The winding tunnel opened into a broad chamber, which he realized had been a bowl in the outcropping that was covered by a roof. A dozen lamps set in wall niches illuminated what had once been a magnificent painting on the walls, a long continuous scene of a journey through an ancient land. To his left were sheep under willow trees, which grew along a road that linked the scene together. The road passed through low wooded mountains, and horses appeared, ridden by archers. The painting faded into the shadows at the back of the chamber, then emerged on Shan's right with scenes of camel caravans moving on sand toward snow-capped mountains.

Beyond a heavy table near the center of the room were several crude benches and sitting cushions arranged on an old carpet. Jakli sat on one of the cushions, staring at a lamp in her hands. She did not seem to notice as he stepped to the table. On it lay six long rectangular sandalwood boxes, plainly but expertly crafted with delicately fitted joints. Pechas, they were called, the Tibetan books that consisted of unbound pages of silk or parchment stacked inside a wooden case. One was open, and several of its pages were arranged in front of it as if it were being read. Behind the books was a bronze statue of Buddha, a foot high, and beside the large figure were several smaller figures of Buddha in gold, none more than three inches high. Below the table was a wooden box covered with dust-caked cloth. Shan pulled up a corner of the cloth. Inside was a jumble of spindles and cylinders, pieces of the prayer wheels used by Tibetan Buddhists.

He sat beside Jakli. "This was the place, wasn't it?"

She was weeping. No longer with the wracking sobs he had heard outside, not even with great emotion, but as she gazed silently into the lamp, he saw two tears roll down her cheeks. She looked up without embarrassment and nodded toward a pallet near the wall, in the darkest shadows of the chamber. He lifted a lamp and stepped toward the pallet. It was drawn up against a large object, covered with a cloth. He pulled on a corner of the cloth and it slowly slid away, revealing a three-foot-high Buddha carved of stone. The plaster just above the Buddha's left shoulder showed fracture lines extending from a single small hole. Down the left side of the statue a rust-colored stain ran to the floor.

"She started bringing me here years ago, whenever we happened to be at Karachuk together."

"She read the Buddhist books with you?"

"Sometimes. But mostly we sat and talked. It was just a quiet place." She looked about the room with a fond but melancholy expression. "For some people, once they knew about this place, this is where they would always go." Shan understood. He felt the reverence of the chamber. It was a place where he would go. Jakli looked back at the flame. "Sometimes she taught me things about healing. Sometimes, after she had gone to her council meetings, she told me about the silly things people do in towns. Ever since she learned my mother was Tibetan, she helped me keep her memory alive."

"Did you want to become a Buddhist?"

Jakli's eyes had drifted back to the stain on the statue. "Lau would never put a name on it. It was so I could worship my inner god, is what she would say." She held the lamp up, as though to better see Shan's eyes. "It is not a bad thing, to be a Buddhist."

"No, it is not," Shan said with a sad smile and followed her eyes toward his hand. It was wrapped around the gau that hung from his neck.

"Are you one, then?" she asked in a puzzled tone.

Shan thought a moment. "When I was young my father took me to the old Taoist temples. Then they were destroyed. When I was older," he said with a sigh, remembering the secret altars made of sticks in his prison barracks, the rosaries of seeds and fingernails and the prayer wheels made of tin cans, "I was taught by Buddhist lamas. But I keep the Taoist verses alive inside me, for their wisdom, and for my father." He looked at the mural on the wall. And I keep the Buddhist verses in my heart, he almost said, because they brought me back to life after I had died. "I guess I am like you," he said. "A little bit of a lot of things." He looked at the small Buddha. Once, in a prison barracks, he had seen an altar consisting only of a series of curved lines scratched on the wall, representing the outline of a seated Buddha.

"I was never sure. I worried about betraying one of them, my mother or my father," Jakli said in a distant voice. "But coming here- it was Marco who showed me Karachuk, when Nikki and I were children. We would sit on the rock and watch for ghosts. We weren't scared. For centuries Karachuk was inhabited only by ghosts. In the old Karachuk it was different. Look-" She rose and carried her lamp to the fresco on the far side of the table, near the desert caravan scene. It showed a domed building that appeared to be a mosque, with men in the red robes of Buddhist clergy standing in front of it, apparently conversing with mullahs. "Here, the Buddhists and the Muslims learned to live together, to share their wisdom."

He turned back to Jakli and saw her staring at the pallet where Lau had died. "I told her so many things," Jakli said, another tear escaping down her cheek. "What if Lau died because of my secrets?"

"Are your secrets so dangerous?" Shan asked in surprise.

"Maybe."

Shan remembered Marco's words at the bar. They've proven that Jakli's not innocent, three times over.

"Because of the things you went to rice camp for?" he asked quietly, looking at the fractured plaster above the statue. There had been no exit wound from the bullet that killed Lau. Her killer had fired another bullet over her head, into the plaster. To secure her, perhaps to make her sit still while he tied her to the Buddha.

Jakli shrugged. "You know how it is. Chinese pest control. All it takes is a few strong words to be sent behind the lao jiao wire."

"Three times," he said. Three bowls, he thought, remembering Wangtu's words.

"First time, I told a Chinese teacher that she was wrong to say Kazakhs and Uighurs were descended from Chinese. She took me to the headmaster. He hit me with a bamboo stick and I apologized. But when I left, there was a rally outside by the Muslim students. The headmaster said it was my fault, that I had organized a political protest. Eleven months in Glory Camp, memorizing the Chairman's verses. They never let me back into school after that."

"But that was only the first."

Jakli's eyes settled on the oil flame again. "At a collective meeting the Chinese birth inspectors announced a new campaign of enforcement. I stood up and asked them what right they had. We produce plenty of food to feed our families. There's plenty of land. I said they limit the number of babies and keep all the good doctors for the Han. Many more of our children die. It's just slow genocide, I said."

"You said that?" Shan asked in disbelief. "Genocide?"

"That was twelve more months, at a camp in the desert. Everything was full of sand there. It was the truth, what I said."

"I know," Shan said somberly. "But I never heard anyone say it in public."

"Then there was a campaign against smugglers. A tent at our clan's camp was found with boxes of Western medicines and portable tape players. You know, with the little headphones. They had no evidence, didn't know whose tent it was. I told them it was my tent."

"But you weren't smuggling."

"No. But the tent was my uncle's, and the goods were from Nikki. I couldn't let either of them get arrested. My uncle, he has to watch over the clan. And Nikki, they would be tough on him. He would be like a caged tiger if they put him behind wire. For me, all they could charge was concealing evidence. So I got ten more months in reeducation."