Lokesh wandered from the group and sat on the sand twenty feet away, facing the darkness. He seemed to be looking at something, or at least toward something. Shan considered the direction and noted the position of the small mountain they sat beside. His friend was looking toward the Well of Tears. Lokesh had heard lost souls there.
"Xu had a file on Americans," Shan said suddenly. He was reluctant to break the mood, but the words had to be spoken. Everyone seemed to freeze, and they all watched him intently now. "A list of visiting groups." He looked at Abigail Deacon. "She has your name."
She shrugged. "I was in a delegation. A group of professors, looking at the ruins of the Silk Road market towns. The Marco Polo tour, they called it."
"But only one name was circled on the list. Yours."
The American woman looked at him uncertainly, almost resentfully, as if Shan were accusing her.
"There could be a dozen reasons, Warp," her husband said. "Your flight connections were delayed."
"Sure," Dr. Najan confirmed. "They had to arrange a special car for you to catch up. That's when we first met, the day you caught up with us. Warp, she always wanted to do things not on the itinerary. Asked for a guide to take her to some of the old watch towers on the mountains. Asked for special food." He looked at Shan as if scolding him. "So they circle a name. Lots of reasons."
"Lots of reasons," Shan agreed woodenly. Good reasons. And bad reasons. He surveyed the team that lived in the little outpost. So far from the world, so absorbed in the grand mystery of their science, it would be easy to forget the bad reasons. The Public Security reasons. The Ministry of Justice reasons.
"The killer," Marco said. "He's hiding far away by now. With Sui murdered, he'll know the knobs will be angry as hornets."
"No," Shan said, and he pulled from his pocket the list of names that Jakli had retrieved from Lau's office. "He killed a third boy," he reminded them. "He has a plan." Shan handed the paper to Deacon, who produced a tiny flashlight. His wife held the paper as Deacon held the light and the others gathered around.
"Twenty-three names," Shan explained. "The zheli. The list is from the school records, the official roll of participants. Anyone could get it. You could print it from a government computer in Urumqi or Lhasa or Beijing if you wanted. Eleven girls. Twelve boys, nine left alive. First Suwan—" Shan pointed to the center of the list, then to two others. "Alta, and Kublai."
"But there's no logic, no way to know what the killer is thinking," Marco said.
"Wrong." Shan pulled a pencil from his pocket and reached for the paper, then handed pencil and paper to Jakli. "Eliminate the girls," he said.
She studied the paper and quickly drew lines through eleven names.
"Then Suwan," he said, and she put an X by the boy's name. "And the boy with the dropka parents who was killed—" Jakli made another mark. "And then Kublai." She made a third mark and returned the paper to the American woman.
The first X was on the center of the page. The next two were the top two names of boys.
"That's his great logic?" Marco asked skeptically, as if he thought little of Shan's discovery. "Just go down the list?"
"He targeted Suwan, and when Suwan proved not to have what he wanted he started from the top of the list."
Abigail Deacon gasped and grabbed her husband's leg tightly. "Micah!" she said in alarm, pointing to a name midway down the list. The fourth boy from the top. After Kublai came a boy named Batu, then Micah Karachuk.
"You can't run to him," Marco warned as he watched the Americans. "It may be what the knobs expect. They're watching everywhere. It must be why they haven't acted on Sui's murder, hoping you'll come out of hiding. You're too conspicuous. You'd be seen in the mountains, reported. Then Micah—" Marco shrugged. "Micah needs you to stay where you are."
Deacon nodded. "We made up the name," the American said in a near whisper as he stared at the list, then began to explain their decision to entrust their son to Lau. Soon after they had arrived in the desert it had become clear that their cavern at Sand Mountain was no place for a ten year old. He had met some of the zheli, had met Khitai, at a horse festival in the spring. Micah spoke Mandarin, as did most of the children, and was quickly picking up enough of the Turkic tongue to get by. He loved animals. The zheli was the perfect answer. He would be well protected, watched over by Lau and the nomads. "Besides," Deacon said, trying to lighten his wife's mood, "He's such a mischievous pup, the discipline of the sheep camps would be great for him. He loves it. Been with four different families so far."
