The gap between the rocks quickly closed up to form a passageway- not a cave, but a structure created long ago by building a roof over the cleft and squaring the walls with plaster. The first thirty feet were deep in shadow. Wary of falling into a concealed crevasse, Shan was about to retreat when the passage curved and he saw the small pool of light cast by a flickering oil lamp. The flame illuminated a dim image on the wall, the head of a bull with angry eyes, wearing a necklace of skulls. A Buddhist image, the shape of Yamantaka, king of the dead. Shan followed the path lit by another lamp ten feet away, then another, studying with reverent awe the paintings of wild animals and landscapes that came into view on the walls. After the fourth lamp, past a patch of naked rock where the plaster had crumbled away, the paintings changed. There was a gentle-looking deer, an image that had grown familiar to Shan in his visits to gompas, the symbol of Buddha's home in India, followed by scenes from the life of Buddha.
The winding tunnel opened into a broad chamber, which he realized had been a bowl in the outcropping that was covered by a roof. A dozen lamps set in wall niches illuminated what had once been a magnificent painting on the walls, a long continuous scene of a journey through an ancient land. To his left were sheep under willow trees, which grew along a road that linked the scene together. The road passed through low wooded mountains, and horses appeared, ridden by archers. The painting faded into the shadows at the back of the chamber, then emerged on Shan's right with scenes of camel caravans moving on sand toward snow-capped mountains.
Beyond a heavy table near the center of the room were several crude benches and sitting cushions arranged on an old carpet. Jakli sat on one of the cushions, staring at a lamp in her hands. She did not seem to notice as he stepped to the table. On it lay six long rectangular sandalwood boxes, plainly but expertly crafted with delicately fitted joints. Pechas, they were called, the Tibetan books that consisted of unbound pages of silk or parchment stacked inside a wooden case. One was open, and several of its pages were arranged in front of it as if it were being read. Behind the books was a bronze statue of Buddha, a foot high, and beside the large figure were several smaller figures of Buddha in gold, none more than three inches high. Below the table was a wooden box covered with dust-caked cloth. Shan pulled up a corner of the cloth. Inside was a jumble of spindles and cylinders, pieces of the prayer wheels used by Tibetan Buddhists.
He sat beside Jakli. "This was the place, wasn't it?"
She was weeping. No longer with the wracking sobs he had heard outside, not even with great emotion, but as she gazed silently into the lamp, he saw two tears roll down her cheeks. She looked up without embarrassment and nodded toward a pallet near the wall, in the darkest shadows of the chamber. He lifted a lamp and stepped toward the pallet. It was drawn up against a large object, covered with a cloth. He pulled on a corner of the cloth and it slowly slid away, revealing a three-foot-high Buddha carved of stone. The plaster just above the Buddha's left shoulder showed fracture lines extending from a single small hole. Down the left side of the statue a rust-colored stain ran to the floor.
"She started bringing me here years ago, whenever we happened to be at Karachuk together."
"She read the Buddhist books with you?"
"Sometimes. But mostly we sat and talked. It was just a quiet place." She looked about the room with a fond but melancholy expression. "For some people, once they knew about this place, this is where they would always go." Shan understood. He felt the reverence of the chamber. It was a place where he would go. Jakli looked back at the flame. "Sometimes she taught me things about healing. Sometimes, after she had gone to her council meetings, she told me about the silly things people do in towns. Ever since she learned my mother was Tibetan, she helped me keep her memory alive."
"Did you want to become a Buddhist?"
Jakli's eyes had drifted back to the stain on the statue. "Lau would never put a name on it. It was so I could worship my inner god, is what she would say." She held the lamp up, as though to better see Shan's eyes. "It is not a bad thing, to be a Buddhist."
"No, it is not," Shan said with a sad smile and followed her eyes toward his hand. It was wrapped around the gau that hung from his neck.
"Are you one, then?" she asked in a puzzled tone.
