Shan was so intensely examining the other corruption case files to be certain none involved the Five Claws project that he was not aware when Tan left the conference room. When he rose and walked into the outer office, Amah Jiejie pointed to a small box by the door. “The colonel said you didn’t have lunch,” she said. “You can eat on the way home.”

He offered a dim smile. “Except I don’t have a way home,” he pointed out.

She lifted a set of keys and tossed them to him. “It’s the utility vehicle parked out back beside the colonel’s car. The colonel says it’s yours so long as you keep the new badge.”

He added an hour to the drive home with a detour on the rough gravel road that led him to a familiar overlook. He parked the car Tan had given him, sturdy despite being several years old, and walked to the edge of the cliff where he had built a small cairn months earlier. Below him was the 404th People’s Construction Brigade, where he had been an inmate. A line of dust marked the closely guarded convoy that was returning prisoners from their daily ordeal of building another road in the mountains. Memories of being on the trucks still ambushed him at unexpected moments, the spasm in his heart sometimes so severe it would paralyze him for a minute or two. The prisoners would have been worked brutally, beaten if they did not keep up the pace, and many of the younger inmates and Chinese prisoners would be slumped against each other, sleeping. But the old ones never slept, just whispered their mantras during the long drive back, quietly working malas, their prayer beads. Their original malas, some centuries old, would have been confiscated decades earlier, so they used makeshift rosaries composed of buttons, little cardboard discs, or even fingernail clippings. Those same battered lamas had saved him, had filled the crushed, hopeless shell that had been Shan with new life and new meaning. Shan did everything within his power to help his son Ko, who was now on one of those trucks, but he knew that the strength and determination he had seen growing in his son was owed much more to the old monks than to Shan. In the last few months much had also been owed to Yara, who had abandoned her life as a feral, defiant, unregistered Tibetan, to get her papers and her teaching job so she could visit Ko every few weeks.

Shan watched as the trucks slowed and entered the gate, thinking now of Metok, who had been a prisoner himself for a few weeks before being executed. When Shan had left the prison, he had said to one of the aged lamas that he owed them everything. “No,” the old man had replied with a serene smile, “you owe us only the truth.”