“I know that now. He smuggled a note out. He said he was being held because he had seen the professor and Natalie Pike murdered. I know now that he meant that he was there when the cave was collapsed, and that whoever directed it knew he was killing those inside.”

Jaya wiped at her tears. “They killed Metok. The government murdered him.”

“And his friend Sun died on the sky train. But it wasn’t the government, only certain people in the government,” Shan said, and gazed despairingly down at the construction. “We can’t stop this, but we can expose the truth,” he said.

“For whom?” Jaya snapped. “No one in the government will care!”

“For us. For Metok and his friend Sun. For Professor Gangfen and Natalie Pike. For Gekho.”

Lhakpa shook his head as if disagreeing. “We have more chance of stopping the dam than finding the truth. Buddha’s blood, Shan, you’re talking about Public Security and a project led by Party officials from Beijing. The deputy director, that man Jiao, has a satellite phone. He talks with Beijing almost every day.”

Shan decided not to ask how Lhakpa could possibly know that. “If you keep resisting, they’ll call out armed patrols.”

“If they call out patrols,” Lhakpa said, heat entering his voice, “we keep resisting.” Jaya murmured her agreement, then whispered a mantra to the Mother Protector.

“I’m going down,” Shan announced.

“Bad timing. They’ve had a high-level visitor,” Lhakpa said, and pointed to the Five Claws office building. Shan made out the shape of a white utility vehicle parked between the flagpole and the director’s office.

“Good. I’m not going down to see the director. I am happy for him to be distracted.”

“Then wait,” Jaya said, and reached into her pack, extracting one of the lanyards with a security badge Shan had seen the workers wearing. She reminded Shan that there were usually spare hard hats in the bin by the mess hall, then had one question before he turned away. “What can you tell us about that drone?”

It was midafternoon by the time Shan reached the administrative compound at the bottom of the valley. He found a hat in the bin described by Jaya and a worker’s tunic hanging on a row of pegs inside the now-empty hall. He went as close to the headquarters office as he dared, wary of the guard now posted there, but near enough to see the nondescript white utility vehicle parked by the front door and the young Chinese driver slumped behind the wheel, asleep.