Shan thought a moment. "When I was young my father took me to the old Taoist temples. Then they were destroyed. When I was older," he said with a sigh, remembering the secret altars made of sticks in his prison barracks, the rosaries of seeds and fingernails and the prayer wheels made of tin cans, "I was taught by Buddhist lamas. But I keep the Taoist verses alive inside me, for their wisdom, and for my father." He looked at the mural on the wall. And I keep the Buddhist verses in my heart, he almost said, because they brought me back to life after I had died. "I guess I am like you," he said. "A little bit of a lot of things." He looked at the small Buddha. Once, in a prison barracks, he had seen an altar consisting only of a series of curved lines scratched on the wall, representing the outline of a seated Buddha.
"I was never sure. I worried about betraying one of them, my mother or my father," Jakli said in a distant voice. "But coming here- it was Marco who showed me Karachuk, when Nikki and I were children. We would sit on the rock and watch for ghosts. We weren't scared. For centuries Karachuk was inhabited only by ghosts. In the old Karachuk it was different. Look-" She rose and carried her lamp to the fresco on the far side of the table, near the desert caravan scene. It showed a domed building that appeared to be a mosque, with men in the red robes of Buddhist clergy standing in front of it, apparently conversing with mullahs. "Here, the Buddhists and the Muslims learned to live together, to share their wisdom."
He turned back to Jakli and saw her staring at the pallet where Lau had died. "I told her so many things," Jakli said, another tear escaping down her cheek. "What if Lau died because of my secrets?"
"Are your secrets so dangerous?" Shan asked in surprise.
"Maybe."
Shan remembered Marco's words at the bar. They've proven that Jakli's not innocent, three times over.
"Because of the things you went to rice camp for?" he asked quietly, looking at the fractured plaster above the statue. There had been no exit wound from the bullet that killed Lau. Her killer had fired another bullet over her head, into the plaster. To secure her, perhaps to make her sit still while he tied her to the Buddha.
Jakli shrugged. "You know how it is. Chinese pest control. All it takes is a few strong words to be sent behind the lao jiao wire."
"Three times," he said. Three bowls, he thought, remembering Wangtu's words.
"First time, I told a Chinese teacher that she was wrong to say Kazakhs and Uighurs were descended from Chinese. She took me to the headmaster. He hit me with a bamboo stick and I apologized. But when I left, there was a rally outside by the Muslim students. The headmaster said it was my fault, that I had organized a political protest. Eleven months in Glory Camp, memorizing the Chairman's verses. They never let me back into school after that."
"But that was only the first."
Jakli's eyes settled on the oil flame again. "At a collective meeting the Chinese birth inspectors announced a new campaign of enforcement. I stood up and asked them what right they had. We produce plenty of food to feed our families. There's plenty of land. I said they limit the number of babies and keep all the good doctors for the Han. Many more of our children die. It's just slow genocide, I said."
"You said that?" Shan asked in disbelief. "Genocide?"
"That was twelve more months, at a camp in the desert. Everything was full of sand there. It was the truth, what I said."
"I know," Shan said somberly. "But I never heard anyone say it in public."
"Then there was a campaign against smugglers. A tent at our clan's camp was found with boxes of Western medicines and portable tape players. You know, with the little headphones. They had no evidence, didn't know whose tent it was. I told them it was my tent."
"But you weren't smuggling."
"No. But the tent was my uncle's, and the goods were from Nikki. I couldn't let either of them get arrested. My uncle, he has to watch over the clan. And Nikki, they would be tough on him. He would be like a caged tiger if they put him behind wire. For me, all they could charge was concealing evidence. So I got ten more months in reeducation."
"But after three terms, it's hard labor," Shan said soberly. "The gulag." He remembered Akzu's warning when she had first appeared at the trailhead. It's too dangerous for you, he had said to his niece.
Jakli nodded slowly and pushed back a loose strand of hair. "But that won't happen now. Nikki will protect me."
"Nikki. He is Marco's son."
Jakli nodded again and turned her face to Shan's, suddenly smiling through her damp eyes. The strand of hair fell back, and she curled it around her finger with the shy expression of a young girl. "We're going to be married- at the nadam, the horse festival."
Shan looked away self-consciously. He did not know what to say. Marriage, and all it implied, was so distant to him it seemed like some vague concept he had read about in an old book. He looked back silently for a long moment. "But he is away."
