He saw that everyone was looking at him, and knew he must have made a sound, a small utterance of fear. He turned slowly to Lokesh, whose eyes, assuming the cast of a prisoner, had also grown distant. He could push his friend deep into the shadows and charge the officer, maybe distract them long enough for Lokesh to escape. At least the chenyi stone was still safe in the mountains, a voice whispered in the back of his mind.

Someone moved at Lokesh's side. Tuan stepped back into the light, looking expectantly at Shan, pausing, as if waiting for Shan to say something. But then a shadow crossed the door and another figure entered. Khodrak, holding his staff, and behind him, Padme, in a clean robe, his arm in a sling. The Chairman's eyes flared, not at Shan but at the doctor and the knob officer. No one moved. The knob and the doctor seemed confused.

Shan studied the monk they had brought from Rapjung. Padme stood straight, in no apparent pain now. His arm was in a sling, although he had not complained to them of his arm hurting. His robe was not only spotless, it was fringed with the same narrow strip of gold thread that Khodrak and the other committeeman wore. Shan recalled the third chair at the Committee table and the way the others had called the young monk Rinpoche. It had been Padme's chair.

"Some of the old ones can turn themselves into smoke and drift away," Padme said, casting a thin smile toward the knob officer, who replied with a sour frown and marched out the door.

Khodrak sighed and studied the loft and its little portal. Someone tall, and strong, and lean might have climbed out. He put his hand on Tuan's arm and seemed to push. One side of the Director's mouth curled down. He relented, stepping back out of the stable followed by the doctor.

"There is a mistake, Chairman Rinpoche," Padme said to Khodrak. He looked at Shan. "These people are our friends. Our heroes. We cannot allow them to be abused."

Shan stared in confusion. Public Security and Religious Affairs had been about to unleash their wrath on them but Khodrak and Padme had turned them away.

"Where is he?" Nyma cried out. "You have Tenzin. Why? You can't just-" Nyma looked from Padme to Khodrak, then to Shan, and her words choked away.

Khodrak seemed not to hear her. "Take a moment," he said, and gestured toward the ground. Padme hitched up his robe and sat on the stable floor, cross-legged, pulling out his rosary. He gestured for Nyma to follow, and in a moment all of them but Khodrak were sitting in a small circle. Padme began reciting the mani mantra, waving his hand to encourage the others to join in as Khodrak paced around the outside of the circle, tapping his staff in front of him like an old beggar.

It was a strange, unsettling ceremony. Padme stopped speaking after a moment but kept waving his hand, directing the others like a choir, Nyma and Lhandro chanting awkwardly as Lokesh and Shan uneasily watched the young monk. After perhaps two minutes, Khodrak halted and Padme abruptly rose, brushing off his robe, the words of the mantra slowly fading.

"Will we find their friend?" Khodrak asked Padme.

"We will find their friend," Padme replied quickly, as if reciting more of the ceremony. Then Khodrak turned and moved out the door, his staff resting on his shoulder.

Padme turned to address Lhandro. "There are no words to express my shame," he said to the rongpa. "There was a mistake." The monk looked back at the door and nodded, then turned to Shan. "It's an old shed used for little other than storage. Someone could have mistakingly inserted the door bar, that's all," he said tentatively, as if suggesting that was how they should explain what had happened. "The medical team is overzealous. They are trained to act extremely, for the containment of disease." He stood, waiting, as the ambulance pulled away, then turned back to them. "The kitchen will give you some food for the trail," Padme suggested. "I will see to it myself." With a gesture for them to follow Padme stepped out into the sunlight.

Tuan stood in front of a white utility vehicle beside half a dozen men in white shirts. Shan studied the seasoned faces of the men. But for their shirts he would have said they were a special Public Security squad- a boot squad, the purbas called them- one of the squads reserved for use against particularly stubborn political threats, which, to those responsible for public security in Tibet, typically meant purbas and other troublesome Buddhists.

The guards stared at Shan and his friends as they filed out of the stable, several glancing back at Tuan, whose eyes found, and stayed on, Shan. They watched Shan intensely, not accusing but calculating. When Tuan saw Shan return his stare Tuan nodded pointedly. You will have to decide soon, Tuan had told Shan. An accounting was coming.

"These are confusing times," Padme observed as they approached the gate ten minutes later, Lhandro holding a paper sack of dumplings and apples from the kitchen.

"May the Compassionate Buddha protect you," Lokesh called tentatively as they walked out of the gate.

Padme's head jerked back and he nodded. "Exactly," he said, in an odd, offhanded tone. "And you." Then he straightened and spoke more loudly, as though for an audience. "May the Compassionate Buddha protect you," he called out, and smiled toward the ragged group of Tibetans who sat among the houses outside the gate.

They walked for an hour without speaking, Lhandro in the lead, walking so rapidly Nyma had to trot sometimes to keep up. Finally, when the gompa was far out of sight behind the hills they stopped at a small stream.

"Who is that Tuan?" Lhandro blurted out in a low, urgent whisper, as if the question had burned his tongue since leaving the gate, and he still feared being overheard. "Why did they- what have they done to poor Tenzin? He never hurt anyone."

"Chao's murder," Nyma said slowly. "A murder like that would have everyone acting strange. They must have thought Tenzin could have information. They confused him with someone. The fools. All that time he was with us at the mandala."

Shan looked up from where he drank but he found no words to reply. Tenzin had not been at the mandala all the time. And there was something else he had almost forgotten. When Drakte had entered the lhakang, moments before dying, the first person he had looked to had been Tenzin.

Shan sighed, and watched as Nyma shifted her gaze to Lokesh, who had removed his coat and rolled up his sleeves nearly to his shoulders. He was vigorously rubbing his arms with the white sand of the streambed. Lhandro began to do the same. Lokesh rubbed his face. Shan and Nyma stripped off their coats, too. No one had words to explain anything that had happened at the strange gompa but they all felt the need to be cleansed. Nyma held some of the sand cupped in her hand for a moment, and glanced at Shan. They had seen such sand before, had seen it sanctified by the lamas and later washed with blood.

Lokesh lit a stick of incense and sat.

"We have no time," Nyma protested, but then hesitantly followed Shan and Lhandro as they folded their legs and watched the wisps of fragrant smoke. They had to calm themselves, to brace themselves against the frightening, confusing forces that seemed to be against them.

When the stick burned out, Lhandro rose with a deliberate air and reached into his sack. He produced the small scrap of cloth he sometimes used as a towel and laid it flat on a rock, setting his red plastic dorje pen on it. "It isn't a real thing," he said as he stepped to Shan with the cloth spread between his hands. Shan quickly dropped his own pen onto the cloth. None of them wanted the tokens of the gompa, he knew, but Lhandro's words referred to the plastic the dorjes were made of. He had known other Tibetans who reacted the same way with any implement made of plastic. It wasn't wood, or cloth, or stone, or bone- not of the earth- and somehow they didn't trust the plastic, as if it were one more of the tricks the Chinese played on them. They were just shadow things, a herder had told him once, you could tell just by feeling them. He had known a dropka who kept in a leather sack whatever plastic items he was given or found by roads, and left them in a small pile whenever he visited a town. The man wasn't sure what they were exactly, but he knew they belonged down below, which was how dropka often referred to towns.