"But you have a new horse now," Shan offered at last.

"That one? Just from the Red Stone herd. I don't have a horse life anymore," she said with great sadness, then climbed back onto the sacks for sleep.

Shan leaned against the pole, watching for another quarter hour, then followed the others onto the sacks. But Shan did not sleep. He watched.

The compound was empty but the lights were on at the guard towers, which switched on spotlights at irregular intervals to sweep along the fence. There was no chance of sneaking through the wire to find the waterkeeper, no chance of searching for Gendun in the special detention barracks. Shan looked back at the boiler. Electricity was still being used. Someone would have to go to the boiler to stoke the coal.

He watched the moon rise and listened to the national anthem played over the public address system to signal curfew. What was the curfew discipline in a lao jiao camp, Shan wondered. Surely it could not be as severe as that at his gulag prison, where questions were never asked. Gulag prisoners caught out after curfew were shot on sight.

He must have dozed, for when he looked up he saw the smoke from the boiler was much heavier. The boiler had been replenished. There was no sign of the workers. He waited another quarter hour, then quietly climbed past his sleeping companions and retrieved the flashlight from the cab. Its batteries were nearly exhausted, its light barely reaching three feet. Perfect for his needs.

Walking slowly, heart pounding, he crossed the compound and circled the little shed by the boiler house. There was a window at the rear. Locked. He put his face to the glass but could see nothing. From the front corner he surveyed the compound. A single vehicle with brilliant headlights moved along the outer wire, a truck on patrol.

Shan waited for the truck to pass along the front of the compound and turn down the far side, then tested the front door. It was open. There were two small rooms. Inside the first was a collection of shovels and rakes and brooms, with a long bundle wrapped in burlap on the floor. Shan had seen such bundles before, in carpet markets. The looms of Xinjiang, especially of this far southwestern corner of the region, had been providing carpets to China and the rest of the world since the days of the Silk Road.

He moved into the rear chamber, which was larger than the first. In rows stacked five and six high were cardboard boxes. Most of them were glued shut, fresh from the factory, but the dim light of his hand lantern revealed their packing labels, in English and Japanese. Radios were inside, and tape recorders, and video cameras. And more than thirty small boxes containing a machine called a disc player. Two airtight metal ammunition cases held bottles of pharmaceuticals, in their original factory packages. Some he recognized as antibiotics, others bore English trade names that meant nothing to him. He pulled a small pad of paper from his pocket and listed the contents of the inventory, then quickly scrawled at the top of the pad, Glory Camp, Black Market Goods.

Preoccupied with speculation over why the knobs had been guarding the goods- were they merely protecting evidence, or were they protecting their investment? -Shan stepped back into the entry chamber and knelt at the carpet, which no doubt was part of the same hoard of goods. The flashlight fell and rolled onto the floor as he leaned over. Not bothering to pick it up, he placed his fingers inside the bundle to feel the density of the weave, for an indication of its value. He recoiled in horror.

A feeble cry escaped his lips as he threw himself backward. His chest heaving, he crawled to the doorway. Cracking open the door, he lay there, gulping in the cool night air to calm himself. It was several minutes before he had steeled himself enough to return to the bundle.

It was not a carpet. He found the flashlight, then folded back the sacking and studied his grisly discovery. A young man stared back at him, surprised and lifeless. His skin was covered with soot, his hair jet black. The body had not been lifeless long enough to be cold. He saw moisture on his own hand and leaned closer. The man's left ear had been severed. It was an old form of torture that had been popular during the Cultural Revolution. When a prisoner refused to divulge information, refused to implicate others with information he had heard, the ear was severed. If you will not share with us what you have heard, then what value are your ears, Red Guard interrogators would shout. The face wore the remains of a grin. The great sadness that had descended on Shan flashed into horror again as he brought the failing light closer to the man's open eyes. They were blue.

He rubbed a corner of the sacking on the scalp and it came away with a greasy black smudge. He smelled it. Shoe polish. He wiped more of the man's scalp, exposing hair the color of broom straw. He dragged a fingernail over the deep layer of soot that covered the man's face, leaving a white track. It was the stranger from the power plant, the American who had taunted him at the boiler.

Lowering himself into the lotus position, he extinguished the light, leaving the room lit only by the rays of the half moon that floated through the open door. It wasn't death that weighed so heavily on him, but that death was so familiar. Since he had left his former incarnation in Beijing, death had seemed to be everywhere. Perhaps it was what one of his teachers had said, that death was the final measurement in the dimensions of souls. Maybe that was what unsettled him so, that death seemed to amplify how incomplete most humans were, and that the closer to death he got, the more incomplete he felt.

Shan did not know how long he sat in the moonlight with the dead man. When he surfaced to consciousness he realized he was reciting a Buddhist prayer for the passage of souls. He sighed and began to unwrap the body of the Westerner, switching on his light again. On the left hand was a line of clean white skin where a ring had been removed. The right hand still bore a ring. Shan eased it off, a simple circle of steel with a crude hatchmark design scratched in its surface, which no doubt remained only because of its negligible value. The pockets of the man's shirt were empty. He opened the shirt. A scar creased the upper right shoulder. A large oval birthmark lay above the right hip.

The man's denim pants bore an American label. Levi's. Their pockets appeared empty. His expensive American hiking boots had been removed. He pushed his fingers to the bottom of the pockets, and from the right rear pocket extracted a rolled up piece of paper pressed against the bottom, where it had been overlooked by whomever emptied the pockets. A series of abbreviations were written on it in English, arranged in five rows. FBP it said, then SBRF, SSCF, TBLF, and on the final line only C.

He knelt at the American's head and stared intensely into the man's eyes, as if he could will them to life again. He knew nothing about the man, except that he had been young, and strong, and jovial. And far from anywhere that might have been called a home.

The knobs did this. The knobs had killed an American, he realized suddenly. What was it the American had done that made him so dangerous? Even for the knobs, killing a foreigner was profoundly dangerous. And what was the American doing that was important enough to risk his life in such a faraway, forgotten place? Sometimes the boot squads brought special prisoners here from far away, Jakli had said, secret prisoners.

Shan slowly rewrapped the shroud, then stood, took two steps, and clutched his chest as the helplessness surged through him once more. He darted outside, moving to the rear of the small building, where he leaned against the wall in his weakness, gulping the fresh night air, trying to purge himself of the smell of death. As he sank to his knees he heard the haunting voice again, as clearly as if the forlorn dropka had been standing behind him. You must hurry. Death keeps coming.