"On the other side of the border. One last trip."
Shan nodded. The son of Marco the smuggler was a smuggler himself. "And Lau knew about your marriage."
Jakli nodded, still fingering her hair. "She was filled with joy when I told her. Nikki was always one of her favorites," she added, and her eyes drifted back to the flame.
Jakli was going to marry a young Eluosi, the tiger for whom she had gone to jail. He studied her. The longer she sat looking at the flame, the more frightened she appeared to be.
Shan looked about the chamber again. Lau had been there alone in the flickering light when Nikki had found her body. "Who was here that night, at Karachuk?" he asked, staring at the stained Buddha. He walked slowly along the wall, feeling one moment warmed by the simple beauty of the ancient painting, the next chilled by the thought of the violent death Lau had met there. She moved from one person she trusted to another, Wangtu had said, as though from one oasis to another.
Jakli sighed. "Marco was here, Nikki, and Osman. Others, drinking at the inn. When we took her body to the cave we asked all the obvious questions. For hours we talked about it. No strangers were here. No one even saw a strange horse or camel. A vehicle would have been heard. Osman said it was the ghosts. Everyone laughed, but he wasn't joking."
"A horse could have come," Shan suggested. "It could have been left on the far side of the wall and not have been noticed. Or the killer could have left the horse on the far side of the rock, and climbed over without going inside the old city."
She nodded slowly. "Lau came on her horse. You heard Marco. Her horse was all lathered, she had been riding hard across the desert."
"Because she was rushing to see someone?" He stopped by the table and looked into the box of religious artifacts again. Something glinted in the light. He reached down the side of the box and pulled out a long cylindrical object, capped by a needle. A disposable syringe.
"No one," Jakli said in a faint voice. She was looking at him with a stark, frightened expression. She had seen the syringe. "No one knew she was here."
"The killer knew." Lau was running from someone, Shan thought. And came to Karachuk for sanctuary. He looked back at the statue. In the dim light it looked like the Buddha had been shot and had bled its heart onto the floor.
He stared at the syringe in his hands, then abruptly let go of it, as if it could strike him of its own will. It dropped into the shadows and he stood staring at his empty hand. He paced around the chamber, studying the old painting again, somehow sensing something of Lau. An old monk had told him that sometimes when people died in great pain little pieces of their soul broke away and wandered aimlessly about. "Do you know now why she wrote that letter to the prosecutor?" he asked.
"She didn't mean it," Jakli said.
"No. She did mean it. I think I understand. It was her gift, like trying to protect Wangtu by not giving him any more teas. She was worried about you. Three bowls of lao jiao. Ready to be married. She wanted to be sure you were protected, safely held in probation, so you couldn't get arrested again. It would have caused her pain, but she did it for you. She would have sacrificed much, even your feelings toward her, if it meant you would be safe." Despite what Lau had done, Jakli was defying her probation, as if she didn't care, as if she were out of the prosecutor's reach, or would be soon. He looked at Jakli. She was biting her lower lip, tears on her cheeks again, staring at the lamp. He sighed and slipped away.
All traces of the sun were gone as Shan stepped out of the cave, but the sky was brilliant with trembling stars and a rising two-thirds moon. A chill wind blew, the kind some monks called a soul-minding wind from the way it made the spirit wary and instantly alert. From across the desert came the howl of a night animal and, much closer, the chirp of a cricket.
He found his former perch overlooking Karachuk and turned up his collar against the cold. There was no activity, no sign of life, except a few glimmers through the thin cloth that hung in half a dozen windows. His fingers absently ran through the white sand by his leg. He longed to return to the dreamlike state he had felt when he first sat on the rocks, but the vision of Lau dying in the Buddha's arms had burned too deeply. His fingers made random shapes in the cool moonlit sand. Then he stopped, wiped the sand smooth, and made a two-part ideogram. The top was a small cross mark whose ends swept into right-facing curves, with a long tail to the left. It symbolized a high barren plateau and implied emptiness. The bottom half had two Y-shaped figures standing on a curved line, showing two humans standing back to back on a mound. The ideogram meant openness and was the sign his father always used for Chapter Eleven of the Tao te Ching. Using what is not, it was called:
Thirty spokes converge on a hub
What is not there makes the wheel useful
Clay is shaped to form a pot
What is not there makes the pot useful
Doors and windows are cut to shape a room
What is not there makes the room useful
He mouthed the words silently, then heard the last lines in his mind so crisply it was as if one of the Taoist priests of his childhood were reading beside him:
Take advantage of what is there
By making use of what is not.
