“It will be hard to see each other in this soup,” said Lhomo. “Keep circling to the left. Stay within five meters of the one in front of you. Same order as our march—Aenea after me in your yellow wing, then the blue man in blue, then you, Raul, in the green. Our greatest risk is losing one another in the clouds.”

Aenea nodded tersely. “I’ll stay close to your wing.”

Lhomo looked at me. “You and Aenea can communicate via your skinsuit comthreads, but that will not help you find one another. A. Bettik and I will communicate via hand signals. Be careful. Do not lose sight of the blue man’s kite. If you do, keep circling up counterclockwise until you clear the cloud tops and then try to regroup with us. Keep the circles tight while inside the clouds. If you loosen them—which is the tendency with parawings—you will strike the cliff.”

My mouth was dry as I nodded.

“All right,” said Lhomo. “I will see you all above the clouds. Then I will find the thermals for you, read the ridge lift, and get you to the jet stream. I will signal like this”—he made a fist and pumped his arm twice—“when I am leaving you. Keep climbing and circling. Get as deeply into the stream as you can. Rise into the upper atmospheric winds until you think that they will tear your wing apart from above you. Perhaps they will. But you will have no chance to reach T’ai Shan unless you get into the center of the stream. It is a hundred and eleven klicks to the first shoulder of the Great Peak where you can breathe true air.”

We all nodded.

“May the Buddha smile on our folly today,” said Lhomo. He seemed very happy.

“Amen,” said Aenea.

Lhomo turned without another word and leaped out over the cliff’s edge. Aenea followed a second later. A. Bettik leaned far forward in his harness, kicked off the ledge, and was swallowed up by clouds within seconds. I scurried to catch up. Suddenly there was no stone under my feet and I leaned forward until I was prone in the harness. Already I had lost sight of A. Bettik’s blue wing. The swirling clouds confused and disoriented me. I pulled on the control bar, banking the hang glider as I had been taught, peering intently through the fog for a glimpse of any of the other kites. Nothing.

Belatedly I realized that I had held the turn for too long. Or had I released it too soon? I leveled off the wing, feeling thermals pushing at the fabric above me but not being able to tell if I was actually gaining altitude because I was blind. The fog was like some terrible snowblindness.

Without thinking, I shouted, hoping one of the others would shout back and orient me. A man’s shout hurtled back to me from just a few meters dead ahead. It was my own voice, echoing off the vertical rock of the cliff face I was about to strike.

Nemes, Scylla, and Briareus move south on foot from the Pax Enclave at the Phallus of Shiva. The sun is high and there are thick clouds to the east. To travel from the Pax Enclave to the Winter Palace at Potala, the old High Way southwest along the Koko Nor Ridge had been repaired and widened, and a special cable platform had been built where the ten-klick wire ran from Koko Nor southwest to the palace. A palanquin specially rigged for the Pax diplomats now hangs from pulleys at the new platform. Nemes pushes to the front of the line and steps into it, ignoring the stares from the little people in thick chubas who mill on the stairway and platform. When her clone-siblings are in the cage, she releases the two brakes and sends the palanquin hurtling across the gap. Dark clouds rise above the palace mountain.

A squad of twenty Palace Guard carrying halberds and crude energy lances greets them at the Great Terrace Steps on the west side of Yellow Hat Ridge where the palace drops away down the east face for several vertical kilometers. The captain of the Guard is deferential. “You must wait here until we bring an honor guard to escort you into the palace, Most Honored Guests,” he says, bowing.

“We prefer to go in alone,” says Nemes.

The twenty Guardsmen crouch with lances at port arms. They make a solid wall of iron, zygoat fur, silk, and elaborate helmets. The Guard captain bows lower. “I apologize for my unworthiness, Most Honored Guests, but it is not possible to enter the Winter Palace without an invitation and an honor guard. Both will be here in a minute. If you will be so kind as to wait in the shade under the pagoda roof here, Honored Guests, a personage of the proper rank to greet you will arrive in only a moment.”

Nemes nods. “Kill them,” she says to Scylla and Briareus and walks forward into the palace as her siblings phase-shift.

They shift down during the long walk through the many-leveled palace, shifting into fast time only to kill guards and servants. When they exit by the main steps and approach the Pargo Kaling, the great Western Gate on this side of the Kyi Chu Bridge, they find Regent Reting Tokra blocking the way with five hundred of his finest Palace Guard troops. A few of these elite fighters carry swords and pikes, but most hold cross bows, slug rifles, crude energy weapons, and railguns.

“Commander Nemes,” says Tokra, lowering his head slightly but not bowing so much as to lose eye contact with the woman in front of him. “We have heard what you did at Shivling. You can go no farther.” Tokra nods at someone high up in the gleaming eyes on the Pargo Kaling tower and the black chrome bridge of Kyi Chu slides silently back into the mountain. Only the great suspension cables remain far above, ringed about with razor wire and frictionless gel.

Nemes smiles. “What are you doing, Tokra?”

“His Holiness has gone to Hsuan-k’ung Ssu,” says the thin-faced Regent. “I know why you travel that way. You cannot be allowed to harm His Holiness the Dalai Lama.”

Rhadamanth Nemes shows more of her small teeth. “What are you talking about, Tokra? You sold out your dear little boy-god to the Pax secret service for thirty pieces of silver. Are we bartering here for more of your stupid six-sided coins?”

The Regent shakes his head. “The agreement with the Pax was that His Holiness would never be hurt. But you…”

“We want the girl’s head,” says Nemes. “Not your boy lama’s. Get your men out of our way or lose them.”

Regent Tokra turns and barks an order at his row upon row of soldiers. The men’s faces are grim as they raise their weapons to their shoulders. The mass of them blocks the way to the bridge, even though the roadway of the bridge is no longer there. Dark clouds boil in the chasm.

“Kill them all,” says Nemes, phase-shifting.

Lhomo had trained us all in the hang-glider controls, but I had never had the opportunity to fly one before. Now, as the cliff rose out of the fog in front of me, I had to do the correct thing immediately or die.

The kite was controlled by manipulating the control bar that hung in front of me as I dangled in my harness, and I leaned as far left and put as much weight on it as the rigging allowed. The parawing banked, but not steeply enough, I realized at once. The kite was going to intercept the rock wall a meter or two away from the outer apex of its arc. There was another set of controls—handle grips that spilled air from the dorsal surface at the leading edge of each side of the dorsal wing—but these were dangerous and tricky and for emergency use only.

I could see the lichen on the approaching rock wall. This was an emergency.

I pulled hard on the left panic handle, the nylon on the left side of the parawing opened like a slit purse, the right wing—still catching the strong ridge lift here—banked up steeply, the parawing turned almost upside down with its useless left wing spilling air like so much empty aluminum frame, my legs were flung out sideways as the kite threatened to stall and plummet into the rocks, my boots actually brushed stone and lichen, and then the wing was falling almost straight down, I released the left handle, the active-memory fabric on the left leading surface healed itself in an instant, and I was flying again—although in a near vertical dive.