"Lau knew this?" Shan asked.
"She suggested it. But kept it secret from the others. So Micah was just a Kazakh boy from a distant part of Xinjiang. Several of the children only spoke Mandarin, because they had been raised in government schools, so his not speaking the clan's tongue was not suspicious."
"So none of the children knew?" Shan asked.
"Not supposed to. But you know ten-year-old boys. Last month, Lau told us Micah had bragged about his parents, then at a class he handed around a jar of American peanut butter. We didn't know he had taken one. Then when I went to see him, he surprised me with three of his friends. Made me promise to come to some classes just before we left Xinjiang, to talk about our discoveries."
Shan stared at Deacon a moment. The Americans were planning to leave soon. Had the boys' killer learned this, and been forced into desperate action?
"He's made some good friends, better friends than in America," the boy's mother added. "Especially Khitai. Micah asked if Khitai could come to our moon festival, to hear the singers." There was no fear in her voice now, which comforted Shan. She had decided her son was safe.
"Stone Lake," Deacon said. "The next two classes are at Stone Lake. Lau always took the children there in the fall."
"If he comes," Jakli said. "Warnings have been going out. Some of the children may stay hidden in the mountains."
"The people he's with now," Deacon said, looking at his wife, "they are as hidden as hidden can be. Not a clan, just two men, a woman and two children. No assigned lands. No contact with the Brigade. The other children don't know where they are. Not even Lau knew all their hiding places. They just stay high up, until winter, roaming just below the ice fields. Lau said we shouldn't expect Micah to see us or anyone else, except on the class days."
"But the others," Jakli said in a forlorn voice. She read the next few names on the list. "They are in danger. The killer could be stalking them. Tonight."
The color had faded from the sky. A cricket sang from the rocks above. Lokesh took another cup of tea and sat, as if listening to something in the darkness. Then, from the edge of the little circle Lokesh spoke, unexpectedly, still looking out into the desert sky. "They say the Jade Basket can vanish, when evil draws near."
"What do you mean, Lokesh?" Jakli asked.
But even if the old Tibetan had been speaking to them a moment earlier, which was far from certain, he was conversing only with the stars now.
Shan realized that Marco had gone, then turned toward the entrance and saw him standing above, on a tall boulder that gave him a perch to see far out into the desert. And he was looking, looking hard. It was for Nikki, Shan realized, his son who was on caravan, smuggling goods across the border. Nikki, who was going to change Jakli's life forever. Shan saw that Jakli had noticed too. She followed Marco's gaze for a moment toward the darkness, then quickly turned back to the others.
"My cousins and the Maos won't find them all. We have to be there to warn them," she declared urgently. "They're supposed to be at Stone Lake in five days. Kaju is going there." She looked back at Shan. They had no vehicle, he realized. They were stranded in the desert.
"That Tibetan?" Najan asked. "He's one of them. Works for Ko. For the Poverty Scheme. Who best to trap the zheli than their own teacher?"
The words seemed to create a stillness in the air, like the calm Shan had felt before the horrible sand storm.
"No," Jakli said slowly. "The Brigade is only conducting business," she said uncertainly. "It has to be the knobs. Or Xu."
"Either way," Deacon said heavily, "the other boys have to be protected. They're in greater danger than Micah."
"A boy named Batu," Shan said toward the night sky. "Next on the list."
Marco appeared, his eyes still watching the desert. He poured himself a mug of tea, drained most of it in one gulp, then threw the remainder into the sand. "It's a clear night. With the stars out, we can navigate. I leave for the Kunlun in three hours. Sophie and I, we'll take you as far as town. The Maos are there, they can get you a truck."