What was not there, he knew, was the motive, for the motive was the connection that had driven Lau to Karachuk, where smugglers hid, where the American waited- the connection that had taken the killer from Lau to the boy Suwan at the Red Stone clan, then to the boy Alta in the high Kunlun. And on to where? Back to Karachuk? If the motive was simply to find secret Buddhists, the killer might be seeking the waterkeeper. If the motive was to find and kill particular children, then the zheli was the trail, the chain that guided the killer, a chain the killer destroyed as he followed it. Unfinished business, Akzu had said. The clans of one or more of the zheli might have been targeted years earlier, and the killer might have reappeared, as though awakening from a long hibernation, to stalk the last survivors. Kazakhs and Uighur clans had fought soldiers years earlier and been destroyed or dispersed in punishment. But they had inflicted significant losses on the army, and perhaps somewhere had kindled a lust for revenge that had smoldered for decades. Lau may have been alive during those terrible years, but not the zheli. What kind of bloodlust burned so deep it drove the killer even to the offspring of his enemy?
A movement below broke the spell. A dark, hulking shape, barely lighter than the shadows it moved in, stole along the back of the domed building. It made no sound, and the animals in the pen ignored it, almost as if they could not see it. Ghosts roamed the Taklamakan. For centuries Karachuk had been a city inhabited only by ghosts, Jakli had said.
The phantom glided toward the rocks now, stopping every few seconds as if to listen or watch. Lau's killer had moved like this, unseen in the night. And Lau had not been killed by a ghost. It could be the killer again, he thought, or a thief. But who would risk the wrath of Marco?
The figure should have been close enough for Shan to hear its feet on the gravel at the base of the rock, but there was no sound except the crickets. The thing bent over on all fours and moved closer to the outcropping, only fifty feet from Shan now. Suddenly a brilliant light flashed from the shape, followed by a sound of glee, then the light disappeared and the grey thing hurried back toward the compound.
Shan launched himself from his perch and ran down the path, jumping onto the sand and darting to the shadows at the rear of Osman's inn just as the figure disappeared around a hut at the far side of the corral.
The horses trotted away from him as Shan approached. They had not been frightened by the figure who had gone before, only by Shan. The big camel, so silvery in the moonlight that it too seemed like an apparition, made a sound that started as a snort and ended in a low, throaty grumbling sound, as if first it were alarmed and then just angry at being disturbed.
The hut had no window. As he approached it Shan saw that its plank door was ajar, and he gently pushed it open a few inches. A thick rug had been hung over the inside frame, concealing a dim light from within. He slipped inside and saw to his surprise a wall of neatly trimmed boards that had been expertly fitted into the structure only three feet inside the entrance. A narrow plank door with a hasp for a lock hung open enough to leak the brilliant white light of an incandescent bulb along its edge.
Shan waited in silence for several minutes, then laid a finger against the wooden door. It swung inward a few inches, enough for him to see a table nailed together of rough planks, stacked with books.
"It's open," someone said in Mandarin.
Shan pushed the door and stepped inside. Deacon, the American, was standing at a workbench under a naked lightbulb, examining something under a large magnifying lens that was suspended by a swinging arm clamped to the table. Without turning around, he gestured toward a bottle on the table. "Help yourself to the vodka."
Shan silently surveyed the room. The electric line for the bulb ran to a wooden box in the corner, containing a series of heavy batteries. The books, in English, German, and Chinese, appeared to be textbooks on anthropology and archaeology. Another volume, thicker than the others and leaning open at the back of the table, seemed to be on a different topic. It was held open by a heavy spring clip to a diagram of a human skeleton.
