"It's me, Bajys," Jakli said in Tibetan. "From Akzu's camp."

He looked at her without expression.

"What happened, that night in the rocks?" Her voice was slow and tentative, as if it were not anger but fear she now felt. "Were you with the boys? We need to understand. Do you know that it wasn't Khitai?" Jakli asked.

"Where would he go?" Lokesh interjected. "Where would Khitai run to?" Bajys twisted his head one way, then the other, as he stared first at Jakli, then Lokesh. "I heard the shot. I saw him lying there, with his red cap, and ran. He's dead." The little Tibetan stared toward the door of the cabin, as if seeing someone there invisible to the others. "That was the one I loved," he said in a hollow voice. "That was the one I was to keep safe. He'll be dead again. But that was the one I knew."

Shan stared at him, trying to make sense of his strange words. "Why did you come here?" he asked. "When the boy died, you fled to Lau. Why?"

Bajys's gaze roamed around the campsite before he spoke again. "Sometimes it comes like this, like a dark cloud. And people just die. It can't be stopped." A rattling noise came from his lap. His hand with the beads was shaking.

"Wangtu knows," he said suddenly in a small, quivering voice. "Wangtu told me. Lau was being stalked, he said."

Jakli greeted the words with a frown. "Wangtu doesn't know," she said with abrupt annoyance. "He just talks."

Bajys looked at her and shook his head. "Wangtu knows," he said mournfully. "The world is ending." He seemed to be shrinking before their eyes, growing smaller, hollowing out. Shan had seen it before, even in brave men, and he shuddered to think of the ugliness that caused it. Bajys had gone from the horror of finding the dead boy to see the wise, gentle Lau and instead found human limbs scattered about, a place of terror and death.

"You know this Wangtu?" Shan asked Jakli.

Her frown returned. "I told you about him. Lau's driver. I knew him when I was young."

"That one at Glory Camp?"

"Not for long. She'll question him, he'll offer something unrelated, he'll be released."

"What do you mean?"

"Don't you understand? That's her game. Throw as many as she can in the camp, let them sweat. They can always think of somebody's sin."

"But for how long?" Shan asked. "When will he be released, so I can speak with him?" The prosecutor, he realized, may have deprived him of the only witnesses who could make sense of Lau's death.

"A week, maybe two."

"Too long."

She looked at him and sighed. "You want to get into Glory Camp? Go to town. Burn a copy of the Chairman's speeches in the square."

"I don't want a one-way ticket."

"No way to see him that doesn't involve going into the prison."

A tremor crept along Shan's arm. His right hand clamped over his left forearm, over the number he wore there, the number tattooed on his skin by his prisonkeepers in Tibet. Talk of a prison, even a low security lao jiao camp, seemed to cast a chill over the group. Shan moved closer to the fire.

A hawk screeched overhead. Red and gold leaves danced across the ground, scattered by the late afternoon wind.

"It wasn't supposed to be me at all," Bajys said suddenly, barely above a whisper. "The oldest son goes, that's the way it always was."

Shan and Lokesh exchanged a glance. There had been a Tibetan tradition of centuries, now shattered, like so much else touched by Beijing, that the oldest son of each family would be sent to train as a monk.

"I was just a dropka, I just wanted to stay with the herds. But my brother was back from a month at the gompa," Bajys said, his voice weak but steadier. "He was getting ready to return for six years of study. We were celebrating Losar, the new year festival, and saying goodbye by playing in the snow one last time. There was a place on the mountainside with a creek that became a long ice slide in the winter. We would sit with a sheepskin on the ice and slide, a hundred, two hundred yards, down to the flat ice where the river was. My brother slid down as I watched and laughed. But when he got to the bottom a black hole in the ice opened up. He shot into the hole and was gone. We never saw him again. No struggle. No body. Hardly a splash. At first I thought it was a good trick and I laughed. But it wasn't a trick. He was gone, laughing with me one second and gone the next. Like he never existed. Even before the Bardo, before the death rites were done, they cut my hair and sent me to the gompa in his place."

His face contorted with pain, Bajys looked into each of their faces, as though inviting any of them to explain it to him. But no one spoke. They sat silently watching the fire.

Shan studied his companions. He knew without asking that they had reached a common understanding. A killer had to be stopped. Khitai and the rest of the zheli had to be saved. The missing lama had to be found. But first Bajys would have to be taken to shelter by Lokesh, who could protect his soul, and by Jowa, who could protect his body. They would go deep into the mountains. And Shan would stay, because Shan had to go back to prison.

There was a mountain before him, and on the mountain was a squirrel and on the squirrel was a flea and on the flea was an eye that watched the sky, the flea wishing for wings. Shan kept his focus high, on the horizon. The mountain was there, but the rest was in his mind's eye only, his way of keeping distracted as the truck moved to the end of a long flat valley tucked into the north slope of the Kunlun. He shifted his gaze from the horizon to the floor of the truck, not daring to look at the huge barbed wire compound they approached.

He knew he had to speak to Lau's driver, Wangtu and any other of Xu's recent detainees Jakli might find. But as they had driven into the arid valley that contained Glory Camp, the black shapeless thing- his legacy of the gulag- had crawled into his gut again, and he had fought a sudden urge to leap out of the truck. No, it's only a reeducation camp, he told himself, not one of the gulag prisons where they trained you with electric shock and ball peen hammers, where misfits like Shan were sent to have their souls splintered and their bodies battered. Not a real prison. Only a reeducation camp, he told himself again as they approached the mile-long row of barbed wire that defined the front of the compound. But when he looked down he saw that his hands were shaking. He placed his right hand over his left forearm and squeezed, trying to control the reaction. Then he noticed the spot his hand covered and squeezed even tighter.

"Are you in pain?" Jakli inquired, with a motion of her hand that caused Fat Mao to slow the truck.

No, Shan was tempted to say, I am not in pain, I am in weakness. If he were caught and they checked the tattoo numbers, they would classify him as an escapee. What had Jowa said to Gendun? They would simply take Shan behind a rock and shoot him. He felt as though at any moment he would lose control of his body and it would fling itself out of the truck. But he just stared at the floor. On the floor was a pebble and on the pebble was a lichen and in the lichen lived a mite.

Jakli had driven from Lau's cabin to a small compound of windblown structures on the Kashgar highway consisting of a shed with a bank of gas pumps outside it, a larger garage building surrounded by vehicles in various states of disrepair, and, on the opposite side of the road, a square cinder block structure, painted yellow, with a large glass window and a hand-lettered sign that said only Tea. She made a series of phone calls from a phone by the gas pumps, and an hour later a delivery truck en route to Glory Camp had stopped for them. Three men were inside, Fat Mao at the wheel and two Kazakhs with heavy moustaches whom Shan recognized as Akzu's sons. The Kazakhs had climbed out onto the burlap sacks in the back of the heavy open bay vehicle to make room for Jakli and Shan in the cab. A fourth man had climbed down from the sacks, a sullen, broad-shouldered man with cold eyes and a gutter of scar tissue on his neck that could only have been made by a bullet. Jakli had introduced him as Ox Mao. Ox Mao had silently climbed into the turtle truck and driven away with Jowa, Lokesh, and Bajys.