Текст книги "Water Touching Stone"

Автор книги: Eliot Pattison

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Текущая страница: 31 (всего у книги 38 страниц)

Ox Mao turned with a satisfied grin. "You're going to tell us, tell us all about you and Xu." But as he took a step forward, a toe of a boot appeared in his groin and an arm suddenly appeared around his throat. The big Kazakh collapsed with a groan, falling back on the floor, and a figure flew past Fat Mao, who stood with his mouth open, as if trying to understand what had happened.

The figure stood in front of Shan now, shouting, facing the Maos and Jowa. "It's all you know, isn't it? Violence. Fighting. But you never know who your fight is with!" Jakli had returned from making hats. Her fury seemed a tangible thing. Her hands clenched and unclenched, like a tiger extending its claws. The stout woman appeared and pulled Ox Mao back into the kitchen, shaking her head.

Jakli bent over him, then grabbed one of the towels, moistened it under the faucet and wiped his brow. "I never should have gone," she said with a remorseful tone and helped him to his feet. "The gates were locked."

She took command. She arranged the Maos on one side of the table in the kitchen, found a coat for Shan to wear, told him to remove his soiled clothes, and dispatched the stout woman with them to be cleaned.

Jowa brought Shan a cup of fresh water, then found him a mug of hot tea. "I was going to-" he said to Jakli, but left his sentence unfinished. Jakli looked at him, and he hung his head. "How are we supposed to know?" the purba asked her, in a voice taut with pain.

"Know?" she asked tersely. "You come all this way because of Shan, and you don't know what to do?"

"No," Shan said. His vision was rapidly clearing. "Jowa came because of the lamas, not because of me. What we have to do is written nowhere. He has reason to be confused. I am confused." He pulled out the chair beside him, inviting the Tibetan to sit. "But not as confused as I was."

"What do you mean?" Jakli asked.

"I had to talk to Xu, I have to understand where she is in this. She told me something that makes me believe Sui was killed by someone over money, a competitor."

"There is only one lieutenant assigned to Bao," Fat Mao said with a frown. "Sui had no competitor."

"Not a competitor for rank," Shan said. "For bounty." He swallowed more of the tea and explained what Xu had told him.

"The bastards," Fat Mao muttered when Shan finished. "They're unaccountable to anyone. It's not even about their socialism anymore. Just money."

"They can be accountable to us," Ox Mao grunted.

Jakli seemed to recognize the glint in the big Kazakh's eye and held up her palm as though to stop him. "Nothing. Don't do anything. Not until all the boys are safe."

"But you heard him," Ox Mao said with a conspiratorial nod toward Shan, as if he had decided to forget the episode in the toilet. "The general comes in a few days."

Shan looked at Jakli. The general was coming. The boys were being stalked. But the clans were gathering. One last time, the clans were gathering. And Jakli had to get to a new life.

The stout woman returned with Shan's clothes, still damp, and began cooking a meal for them. When he dressed and reappeared, she inspected him with a matronly air. Seeing dirt on his shoe, she rubbed it with her dish rag. It was her way of apologizing, Shan knew, and he accepted her hospitality with quiet nods as they started the meal, the woman serving Shan first.

When they had finished Fat Mao rose and pulled folded papers from a jacket hanging on the wall. "That truck driver," he announced, "the one who found Sui." He pushed the papers across the table to Shan. "We realized Sui had no money on him. We had the man's license number, so we tracked him down in Kashgar. After a couple of hours of persuasion he admitted stealing the money, but said he spent it all in a bar in Kotian. About a dozen drinks and a particularly enthusiastic mai chun nu." The phrase meant girl selling spring. A prostitute. "But when he grabbed the cash he grabbed some papers with it. He was glad to get rid of them, said they scared him when he finally read them."

There were only two sheets. One was a list of the zheli, the official list printed from the school computer, with Khitai's name underlined and a note beside it that said Red Stone camp. At the top of the page Lau's name had been written, with personal information. The room number of her office at the school. A description of her horse. Brown horse, white face, it said. There was another name Shan did not recognize. North Star Enterprise. He pointed to it.

"A garage," said Fat Mao. "Not just a garage– a blacksmith, a stable. Lau kept her horse there. Ox Mao checked it today. The afternoon before Lau died, she took her horse. Ten minutes after she left, a man who looked like Sui came in and rented a horse. In civilian clothes. Brought the horse back the next morning, drenched in sweat, worn out. The owner yelled at him, but Sui just smiled and threw him something that shut the man up. A piece of gold."