"If you've grown particular, there's a clean glass on the shelf above the door," Deacon said, then glanced over his shoulder. He paused and raised an eyebrow, then returned to his work. "It's you," he said impassively. "Expected a Russian."
Shan did not immediately reply, for, an instant after Deacon had noticed him, his own eyes had found a shelf hung above the bench where Deacon worked. It held half a dozen small cages, all different but each one constructed of finely worked wood. They all glowed with the patina of great age. The largest, perhaps six inches long and four in height and depth, was made of thin slats of sandalwood. The smallest appeared to have been crafted out of a solid piece of fruitwood, hollowed out and carved into the shape of a temple.
The cruelest thing they had done to him in the gulag was to steal his memories. The pain from his repeated interrogations, from batons sometimes, and drugs, and electric prods, had dulled his memory, had made certain parts of his brain seem inaccessible. It was part of the Party's master plan, a cellmate had said, to cauterize the brain so it could not remember that once things had been better. But on seeing the cages something vague had jarred loose in the back of his mind.
At least three of the cages appeared occupied.
Deacon had followed Shan's gaze. "Marco laughs at me, but I tell him every proper town needs its own orchestra."
"You were outside," Shan said, then added with sudden realization, "you were gathering singers."
Deacon looked at the cages with a satisfied grin. "Got him, finally. Old Ironlegs, we call him. Makes a rasping sort of song, like his leg is made of metal." He turned to Shan. "You know crickets?" he asked in English.
Shan looked at the American in silence and slowly grinned. It seemed a wonderful question. "When I was young," he said, awed that the memory should have leapt out and found his tongue after being lost for so many years, "my father would take me to an old Taoist priest who had avoided all the suffering in the cities by fleeing to the mountains. He lived alone and spent most of his time weaving baskets and meditating on the Taoist scriptures. The only other thing I remember about him is that he collected singers. He taught me about them." How remarkable, Shan thought, to be in the desert, with a strange American, looking for a killer, and suddenly have one of the darkened doors of his memory opened.
Deacon smiled. "My first trip to China, I went to a market and saw a vendor selling insect singers. Had maybe fifteen species. A horse bell. A stove chicken, with the big antennae. Some of the black ones, ink bells they're called. And a weaving lady."
Somewhere deep inside Shan, something warmed as he heard the names, names he had first heard with his father, decades earlier. "I remember one called a cao zhong," he said. The words came unexpectedly, on a flood of recollection. "A beautiful one, loud but perfectly pitched. I don't know the English."
"A grass katydid," Deacon said. "God, I'd love to have a katydid. Too dry here." The American's eyes filled with pleasure as he gazed at his cages. "That street vendor, I sat with him for two hours as he explained how each had different songs, how their diet could affect their song, how the emperors used to have tiny furniture made for their favorite crickets. Next trip, I took my son Micah to see him again. All Micah did was grin, the biggest, most beautiful grin I ever saw on his face. We were hooked." Deacon looked with pride at his collection of cages. "The vendor told us they bring good fortune."
Shan nodded. "Because their song is so alive and bright. Living music, the old priest called it. Because you can't control them. If a cricket chooses to bring his living music to your home, then nature has indeed blessed you." Shan pried the door of his memory open further. "I remember one called a blue bell, and a painted mirror." He rushed the words out, as if scared of losing them again. "And a bamboo bell."
"With Ironlegs my chorus is complete. He's a watchman. Pang t'ou, they call it. Watchman's rattle. Full moon in ten days. My son and I will take them out into the dark at midnight and listen to their chorus. We'll watch for shooting stars. One of the old Kazakhs told my son that some crickets can do that, call in shooting stars."
"Your son?" Shan asked. "Your son is here?"
"Not here, but in Xinjiang."
For an agonizing moment Shan's mind raced. No. Deacon couldn't be old enough to be the father of the dead American at Glory Camp. "How old is he?"
"Ten." The American pushed the lens away and surveyed his cages again. "They'll attack each other if you don't keep them separate," he said, as if eager to shift the conversation from the boy called Micah.
"The old priest had a lot of antique cages, like yours, and some made of gourds," Shan recalled. "Others he made of bamboo splints or reeds."
"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."