"Rinpoche," Yeshe said urgently. "You were the Tamdin dancer at Saskya. You kept the costume until last year. Who took it from you?" he pleaded. "Did you teach it to them? Who was it? We must learn who took the costume."

Je gave a hoarse laugh. "I knew people like you in the other place," he said with a rasping breath.

"Rinpoche. Please. Who was it?"

His eyes flickered and shut. There was a new sound, a rattle in his chest. They watched in agonized silence for several minutes.

Then the eyes opened again, very wide. "In the end," he said slowly, as though listening for something, each word punctuated by the wheezing rattle, "all it takes is one perfect sound." He closed his eyes and the rattle stopped.

"He's dead," Dr. Sung announced.

Yeshe stared at the body in utter desolation. The eyes of the old man at the foot of the pallet welled with tears. A voice in the back shouted out an epithet in Tibetan. The priest who had been conducting the Bardo ceremony began to speak with a chilling ferocity, a dark chant Shan had never heard before. He was glaring at Yeshe as he spoke, his invective coming faster and louder. Yeshe stared at him mutely, his face drained of color.

Shan pulled Yeshe's arm but he seemed unable to move. The attending priest, tears pouring down his cheek, was frantically searching through the hair on the crown of Je's head. If properly prepared, Je's soul would have drifted out a tiny hole thought to be on every human's crown.

"Get him a bone!" someone yelled from the rear.

"His name is Yeshe!" another shouted. "Khartok gompa."

Shan put his shoulder into Yeshe and pushed him out of the yurt. Something inside Yeshe had collapsed. He seemed suddenly feeble and senseless. Shan took his hand and led him to the cell block. Inside, Sungpo was chanting now, a new mantra, a sad mantra. Somehow he knew.

"It doesn't matter," Shan said to Yeshe, not because he believed it but because he couldn't bear for Yeshe to become still another victim.

"Above all, it matters." Yeshe was shaking now. He stepped into an empty cell and gripped the bars to steady himself. There was a fear on his face that Shan had never seen before. "What I did- it destroyed the moment of his transition. I ruined his soul. I ruined my soul," he said with chilling certainty. "And I don't even know why."

"You did it to help Sungpo. You did it to find justice for Dilgo. You did it for the truth." He hadn't told Yeshe about the coral rosary in the Lhasa museum, the duplicate of Dilgo's, the rosary that no doubt had been planted to implicate Dilgo and ensnare Yeshe in the lies. It didn't matter that Yeshe learned of the evidence, because his heart had learned of the lie long ago.

"Your justice. Your damned justice," he groaned. "Why did I believe you?" He seemed to be getting smaller, shrinking before Shan's eyes. "Maybe it's true," Yeshe said, with a realization that seemed to horrify him. "Maybe you did summon Tamdin. Maybe he's been lurking around us all the time. Maybe he used you to create the ruthlessness. He lays waste to everything, lays waste even to souls, in the search for truth."

"You can go to your gompa. You want to be a priest again, you've shown me. They will help you."

Yeshe moved to the back wall and slumped against it. When he looked up he appeared so gaunt it seemed the flesh had shriveled on his bones. His color had not returned. He was not Yeshe, but a ghost of Yeshe. "They will spit on me. They will drive me from the temples. I can never go back now. And I can't go to Sichuan. I can't be one of them anymore. I don't want to be a good Chinese," he said. "You destroyed that for me, too." He fixed Shan with haunted eyes. "What have you done to me? I took four. I might as well have jumped from a cliff." Throw him a bone, the monks had said. "For nothing."

He slowly slid down the wall to the floor. Tears were streaming down his cheek. He found his rosary and pulled it apart. The beads slowly dropped onto the floor and rolled away.

Numbed by his helplessness, Shan filled a tea mug with water and handed it to him. It fell through Yeshe's hands and shattered on the floor. Struggling to find words of comfort, Shan began picking up the pieces of porcelain, then stopped and dropped to his knees. He stared at the shards in his hands.

"No," Shan said excitedly. "Je told us exactly what we needed to know. Look!" he said, shaking Yeshe's shoulder as he held up a shard. "Do you see it?"

But Yeshe was beyond hearing him. With an aching heart Shan rose, gave Yeshe one last painful look, then darted out of the building.

When Sergeant Feng and Shan arrived at the market, Feng made no effort to leave the truck. Shan moved straight toward the healer's shop. But he did not enter Khorda's hut. He stood in the alley beside it. A youth in a herder's vest appeared beside him. "Wait," the youth said urgently. Moments later he returned with the scar-faced purba.

"You don't need to go to the mountain," Shan told him. "You don't need to sacrifice yourself. I found another way."

The purba looked at him skeptically.

"I need to go with the food today. To the 404th," Shan said.

"We don't deliver the food. It is the responsibility of the relief association."

"But sometimes you go with them. There is no time for games. I know what happens now. Sometimes you leave someone behind."

"I don't understand," the purba said stiffly.

"The camp of the 404th is built on rock. There is no tunnel. There is no hole in the wirefence. And no one is flying through the air like an arrow."

The purba surveyed the marketplace over Shan's shoulder. "Have you finished your investigation?"

"I've seen Trinle. Not at the 404th."

"Trinle is a very holy man. He is often underestimated."

"I don't underestimate him. Not now. For him the 404th is not a prison. He comes and goes on the business of Nambe gompa. He comes and goes with the purbas. There is no one else who could do it for him."

"And how would we perform this magic?"

"I don't know exactly. But it shouldn't be difficult so long as the headcount isn't changed."

The purba winced, as though he had bitten something sour. "To take the place of a prisoner would be foolhardy. It would risk immediate execution."

"Which is why it is a purba who does it."

The man did not react.

"Trinle is sick more than most," Shan said. "We have become used to it. Sometimes he stays confined to his bunk with his blanket over his head. Now I know why. Because it isn't him. I can guess how it is done. On agreed days purbas help with the food, when the relief association serves meals. One man wears prison clothes under his civilian clothes. When Trinle reaches the food tables there is a distraction. Perhaps he ducks under the tables and puts on the civilian clothes. The purba switches with him, and stays in the 404th until Trinle returns. The guards are not fastidious. They don't know every prisoner's face. As long as the headcount is the same, how could there be an escape? And as long as his face stays hidden, what other prisoners will suspect?"

The purba stared at Shan. "What exactly do you want?"

"I need to get through the dead zone. Today."