"A Panda?" Shan asked.

Fat Mao shook his head. "Gold in the form of a two-inch Buddha."

Jakli moaned and looked at Shan. They had seen the little solid-gold Buddhas before, in the sanctuary room at Karachuk, the room where Lau had died.

The other page held handwritten notes. In one corner was a series of numbers, sums of money, underlined repeatedly. Calculations of bounties, in multiples of five thousand. The price for an orphan. And in the center, a rough map, with a date on it. Over his shoulder Jakli gasped. "It's tomorrow. The map is to Stone Lake. Sui was going to Stone Lake for the boys."

"But he lost the competition to a better murderer," Fat Mao said grimly, "and now that killer is going instead."

Chapter Eighteen

Stone Lake was an abandoned oil field camp, a place on the fringe of the desert where fossils were found in the outcroppings. As she drove, Jakli explained that Lau often took the zheli there in the autumn, between the summer and winter temperature extremes to collect fossils and imagine the world as it existed when the fossil forms lived. They drove on a rough track cleared and compacted for oil crews thirty years earlier, across a coarse, gravelly plain dotted with clumps of ephedra and the other tough stunted shrubs that, like some of the clans, had learned to survive where few other life forms could exist. Sand could be seen in the lee of boulders. Sometimes, as they crested low hills, Shan saw the endless white expanse of the Taklamakan in the distance.

As the shrubs began to disappear and the barren desert landscape took over, Jakli stopped the truck Fat Mao had provided them, paused to look for any approaching vehicles, then released air from the tires for better traction. She climbed back in and eased the truck off the road, cresting the dune that ran parallel to it, then drove for another mile in a trough between dunes before surmounting a second dune and stopping in its shadow.

They climbed out and she led Shan along the dune for fifty yards, then onto a low rise. At the top they stopped and surveyed a long bowl between the high dunes. Rock formations were scattered along the edge of the bowl and at the south end a cluster of cement foundations could be seen, with several sun-bleached timbers rising out of the sand, the ruins of the oil camp. Past them, near the south end of the bowl, was the frame of a building that swayed in the wind, and beyond it, fifty yards away, a dip in the encircling dunes where the road entered the camp. Several smaller structures, looking like tool sheds and housing for machinery, were scattered across the southern end of the bowl. The largest, big enough to garage a dump truck, was built of cinderblocks with two large rusted metal doors that opened at the center. It had survived the desert conditions better than the other structures. Beyond it against the dune on the opposite side of the bowl was a much older ruin, a stone foundation with part of a mud-brick wall still intact, its timbers no doubt long ago scavenged for fuel. To the north lay the desert, broken only by a single clump of shrubs perhaps three hundred yards from where they stood. Shan gazed to the far south, to the distant peaks of the Kunlun, where Jowa now searched. He was going to the lama field, with a Mao guide, to the grave of Khitai, in case Gendun and Lokesh visited.

A small dust devil spun around the bowl. A bird, a large carrion eater, floated overhead.

"No one," Jakli said, but as she spoke Shan pushed her down, pointing silently toward the road at the end of the bowl, where a man and a dog had just appeared at the crest of the dune.

As they watched, their eyes barely above the dune, the man turned and waved to someone behind the bowl, out of sight. Moments later two more figures appeared, another man and two boys wearing the dark, bulky clothes of herders.

They watched as the boys scampered down the dune toward the garage, the intact structure in the center, followed by one of the men.

"It's Kaju," Shan said. "But who's the other?"

"Akzu!" Jakli exclaimed, and she bolted over the dune.

Shan followed reluctantly, watching Akzu and the dog. Akzu could warn them of anyone approaching. But even if he did, where would they go? They had no place to hide.

They reached the building at the same time as the boys. A moment later Akzu arrived and greeted Jakli with an embrace, then turned toward the boys. One was Batu, who looked sheepishly at Jakli, then explained quite soberly that he had had a dream of a beautiful horse that had spoken to him and told him that as the oldest of the zheli he had the obligation to protect them. Akzu offered a silent nod, as if he was familiar with the power of such dreams. The second youth was introduced as Jengzi, a name that hinted of Tibetan origins. Jengzi offered a shy grin as he was introduced and tossed a stone against the metal doors. He stood close to Kaju, as if wary of Shan and Jakli.

Kaju watched the road with a worried expression.

