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She heard his shoe edge out across the floor She felt his hand on her arm He pulled her to him and wrapped his arms around her

“Don’t be frightened,” he whispered in her ear His heart beat steadily against her fluttering one Her body felt how gentle he was, and her heart began to slow to match his rhythm

“I’ht,” he told her “Stay still” Then, using her body as a guide, he ran his hands down her waist, over her hips, and down her legs He kept one hand in a proprietary grip around her ankle while he searched the ground with his other hand A second later the flashlight was back on He took Hulan’s hand and led her out to the cave entrance

They stood at theriver At last Michael turned to face her “I’et us alone together in the dark I shouldn’t have done that” Then he dropped her hand, stepped out into the rain, and with an assured gait headed up the hill back toward the Site 518 encampment

She waited a few s, then she followed the path down to where it disappeared into the rushing current Brian’s little beach had to be threewaters

THE WEATHER HAD CALMED TEMPORARILY, BUT THAT WAS TO BE expected The stor itself out But even with the break, the airport was nearly deserted No one wanted to fly in this weather David went to China Southern’s ticket counter and checked in for the 11:50 flight to Wuhan He hadn’t eaten in about twenty-four hours, so he got some breakfast while he waited for his departure A television was tuned to the nehere every fifteen minutes the scroll across the bottozi below the Three Gorges had now claimed twelve hundred lives At 11:30 he boarded the plane; it taxied out to the runway, and then everyone waited as thunder ru streaked around them Three hours later, in anothercruising altitude, the seat belt sign remained on because of violent turbulence

David couldn’t stop thinking about Michael Quon He was sophisticated He’d figured out how to propel his cause through ious leader, but he had a rotten and corrupt core He advocated austerity yet partook of the finer things in life He was also probably very good oreat aphrodisiacs He’d used the Society’s tenets as athat religion is more powerful than politics That hy Co and the All-Patriotic Society were growing

Xiao Da was all about manipulation and control He believed hiot aith that in China, where the people were, as Hulan said, susceptible to indoctrination Xiao Da mirrored what others wanted to see For poor Chinese peasants on the banks of the Yangzi, he was a savior ould protect thehborhood Co the newest fad For so the past

David wondered if possession of a h for the man who called hiovernious hold on the n-born person be influential enough within another country to upset global stability? Stranger things had happened in other parts of the world

This line of reasoning led David back to Vice Minister Zai Howand believable case for David and Hulan’s trip to Bashan as a possible last chance for their rateful But Zai had said other things that day, about David and Hulan reconnecting to the special gifts they each had that made the on in recent years For David, that would lobalof her ability to see into the mind of a killer Zai had also talked about David’s ic to deal with cases, while Hulan put her physical body between herself and evil Was that why Zai was on his way to Bashan now? Had he truly sent the two of the them what they were about to encounter? Or did he know that so had already happened to Hulan?

All this “logic” was just a way for David to s He couldn’t lose Hulan He couldn’t face the world without her

That night electricity was out in Bashan Village Candles and a couple of hurricane lalow The chef ether one of his better ned There is nothing like a natural disaster to bring people together

Given the conditions, talk turned once again to the great edifice being built at Sandouping Without the five men from the municipal museums, the conversation was ht of only 150 feet? What if a series of smaller

dams was constructed instead? What if China allotted twenty ical excavation? What if only half a million people had to move?

Hulan sat next to Michael Quon He’d co room This ti there anyway? But he’d stood just inside her door as he had thisaround with that sa They didn’t speak then about what had happened earlier, but as the rain poured down and the candles cast their golden light, Hulan kept going back to that moment when she’d been sed by the blackness of the cave