pausing to draw in a deep breath of the depleted air, Deacon explained that he had spent much of his youth roaming the world, seeking adventure, spending most of what his father, an automobile dealer, had left him. "Kayaking for a month in Tasmania. Climbed four mountains in Alaska and Nepal. Bungee jumping in New Zealand. The Andes. A month in Peru. A month in Patagonia."

"Doing research?"

"Hell, no. At least, not often. After we got married, sometimes Warp would go on my adventures and pay her way by writing an article. I was just a thrill seeker. She settled us down for a while, said I had to grow up. Got jobs at the university, good jobs. Micah came. Then one day we're at a shopping center, a place where many stores are all together, in a cement maze. Had a big basket of toys, waiting in line. Suddenly I see she's crying, tears rolling down her cheeks. She says here we are, playing along. It's how everyone measures their lives, she said, when you have young children you go to the giant toy stores and buy expensive plastic things. They get older and you buy expensive electrical things at a different store. Then it's expensive clothes. If you're really successful, expensive shoes and expensive cars. It's called Western evolution, she says. You mark your existence, and your place in the herd, by what stores you shop at. I said it's just some toys, Warp. But when it came time to pay and she reached into her purse, her hands were shaking so much she couldn't hold her wallet. She couldn't move. Just cried and cried. Police came, then an ambulance. They put her in a place like a hospital for a week. Some fool heard about it and told Micah his mother had a breakdown in the toy store. He came to me- he was five- with all his toys in a big box and said he would give them up, never have toys again, if they would give his mama back. I went to the hospital and took her out, told them they were the goddamned crazy ones, not my wife. We agreed we would take every research project that came along, to get away from the world.

"Then months later I lay dying in the Amazon. I said to her, I married the wisest person in the world. You were right that day in the toy store, I told her. Nobody's accountable. People sit back and let bad things happen. Forests get leveled. Cultures get destroyed, traditions get cast aside because they're not Internet compatible. Children get raised to think watching television is required for survival and get all their culture from advertising. We pledged to each other if we got out of there we would make it different for us and Micah. We would be accountable, and we would find a place where we could make a difference."

"And here you are," Shan said distantly. "In an ancient tunnel under an ancient town, just waiting-"

"No regrets," the American shot back, as if he did not want Shan to continue. "Our government and the Chinese government doesn't want us here. Screw them. This is where it is, this is where we make the difference." Make a difference. Oddly Shan recalled, Prosecutor Xu had used the same words just the day before to explain why she was in Yoktian. "These people, Beijing thinks they're broken. They're not. They're just waiting. All we do is what you do. Help them find the truths."

"But your son." Shan tried to pretend that he was simply lying on a rock under the open sky, talking in the night.

"Two hundred years ago in America ten-year-old boys were out hunting food for their families. They were learning how to survive, how to build barns and cabins, how to ride, how to heal a sick horse, how to shear a sheep. That's what our boy is learning, essential things. The first things, Warp calls them. Hell, I couldn't even teach him some of them. But the old Kazakhs and Tibetans, they know. We trust them like family. After the first two weeks, Micah said he wanted to switch families, that his shadow clan didn't have any horses and he wanted to be with horses, like the Kazakhs, like his mother's ancestors. But we said stay up there, learn about the sheep for now. Lau said she would make sure he didn't switch among the zheli families. He's safer with them than anywhere."

Deacon's voice drifted off. But Shan knew what he was thinking. Thank god the boy had not come to Stone Lake, to die with his father.

Shan was under one of the support beams. In the darkness he traced the contours of its carving with his fingers. A dragon head. A flower. He broke the silence a few minutes later. "What kind of New Zealand animal is a bungee?" he asked somberly, wondering whether, after a lifetime of questions, he only had a handful left. "And why would you jump over it?"

The sound that came out of the American was a rasping, wheezing noise that Shan knew was intended to be a laugh.

"Okay," Deacon said after he explained. "How about you? A secret."

Shan thought a moment. "I was a bad father."

"Come on. What man isn't? Every man with a child is a good father and a bad father, all in the timing."

"I was a disloyal worker."

"I hope so. You worked for the People's Republic, for chrissake. Not good enough."

"In my heart," Shan said at last. "There is constant pain. Because I am Chinese and China has forsaken me."

His consciousness seemed to flutter, and he wondered if perhaps he had passed out. He said Deacon's name, and the man made a small moaning sound. He inched forward, wide awake now, and touched the first of the rotten beams. He called to the American. "If we could ignite the fallen beam we could use it as a torch, see our way forward."

"And burn up what oxygen is left," Deacon said in a hoarse voice. "And if we move the wrong way, even in the light, it could collapse."

"Maybe," Shan suggested, "that would be better than slow death over the next few hours."

He could hear Deacon venturing forward. As the American approached, Shan found his hand in the dark and placed it on the beam. He produced one of his matches, lit it, and held it under the end of the beam. The wood smoldered but did not ignite.

"Not hot enough," Deacon said in a voice devoid of confidence. "Make a pile of the rotten chips, start them first."

They tried it and failed. Deacon had three matches left, Shan had four, and they laid all the American's matches on the pile and lit one of Shan's. The pile sputtered, flared, dimmed, and burned out. Silently Shan pulled papers from his pockets, his notes, his evidence, and crumpled them into a pile and lit them. They flared into a small but steady orange flame. He fed it more chips while Deacon held the beam over the flame. In two minutes they had a torch and were moving down the fragile tunnel.