"Is someone else coming?" Shan asked.

"I don't know. With Jengzi here, only one boy is left. High in the mountains, away from everything." He gave Shan a knowing glance. Micah, the American, had not come.

"I mean, from town," Shan said.

"No," the Tibetan said in an uncertain tone. "Director Ko said to bring them back when I was done, so he could present their gifts. I said after all that happened I didn't expect anyone to come."

Shan nodded. He was watching Jengzi as he listened. Jengzi had come from one of the shadow clans. He might know where Micah was.

Kaju followed his gaze. "He speaks Tibetan," the teacher said quietly. "He has an old rosary, says someone gave it to him as a baby."

"Where did you find him?" Shan asked.

"On the road, five miles south. Walking. It's what his zheli family does, he says. His foster father will not be seen. He won't go on roads, treats them like they're poison. He distrusts everyone. They came out of the high mountains last night, to bring Jengzi, then went back into hiding in the foothills. They will return to pick him up at dusk."

As Shan took a step forward, Kaju touched his arm. "Ko said something else, as I left. He said to ask if the boys would like a helicopter ride. He said he might bring the Brigade helicopter here. Ko just wants to help," the Tibetan added in an uncertain voice.

One of the boys let out a cry of surprise. Shan turned from Kaju to see Jengzi pointing excitedly toward the shadows inside the building. In the darkness beside a broken window at the rear of the structure the outline of a figure could be seen, sitting on a steel barrel. Kaju jerked Jengzi back.

"Hungry, anyone?" a deep voice called out. "I brought us some multicultural cuisine. Peanut butter." Jacob Deacon stepped out of the shadows.

Shan watched the American as the boys greeted him warmly, As if they knew him already. They eagerly grabbed the jar from his hands, opening it to explore its contents with their fingers.

The American embraced Jakli and nodded at Shan, then extended his hand to Kaju. "Small class for the new teacher," he said.

Kaju grasped his hand with a nervous glance toward the road. "I didn't expect Micah's father today. Not with all the trouble."

"Trouble? What trouble? Lau wanted the class to hear about the archaelogy digs and hear about fossils. Weeks ago she asked, and I said I'd come. I came."

"But how? You came so far?" Jakli asked. "What if someone saw? The knobs."

Deacon held his palm up to silence her protest. "Not so far, if you go straight across the sand. With a good compass and a good horse, only four hours. I left at midnight. I'll be back before the sun sets."

"You've been waiting all this time?"

Deacon pointed to a small backpack at the foot of the barrel. "I've always got research to write up." He spoke in an absent tone as his eyes restlessly surveyed the dunes. Not for the danger, Shan knew. For his son. He had come for his son.

Shan watched as the two boys squatted at Deacon's feet, still excited about the American peanut butter.

"Micah," said Batu with a grin. "He takes peanut butter with rice. He makes balls out of it." The boy looked up at the American. "Let me take some back. I'll see him in the mountains this week, I know I will. Malik and I-" The boy cast a guilty look toward Jakli and Shan. "We're going to ride up near the glaciers to look," he said in a low voice. He pulled on the American's hand until Deacon looked away from the dunes. The American knelt beside the boy and began patting his pockets, as if searching for a container that might carry a few ounces of peanut butter to Micah.

Kaju glanced back toward Akzu, who had returned with the dog to squat on the dune overlooking the road. "People are scared," he said to Deacon. "The family he's with, they're so shy. Next class, it's the full moon. A few more days. I'll be here," the Tibetan added. "I'll come alone."

"Sure," Deacon said, his disappointment obvious. "Next class." He looked at Shan and winked. "Got a date on the full moon."

Shan offered a small grin. At least amid all the tragedy there were two good things. Jakli was starting a new life with Marco's son. And Deacon would be under the full moon with his son, listening to their insect orchestra.

Suddenly the dog started barking. They looked back to see Akzu rise. He raised his hand straight up, then lowered it to the back of his head as if scratching it.

Kaju gasped. "It's the signal," the Tibetan said urgently. "Someone is coming. Someone he has to warn about."

"Shit!" the American spat. "Shit and double shit." He began fumbling in the pockets of his baggy pants as Kaju herded the boys toward the shadows inside the structure, away from the line of sight to Akzu, who stood waiting for someone now, facing the road. The Kazakh was staying on the dune deliberately, Shan realized, so the new arrivals would come to him, so they would be visible from the building. Jakli and Kaju quickly pulled the doors shut, leaving a crack a few inches wide to see through.