"Then I suggest we get some sleep," Jakli said. She walked over and put her hand on Lokesh's shoulder. The old Tibetan turned his head, still wearing his distant expression, then rose and silently let her lead him inside.
Shan did not feel like sleeping. He had slept for two days already. He helped the others remove the cooking implements to one of the cells that had been converted to a pantry, then wandered along the murals on the walls. Lokesh was right, Shan felt it too. Never had he been anywhere where he felt so connected to the ancient world. It wasn't a quality of history he felt, nothing like the distance created by museum displays. It was a direct, visceral quality of continuity, of the great chain of life. No, perhaps it was only the chain of truth he sensed. Or maybe even simpler, a realization that people always had done good things, and it was only good things, not people, that endured.
But Shan was not sure what good things were anymore, or at least how he connected to good things. He was adrift, without answers to save the boys who were dying. His friends seemed to have secrets they could not share. His enemies seemed everywhere, yet impossible to find. His government would like nothing better than to put him behind prison walls again.
He found an oil lamp and wandered outside, climbing up the narrow trail that led to the top of the rocks. He lay back on a flat rock and mingled with the stars for several minutes, then lit the little lamp and took out his note pad and pencil.
Dear Father,
he started.
I have found a place from a different world, where I made a thousand-year-old friend.
He should have been using an inkstone and brush and was shamed that he had only his pad and a stub of a pencil.
Now I am supposed to provide everyone's answer
, he wrote,
but instead it feels like each person's tragedies and sorrows, now and in the future, cast a shadow and I attract the sorrows of all I meet, until I stand in the one place where all the shadows intersect, the darkest place of all.
I travel, but I have no destination. I have no family. I have no home to long for. I can only long for the longing. This is not what I expected my life to be, Father, when you and I wrote poems to the ducks.
Come closer, Father. Help me watch the stars.
He read it twice, then signed it.
Xiao Shan.
Little Shan, the way his father would have called him.
He would have liked to have bamboo splints and juniper, to make the kind of small fragrant fire that attracted spirits. But he had none. So he picked a few dried stems from the wiry bushes on top of the rock and arranged them in a small dense pile. He took a sheet of blank paper and folded it into an envelope, wrote his father's name on it, and set the letter on the twigs. It was a meager offering. He should have had rice paper, he should have spent an hour just practicing the rhythm of the ideograms before inscribing them in the bold flowing strokes his father had taught him.
Forgive me, father, for these my shortcomings
, he said in his heart, and lit the fire with the little lamp.
The ashes floated upward, toward the heavens. For a fleeting moment they drifted across the Northern Bushel, then they were gone.
After a long time Shan wandered back inside. The tunnels were silent. Even the camels were sleeping. With his little lamp held in front of him, he found the cell with the ancient pilgrim and sat beside him, gently pulling open the blanket that covered him so that Shan could see his hands and the worn spots at his knees that were the signs of a pilgrim. More than ever the man seemed to be asleep. Sometimes, when the light flickered, it seemed his mouth moved. He had been exposed in the karaburan that had almost killed Shan, the one that had made it impossible for Shan to leave for a new life. The scientists would take their samples from the pilgrim and he would be returned to the desert, perhaps to be exposed by another storm in a thousand years. A messenger. Or still a pilgrim, Gendun would have said, brought back to visit important places of virtue, to stir mindfulness in others, across time.
"My name is Shan Tao Yun," he said quietly to the silent figure. "I was born in Liaoning Province, near the sea, more than four decades ago." The words just came out, suddenly, without conscious effort. "When I was very small we made sweet rice cakes on festival days and took them to the temple. But sometimes I ate one when my parents weren't looking. They never found out." He spoke on, of memories that he thought he had lost until that instant, of his forgotten cousins and the way his mother sang opera songs to goats when they had been sent to a work camp. He smiled as he spoke, because the ancient man had come back and unlocked more doors in chambers he had forgotten how to visit.
