"They're hard to find, the old cages. What happened to his?"

Shan smiled sadly as that part of the memory flooded over him. His father had left him with the old man one night, and they had stayed up until the crickets stopped singing in the early hours of the morning. "One of the few people who knew about him was a shepherd boy who brought rice cakes to him on festival days. But the boy joined the Red Guard and had a quota of reactionaries to arrest."

"Christ," Deacon muttered, as if he recognized the story.

"One day the boy came and told the old man that he would have to tell his platoon leader about him, that they would come the next day to take him away."

"Jesus. What did the old man do to the boy?"

"He thanked the boy for showing him respect," Shan said with a sigh. "That night, because the cages were from imperial China and he knew they would be crushed by the Guard, he freed all his singers. Then he waited until the moon rose and he burned all the cages. I know because my school class was required to go to the trial. The Guard was furious, because he refused to condemn the Taoists, and he only talked about that perfect moment, in a serene voice, about how the crickets had stayed and watched the fire and sung their most beautiful song ever as the cages burned. We were forced to leave, because the old man didn't follow the script." There had been another trial later, he recalled, when the Red Guard had begun to exhaust the supply of ready victims. They had arrested a vendor of crickets and put the insects on trial for contributing to the reactionary tradition. In the end they had roasted all the crickets on tiny spits and made the man eat them.

The laptop computer beeped and the screen went blank. Deacon took a step toward the workbench and closed the cover.

"I didn't know there was electricity," Shan said. "There wasn't any at Osman's."

"Only here. A portable solar rig. Charges the batteries enough for four or five hours' use."

Solar cells and crickets. A computer in an ancient Silk Road hut. An American hiding in a Chinese desert, drinking vodka with a Russian renegade. Jakli had taken him to another world, or several other worlds, none of which seemed connected to Lau or Gendun or the dead boys.

Shan could see the back table now, where Deacon had been working. The lens had been over a piece of cloth, an old faded textile with a crosshatch pattern of threads colored in shades of brown, yellow, and red. Deacon stepped forward, blocking his view of the table.

"Why are you here, Mr. Deacon?" Shan asked.

"Deacon. Just Deacon. I told you. Collecting crickets."

"I mean here, in Karachuk. In the Taklamakan. In Xinjiang."

Deacon smiled thinly and looked up at his crickets. "Maybe because of that grin on my boy's face. Hard to come by, back home." He looked at Shan. "Or maybe for the same reason as Marco, and Osman, and Jakli, and Nikki."

"You mean to hide?"

The American shook his head solemnly. "To the contrary. We came here to stop hiding. Here is where no one can hide."

"We?" Shan asked. "You and your son?"

Deacon frowned. "My wife and I."

"I thought that hiding was the point of Karachuk. Smugglers. Outcasts. They come here to hide."

"Then you don't get it. I've been everywhere, on every continent, even the Antarctic. This is the only place I know on earth where you're totally responsible for yourself. No police. No soldiers. No goddamned government to tell you what to think or to make it easy for people not to think. You have to be somebody here. You have to trust and be trusted."

Shan stepped closer to Deacon's worktable. Deacon moved to block him. "You have to trust," Shan said, repeating the American's words.

Deacon frowned. "You didn't say what happened to that old priest with the crickets."

Shan looked at the cages once more. "They beat him at the end of the trial. Then they forced other priests to beat him. He died and they burned his body, all on the same day they took him from the mountain." Shan sighed and looked at the cricket cages again. "My father got some ashes from where the fire was and he took me back there, to where the priest had lived. We made a secret shrine for the ashes. When we left at dusk the crickets were singing for him."

The American stood still and let Shan push past.

It was indeed an ancient textile Deacon had been studying, a piece of thickly woven reddish-brown fabric. The cloth was wrapped around something cylindrical, covered at one end with a bit of canvas. To the right was a small binocular microscope.

"Textbooks say you can only dye white wool, wool without natural pigment," Deacon said over his shoulder. "But in the Taklamakan they never read those books. This is wool from a brown sheep, with most of its threads colored with a red-purple dye through some process we don't understand yet." Deacon pointed to the crosshatch pattern. "Here, they wove with strands of undyed white wool and white wool dyed red."

Shan looked at him in confusion. Surely the American hadn't come halfway around the world to secretly study cloth.

Voices suddenly broke through the silence outside. Multiple voices, a commotion of running and shouting. Someone called for Marco. Deacon looked back at his door but seemed reluctant to leave Shan alone.

Someone shouted the American's name. The door swung open, but no one was behind it. As Deacon stepped toward the opening, Shan quickly pulled away the canvas at the end of the textile.

He stared in disbelief, fighting a sudden nausea. The fabric had been a pants leg. Extending from it was a human foot, small and shriveled, but unmistakably a foot.

"Shit," the American muttered, his eyes moving from Shan to the door.

Somebody shouted again and Marco's huge frame filled the doorway. He gestured for them to come out and retreated far enough for Shan to see Akzu behind him, looking so exhausted he could barely stand. Jakli ran up, holding a blanket around her shoulders.

"Someone killed a Public Security officer," Akzu gasped. "Lieutenant Sui. The knobs will be crawling all over the county in a few more hours. They will declare martial law." The Kazakh pronounced the words like a death sentence, then turned to Shan and the American as though further explanation were required. "Arrests will made, lots of arrests. Soldiers will sweep everywhere. Everyone must flee. They're going to take our families."

In the early morning light the stone sentinels of Karachuk seemed to have crouched, as though coiled for battle, sensing an approaching enemy. Indeed, the news brought by Akzu seemed to have transformed most of the town's inhabitants. The bright clothing Shan had seen the day before had been replaced by shades of brown and grey that blended with the desert. Long knives had appeared on many belts and, to Shan's great discomfort, rifles were slung on the shoulders of some of the Kazakhs.

He found Akzu and Osman at the corral, speaking in hushed, hurried tones.

"Where was Sui killed?" Shan asked. "Usually these things happen in the cities. Surely they wouldn't suspect the herdsmen."

"On the Kashgar highway," Akzu sighed, "twenty miles outside of Yoktian. No one lives there but Kazakh and Uighur herders. You know what the knobs will do. Sweep the camps for political undesirables. Curfews will be imposed. Four years ago when an army sergeant died martial law was declared for six months. Suspects were sent directly to the coal mines, their families to Glory Camp. The fools who did it have no idea of the suffering they will cause."