A moment later a man appeared at Akzu's side, shorter and wider than Akzu. As he began speaking to the headman, he turned toward the bowl and his uniform came into clear view.

"Bao!" Jakli cried.

"It's all right," Kaju said, though his voice had no confidence. "Akzu has a plan. He will say he is checking the path for the Brigade herds to move to winter pasture. Sometimes there is water near here. If there is, he can save a day by cutting across the sand. He only wants to help the Brigade now, he will say, because he will be an owner soon. Since there is no water here, he will ask Bao to look on his map for a better route. If Bao wants to help, Akzu will go with him. If not, Akzu will keep talking until they all drive away together. Then he will return in four hours. It is agreed."

But the words seemed to give little comfort to the boys or to Deacon, all of whom stood wearing grim expressions in the dim light. The American had something in his hand that he had pulled out of his pocket– a small battery light, the size of a pencil. He had strapped his pack to his back and stepped to the window.

Shan watched Bao with a cold intense stare, remembering their last encounter, remembering how Bao's slap had drawn blood. The man seemed like a dark planet that had captured Shan in its orbit. Who else was there, how many others waited behind the dune in a knob patrol car?

Shan turned. Jakli was in the shadows with the boys now, one arm around each of them, comforting them. What a land we live in, he thought, where ten-year-old boys not only know what Public Security is but know to be terrified of it. He looked from Jakli to Deacon, and somehow knew each was thinking the same thing. Bao could take them all and have enough glory to get noticed in the capital. Shan the fugitive. Deacon the illegal American. The orphan boys for whom there was a private bounty. Jakli, absent from her paroled job.

Suddenly Bao was pointing at the building.

"We've got to go," Deacon said, and he began lifting Batu through the window.

"Go?" Kaju croaked in a desperate tone. "There is no place to go."

"Sure there is," Deacon replied. "We're going to become invisible." The American dropped Batu outside and climbed out himself.

Bao began slowly walking down the dune. Akzu hesitated, then followed, waving an unfolded map in the air, as if asking Bao a question. It took less than ten seconds for Jakli, Jengzi, Shan, and Kaju to clear the window.

Deacon was thirty feet away, at the remains of one of the small sheds, tearing away the floorboards. The shed was out of Bao's line of sight, blocked by the garage, but for how long no one could know. By the time Shan got to it the American had removed three planks and lowered the boys into a shaft underneath. Jakli and Kaju dropped inside, then Deacon pushed Shan in and jumped down himself.

"What is-" Shan began, but Deacon shoved him hard, pushing him into a darkness at the north side of the six-foot shaft. "As far as you can go!" Deacon ordered in a hushed, urgent voice, then he reached up to replace the planks.

Not until the American finished and began moving toward the others with his light did Shan see that they were in a tunnel lined with stone, nearly four feet high and perhaps five feet wide. Jengzi was crying, held by Jakli at the front. Kaju was next with Batu.

"Okay," Deacon said from behind Shan. "Today's archaeology lesson is about to begin."

"Archaeology?" Kaju gasped. Shan could hear the Tibetan breathing hard, as if he couldn't get enough air.

"Thirty more feet and it'll be safe to talk," Deacon said in a loud whisper.

The bottom of the tunnel was coated with a layer of sand, under which were the same square-cut stones that lined the rest of the tunnel. Every eight feet, wooden timbers, many still with their bark, stretched across the width of the tunnel, supported by small posts. As the group inched along in the dim light from Deacon's pencil lamp, sand trickled down from between the stones overhead.

"The karez," Deacon said when they stopped. "The ancient irrigation tunnels from the mountains, built to carry the melt water, like at Sand Mountain."

"Still intact?" Shan asked.

"Sure. See for yourself. Runs for miles in places. Up around Turfan, they still use them for irrigation, like some of the old Roman aqueducts in Italy. We found a map at Sand Mountain. Seemed to indicate a tunnel here. I checked it out this morning."

"But it's impossible," Kaju said, still breathing hard. "It can't be stable. We'll be-" He stopped, and Shan looked up the tunnel. The teacher's eyes were on his students.

"There were portals, all along the way," Deacon said. "Access for maintenance, access for taking out water. Just like what we came through. Just got to find the next one and out we go. Like pikas from their den."

