He peered at Ng’s companions. Three of them. Two men and a woman. The man on the left was tall, an American probably, with a careful expression and eyes that lingered a heartbeat too long on Meirelles’s own. The man on the right was smaller and more obviously nervous, his hair long and dirty white. The woman between them was in a subdued way beautiful, but very distracted: her hands wrestled with themselves, her brow knotted into a frown.

Ng thought, She’s the one who wants the stone.

“It’s here,” he said hoarsely, in English. “It’s here… I have it.”

He saw the subtle light in Ng’s dark eyes.

“Give him the money,” Ng said.

The white-haired American said, “I don’t see the stone.”

The woman touched the man’s hand: some kind of subtle communication, perhaps a warning. And the tall American watched.

The white-haired man sighed, reached into his pocket, and drew out two slips of paper. One for Ng, one for him. So flimsy! Meirelles thought. It seemed for a moment a stupid exchange—the oneirolith, a solid thing, for this note.

He unfolded it and looked at it long enough to establish that it at least seemed legitimate: a Bradesco bank certificate, the amount in cruzeiros so large that it made his head swim. “All right,” he heard himself say, “yes.”

Ng pocketed his own money and smiled.

Meirelles brought out the oneirolith in its wrapping of dirty oilcloth. The white-haired American eyed it suspiciously. “How do we know it’s what we want?”

But the woman touched his hand again. “It’s what we want.”

She feels it, Meirelles thought. She’s sensitive to it. He watched as she reached for the stone, and he felt the hesitation in her, her respect for it. “Take it,” he said. “Touch it. It won’t affect you through the cloth.” She didn’t understand his Portuguese but seemed to take solace from the tone of his voice.

Ng took Meirelles’s hand and shook it across the table, the bargain completed.

Now, Meirelles thought. If he meant to tell them about the military police, he must say something now. If they left in ignorance, they might walk back to Ng’s home and into the hands of the police.

And if Ng knows, Meirelles thought… will he want the money back?

He felt the bank certificate in his pocket, a warm presence. A ticket back to his wife and child. A ticket out of Pau Seco and a ticket out of Cubatao. A piece of paper containing a better life.

He drew back his hand as Ng stood up. The Americans hovered above him.

“Wait,” he said.

Ng narrowed his eyes. “What is it?”

Meirelles felt the sweat beading on his forehead. He looked into the face of the Vietnamese. It was not the sort of face he was accustomed to. He didn’t know how to read it.

“The police,” he said faintly. “You’ve been betrayed.”

Ng regarded him gravely for a long beat. He bent down with his knuckles on the small wooden table and his gaze was terrible, riveting. Meirelles could not look away. Spare me, he thought inanely.

But Ng only shook his hand a second time.

“Thank you, Roberto,” he said. “Thank you for telling me.”

The three Americans followed him out.

CHAPTER 11

1. Ng described a place down the road and told them to wait there. A truck would come, he said.

“It could be a trap,” Byron said. “He could be selling us out.”

Keller anticipated an angry reaction from the Vietnamese. But Ng only shook his head. “I have my own kind of virtue,” he said. “I stay bought.”

So they hiked down the road that ran from the mines through the old town, sheltered by their clothes and the night and the press of human bodies around them. They avoided the trash fires and walked with their shoulders bent, purposefully but not too fast, alert for police patrols. Beyond the limits of the town they kept to the shadow of the forest wall. A barrel-ribbed dog paced them for a quarter of a mile, loping on three legs; Byron threw a stone to drive it away.

In time they came to the place Ng had described, an opening in the road where a logging trail joined it from the west. Midnight had come and gone and there was very little traffic. Twice, big antique diesel semis roared by on their way to Pau Seco. Once, ominously, a military transport. But mostly the road was empty, the night noises of the forest ringing in the darkness.

Keller had fallen into a standing doze when a van pulled up at the verge of the road, waking him. The sky was faintly brighter now, and he was able to read the word Eletronorte in faint white letters along the rust-scabbed body of the van. The driver waited, his engine idling.

Keller showed himself first, then Byron, and then Teresa. The driver, an Indio with large unblinking eyes, waved them into the back. Keller latched the door behind him and the van jolted forward.

They sat on the empty metal floor with their backs against the bulkhead. Teresa said wearily, “Where’s he taking us?”

Byron shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. We can’t go back through Rio. We should stay away from the big cities altogether.”

Teresa held the wrapped oneirolith in her hands, steepled delicately between her fingers. “At least,” she said, “we got what we came for.”

“You did,” Byron said. “And I guess Ray did. Pretty good footage, right, Ray? Damn nice footage.”

Keller said nothing. Teresa was leaning against him now, her eyes closing. Keller put his arm out to steady her, and the truck carried them down the night roads, away from Pau Seco.

He drifted on the edge of sleep for a time, conscious of her warmth and of the weight of her against him as the Eletronorte van rattled into the dawn. The driver glanced back occasionally but did not speak, the expression on his face faintly puzzled, as if he were trying to make sense of this new and mysterious cargo. At last, when the light filtering back from the cab woke him, Keller managed a smile. “Thank you for the ride,” he said hoarsely.

The driver shook his head. “Ela e muito gentil.” He gestured at Teresa. “Pretty girl.”

Very pretty, Keller thought innocently.

“Your girl? Your wife?”

“No.” Not quite that. But he closed his arm around her protectively, and she moved against him in her sleep.

“Your girl,” the driver said toothily, and turned his attention back to the road.

And Keller recognized—a moment of insight as penetrating as the sunlight—that it was true, he was falling in love with her… maybe had already fallen in love with her.

It put him in a bad position.

Adhyasa, Keller thought. He was supposed to be a machine, and machines are supposed to be indifferent: you can’t suborn a machine. A machine in love might be tempted to look away.

And yet… He sat in the back of the jolting truck with her body pressed against him and wanted her more than he had wanted anything for years. The wanting itself was a new thing, and it ran through him like a tide. A part of him welcomed it: this thawing of ancient tundra. But he knew the risks. Stray too far from the Ice Palace and he would be stripped, vulnerable. Outside the Palace, all manner of things waited.

Old pain. Memories. Things seen.

And yet…

“Here,” the driver said suddenly. The truck slowed. Keller bounced back against the metalwork; Teresa moaned and stirred. “Avie-se! Please hurry now.”

And then they were alone again, blinking at the sunlight in a dry junction town called Sinop.

They had bank certificates and cruzeiro notes; enough, Byron said, to get them out of the country. They should find a room and in the morning strike out along the eastern highway to Barreira or maybe Campo Alegre. He knew people in Belem ; from Belem he could arrange a flight out of the country.