Shan rose with her. “I’m sorry, Meng. I don’t have a lot of time. Maybe if you had let me know in advance.”

“Limei. You used to call me Limei,” she said and pushed him toward the café.

Snowflakes were drifting down from a solitary cloud over Yangkar as Shan reached the garage, the crystals glistening in the moonlight. It was what his old friend Lokesh called an ice blessing, when the flakes tumbled down without a wind to gently kiss the creatures of earth, reminding them of the power and beauty of the earth gods. He paused to look to the northwest, where the beloved old Tibetan labored over the task of preserving ancient texts in an illegal outpost of the purbas, the resistance, and wondered if he had received the letter Shan had dispatched in the purba’s secret network

The garage was dark, except for the back room where Tserung’s teenage son lived, from which Chinese rock-and-roll music could be heard. Shan cautiously worked his way through the labyrinth of the junkyard, pausing halfway down the path to watch behind him.

Shan had an irrational premonition that the rowdy little girl traveling with Meng’s companion might have followed him. He and Meng had actually been enjoying a quiet lunch, speaking of small things like the weather and her life by the Gobi, but after a quarter-hour the pair had burst in to join Shan and Meng as they ate. He had quickly come to view the girl as one of the monkey imps that plagued unharmonious households in old Confucian tales. She had broken a plate and a mug by willfully flinging them at the wall, squealing with delight, then scared away an old Tibetan couple by making faces at them, a sign of bad luck for the town’s traditional residents. Through the window he had watched them go straight to Shiva, no doubt for the astrologer to provide them with a protective charm. Not once had Meng offered an explanation of why she had brought such unlikely companions, but Shan had recalled that she had been raised in a rural area where the one-child policy would not have been strictly enforced and decided that they must be her sister and her unruly niece.

Although Shan rejoined Meng in late afternoon after spending hours at his computer searching for details of the Five Claws and Larung Gar, there had been no more quiet time. They had spent much of the time picking up the child’s detritus, including shreds of notices she had ripped from the town bulletin board and shards of another smashed mug, this one thrown against the wall of a cell. He had surrendered his quarters in the building behind the station to them, telling them he would take a room at the little inn off the town square, then gone to sleep for an hour on a jail cot.