The builders of the aqueduct had done their job well. For long stretches the stone work still fitted so tightly that the karez appeared to have been swept clean. In places there were small, stagnant puddles, meaning, Deacon pointed out excitedly, that at times of high water, in the spring thaw, some water was still finding its way down the old tunnels.

Shan began to recognize a pattern in the tunnel supports as they moved slowly forward. Every fifth set of beams was thicker and carved with scrolls and the shapes of plants, the plants once kept alive by the karez. In the center of each of the heavier beams was a small dragon head, facing north, ready in defense should demons seek to invade by subterranean means. To the front he heard Jengzi make a whimpering sound, calling out that there were spiderwebs. Shan felt like whimpering himself. There was no danger of Bao discovering them now, only the much more real threat of disturbing the fragile walls. If the roof collapsed, there would be no rescue, only blackness and enough time for horror to take hold as the oxygen was exhausted.

He heard Jakli speak calming words. Khoshakhan, he heard her repeat, the calming word for lambs. Jengzi, in front of Shan, stopped whimpering. But as they paused the boy began to inch forward to be beside Kaju. Shan was about to warn him that there was no room for two abreast when the boy's foot pulled against one of the ancient posts. There was a sound not of cracking or splintering, but simply a dry crunching noise as the bottom of the post fell away. The dribble of sand above became a steady flow, creating a thin falling veil that quickly accumulated on the tunnel floor.

"Go!" Deacon shouted. Jengzi scrambled forward, followed by Kaju and Shan. A stone fell onto Shan's back as he passed through the spilling sand. Before he cleared the breach, a second stone fell onto his leg. He paused to see if Deacon needed help.

"Go!" the American shouted again.

Shan shot forward ten feet and turned just as the entire roof around the weakened support collapsed. Deacon was halfway through as the stone and sand closed over him. Shan reached out and grabbed his flashlight with one hand, then grabbed Deacon's wrist with the other and pulled.

With a great heave the American came out of the rubble. He lay face down, gasping for a moment, then took the light and shined it forward, into the face of each of those ahead of him. "Okay," he said with a forced grin. "Guess Bao can't hear us now."

"Where exactly is the exit you promised?" Jakli asked slowly, each word sounding like a vast effort of self-control. The light barely reached her face. Beyond her was the vague shape of the tunnel extending a few feet, then blackness.

"There's access, has to be. There was a community here. You saw the stone ruins," Deacon said. "And cisterns. Almost all the cisterns have been sealed off at the top, but they might have only a foot or two of desert above them."

"But when?" Kaju said, unable to hide the fear in his voice. "Where is a cistern? It's hard to breathe."

"I think Mr. Deacon is saying we just keep going," Shan offered.

"Right," Deacon said in a subdued voice. "A few more days, maybe we'll come out in the northern mountains, with frogs in our pockets." He aimed his light at the boys' faces. "They say there's treasure in some of the old Karez," he offered with hollow enthusiasm.

Batu smiled. Jengzi looked at the American with skepticism, but they both began to crawl with new energy, following Jakli as she probed the darkness.

No one spoke for several minutes, as though fearful that a sound might shatter another of the frail supports. Then Kaju suddenly stopped. "Here!" he said, and pointed to the beam above his head. "We have protection."

As Deacon raised the light, an inscription painted with crimson pigment in Tibetan script could be seen. "The six-syllable mantra," Kaju said with a glimmer of hope in his voice. "The tunnel has been blessed."

"Again!" Jakli called out, pointing to a beam near her own head. The same inscription, in the same paint. She crawled ahead at a faster pace, as though the mark might portend a portal. As Shan watched, she faded into the darkness, but the sound of her movements continued. Then suddenly there was a sound of stones falling and a splash. Jengzi called out Jakli's name in alarm. There was no reply.

"Nobody move!" Deacon warned. "Not a muscle. Not a hair. I'll go."

"No," Shan said. "You're in the back. Pass the light to Batu."

The boy's eyes were wide with fear, but he took the light without speaking and inched forward. He moved twenty, then thirty feet in front of them. Jakli's voice could be heard in the distance, echoing as though in a hollow chamber. The muffled words of a conversation rolled down the tunnel and then, incredibly, laughter. Kaju and Jengzi shot forward, followed closely by Shan and Deacon.

Shan and the American arrived to find Kaju and the boys arrayed on a stone ledge, depressed along its bottom to continue the main course of the karez as it curved around a huge hole lined with stones. The cistern that had been designed to capture the overflow from the main channel was at least forty feet in diameter under a dome of tightly fitting cut stones, and had been built in four tiers, each several feet higher than the one below. Jakli stood below them, on the top tier, up to her waist in water, her head three feet below the top ledge.

