"Nearly six months now."

"They say your predecessor was killed."

Director Wen nodded his head sadly. "They consider him something of a martyr back home."

"But don't you fear for your life? I saw no guards."

"We cannot be bullied, Comrade. I have a job to do," Wen declared somberly. "The minorities have a right to preserve their culture. But unless there is balance, there is danger from reactionaries. Just a few of us have been trusted by Beijing to stand in the middle. Without us there would be chaos."

The seeds of the night sky grew in Tibet. There the stars were the thickest, the dark blackest, the heavens closest. People looked up and cried without knowing why. Prisoners sometimes stole from their huts, under threat of the stable, to lie on the ground silently watching the heavens. The year before at the 404th an old priest had been found in such a position one morning, frozen, his dead eyes fixed on the sky. He had written two words in the snow at his side. Catch me.

Shan leaned his head on the window as the truck climbed out of the valley on its long trip north, farther and farther into the sky. There was a test for novices at some gompas. Go out in the night and lie at a place of sky burial. Contemplate the heavens beside the bird-picked bones. Some did not come back.

"Everyone talks about this prisoner Lokesh." Yeshe's voice came out of the darkness behind Shan. "You did something for him."

"Did something?" Sergeant Feng interjected gruffly. "Kicked us in the ass, that's what."

"Just a harmless old man. A tzedrung," Shan said, using the Tibetan term for a monk official. "He had been a tax collector in the Dalai Lama's government," Shan explained. "It was long past time for his release."

Feng snorted. "Right. We just let the prisoners decide when we should open the gate."

"But how could you-" Yeshe leaned forward. Having built up the courage to ask, he was not going to let go.

"I had seen a decree from the State Council ten years before. In honor of Chairman Mao's birthday, amnesty was declared for all members of the former Tibetan government. The decree had been overlooked by Warden Zhong."

"So you just instructed the warden about his duties?" Yeshe asked with disbelief.

"I reminded him."

"Shit," Sergeant Feng groused. "Reminded him! Like a grenade down his pants he reminded him." He slowed the truck and leaned toward Yeshe. "What Prisoner Shan does not say is that he couldn't remind anyone. Would have broken discipline. So instead he asked the political officer for materials to make a banner in honor of Mao's day."

"A banner?"

"Big damned banner for all the world to see. Showed patriotic spirit, Lieutenant Chang bragged. Families were coming. Townsfolk were coming. Guards were on parade. Out comes the banner, on the roof of their hut. All honor to Mao, it said, in whose honor the State Council reprieved all former officials. Even showed the month and year of the decree, so no one would be confused. Political officer, he spent lots of time with Shan that week."

"But this old man got released?"

"A petition was presented to Colonel Tan. It wasn't just a violation of law, it was a violation of a gift from Mao. Threat of demonstrations. So the colonel admitted to the world that Warden Zhong had made a mistake."

On they drove, mile after mile, mingling with the stars. They were so high now the road seemed to have lost all connection to the planet. Only a few black patches along the edge of the sky showed they were still among the mountains.

"Why were you scared of Director Wen?" Shan heard himself asking Yeshe, unaware the question was even on his tongue.

"I did not intend to be scared," came the disembodied reply a long time later. "But he is the kenpo. For all of Lhadrung."

The earnest young Director Wen an abbot? Then Shan understood. "A priest would be scared of Wen." Wen's chop made priests, or ruined priests. His chop ruined gompas.

"I am not a priest."

"You were a priest." Shan remembered Yeshe's haunting mantra in the skull cave.

"I don't know." Yeshe's voice was hesitant, and pained. "It was just a stage of my life. It was over long ago."

You have no long ago, Shan almost said. Don't dare to speak of long ago, not until like the rest of us you have endured your ration of nightmares, not until you have memories so brittle they snap like twigs when the political officers scream for you to confess them. "Then you went to school in Chengdu," Shan said instead. "But you were sent back for reeducating. Why?"

"It was a misunderstanding."

"You mean a miscarriage of justice?"

Yeshe made a sound that may have been meant as a laugh. "Someone replaced a picture of Mao with a photo of the Dalai Lama in one of the classrooms. When no one would confess to the act, all six Tibetan students were sent home."

"You mean it wasn't you?"

"I wasn't even at school that day," Yeshe said forlornly. "I skipped to get tickets for an American movie."

"Did you get them?" Feng asked after a moment. "The tickets."

"No," Yeshe sighed. "They were sold out."

The silence of the sky overwhelmed Shan again. A ghost appeared in the headlights and seemed to hover as it watched them. Feng gasped. Only as it slipped over the side of the mountain did Shan see its wings. An owl.

"My old man was a carpenter." The words suddenly floated into the air, like an uncontrolled thought. It took a moment for Shan to realize it was Feng. "They took away his shop, his tools, everything. Because he owned them. Landlord class. Dug irrigation ditches for ten years. But at night he made things." There was something new in Feng's voice. He had felt it, too. The darkness.

"Out of cardboard. Out of dried grass. Sticks. Beautiful things. Boxes. Even cabinets."

"Yes," Shan said uncertainly, not because he knew such a carpenter but because he had known many such heroes.

"I asked him why. I was just a stupid kid. But he looked at me, all wise. Know what he said?"

A meteor shot across the sky. No one spoke.

"What he said," Feng continued at last. "He said you must always step forward from where you stand."

Shan watched the stars for several more moments. "He was very wise," he said. "I would have liked to have known your father."

He heard Feng suck in his gut in surprise. Then he made the low gurgling noise that was his laugh.

Another meteor streaked by. "Some of the old yaks say that each shooting star is a soul attaining Buddhahood," Shan observed languidly.

"The old yaks?" Yeshe asked.

Shan didn't realize he had spoken aloud. "The first generation of prisoners. The oldest survivors." Shan smiled in the darkness. "My first winter at the 404th we had snow removal duty in the high passes. Bitter cold. The winds, they would do strange things with the snow. Thirty-foot drifts in one spot, bare earth in the next. Boulders sculpted with ice and snow to look like huge creatures from your dreams. One day after a new snow we're digging out the road and there's a big boulder where there never was one before. Brought down by an avalanche, someone said.

"We shoveled snow. It blew back. We shoveled again. Later, behind us, one of the guards screams. The boulder's staring at him." Shan smiled again. He had forgotten how fond he was of the memory. "It was an old yak, letting the snow cover him to avoid the cold of the storm. He just stood there, like he was part of the mountain, watching the insanity of the world around him. On the way back one of the prisoners said it reminded him of the old monks in the 404th. Ageless, indestructible, like a mountain with legs, at peace in the most tormenting environment. The name just stuck."