Deacon whistled in awe at the construction as he shined his light along the ceiling and far wall. Roots pierced the stone at the apex of the chamber. Shan remembered the surprisingly vigorous clump of shrubs that grew near the far end of the bowl.

"With Jakli's permission," the American said, "I will record Batu and Jengzi as the discoverers. The solvers of the great mystery."

"Mystery?" asked Kaju.

"Sure. We just found out why this place has always been called Stone Lake."

The boys wore grins that nearly reached their ears. Jakli splashed them from below.

"If there was a cistern," Shan suggested, "there must have been access."

Deacon was already easing himself along the ledge toward the far wall. "Probably a stone stairway leading down from something like a bath house." He stopped and aimed his light at a point just below where the dome began on the opposite side. "Right about there," he said. A large stone could be seen, supported by two cut-stone posts. But the area below the lintel stone was packed with rock, sand, and timber debris. The entrance had collapsed.

As Shan and Kaju reached down and pulled Jakli onto the ledge, Deacon's light searched the side of the cistern. "It's too fragile here," the American concluded. "We could collapse the whole thing by moving the rocks. But the cistern would have been near the center of the settlement here. There will be more access ahead."

Just as his hopeful words rang out his light flickered and went dim. He shook it and it brightened, though not nearly to the brilliance it had a moment before. "Go!" he barked.

Two hundred feet past the cistern, Jakli, in the lead, asked for the light. A moment later she began describing in a shaking voice what lay ahead. But there was no need for words. The beam of the light told them everything. Several side posts were loose, three of them fallen and leaning across the tunnel. One top beam had fallen to the bottom and had a pile of sand and stones around it. Another small beam was rotted away, with little more than a few splinters holding it up. The tunnel appeared ready to collapse at any instant.

Time seemed to have a different quality in the tomblike stillness. The small party stared at the doom ahead, and Shan had no idea how long it was before Deacon spoke.

"Okay," the American said in a taut voice. Shan heard him breathe deeply, as if trying to calm himself. "It'll be like this. The light stays with Jakli. She goes first, then the boys. We need someone strong behind, in case there's quick digging to do, so Kaju goes, then Shan. Call back when you reach a stable zone, and I'll come. I'm the biggest, and so the most dangerous."

No one argued. Jakli began inching forward.

"You'll have no light," Kaju called back to the American.

"I got matches," Deacon said in a hollow tone. "No problem."

Shan urged the Tibetan forward with a touch on his leg, and gradually the four in front made progress. Ten feet, proceeding with agonizing slowness, then twenty feet, and the light began to quickly fade, as if perhaps the tunnel had curved.

"I know you're here, damn you," Deacon said in the darkness. "You're smaller than Kaju. You can make it."

"I thought there might be crickets," Shan said. "Why should you have all the fun?"

There was silence for a long time. When he listened hard, Shan thought he could hear particles of sand turning over.

"How many do you have?" Shan asked. "Matches."

"I just counted. Ten."

"I've got maybe half a dozen." Shan said.

"Great. Run out for marshmallows. We'll have a roast."

"Marshmallows?"

"Never mind."

Silence again.

"I got Old Ironlegs to sing," Deacon announced through the darkness. "Big bass voice. I fed him some peanut butter."

They spoke of crickets again, of the ones the old monk had when Shan was a boy and those Deacon had collected so far for his son.

"Is this all we do?" Shan asked at last and heard the sadness in his own voice. The killer could strike again and he would be lying in the sand, chased into his grave by the knobs.

"Going ahead in the dark-" the American said quickly and urgently, as if forcing the words out, "-it's suicide. A handful of matches, no better. So we wait. Jakli's going to send an army of pikas with lighted helmets."

"We could go back," Shan said.

"No better chance back there. This is where we told her we'd be."

Did he mean, Shan wondered, this is where they would dig for their bodies?

A match flared, hurting Shan's eyes. Deacon was looking at him, the American's head propped on one arm, a strange peacefulness on his face.

Do we just lie here until we die of starvation? Shan wondered.

"No, no," Deacon said, with an oddly calm voice. "There's no circulation of air in here. We'll die of suffocation long before that," he added, and Shan realized he had spoken his thought out loud.

The match flashed and went out.