Free Water Touching Stone by Eliot Pattison

trail. At first Shan had thought it was still resentment over his presence, but then at a fork in the trail where Akzu led them down the least used of the two paths, he had seen that it was skittishness, even fear. Even the horses seemed reluctant to take the path and had to be reined tightly, before the riders could pull them between the two boulders that marked the trailhead. Akzu had dismounted to cut the bells from the harness of the camel.
     
     
Jakli rode in front of Shan. "A shortcut," she called back. But Shan saw the skittishness in her eyes too.
     
     
As they rode in the shadow of another rock wall he studied the five-mile-long valley it surrounded. It was not as fertile as the valleys in central Tibet but still held enough vegetation and water to support the small flocks of the dropka. There should have been herds, he knew. There should have been sheep or goats or yak, even the low-slung felt tents of a shepherd's camp. But it was empty, barren of life, as if somehow it had been sterilized.
     
     
The trail rose toward the crest of the ridge that defined the south end of the valley, and a small cleft in the rocks at the top appeared. Akzu signaled for the column to stop, then dismounted and led his horse to the opening. He pressed himself against the side of the cleft and peered through it. A moment later, visibly relaxed, he stepped quickly past the cleft and signaled for them to dismount and proceed. Shan awkwardly slid off his mount and followed their lead, but paused as he moved past the opening.
     
     
The object of their fear dominated the landscape beyond the ridge, a compound that, although at least two miles away, was clearly of huge dimensions. A long line of high wire fence, punctuated at intervals by guard towers, surrounded a complex of low, gleaming white buildings and cement bunkers.
     
     
"When I was young," a soft voice said behind Shan, "there was a nest of scorpions on the next hill from ours at our summer pasture camp. My brothers always wanted to kill them."
     
     
Shan looked at Jakli in confusion, then back at the complex. He knew what a Chinese prison looked like, and this was no prison. It had many guard towers but was too new and clean; too much of Beijing's money had been spent on the facility for it to be simply part of the gulag. But it also wasn't like any army base he had ever seen. Everything seemed to be made of cement. He saw nothing that looked like barracks. There were small buildings, the size of toolsheds, at regular intervals inside the wire.
     
     
"No, my father said," Jakli continued. "Let them live. I would not have you walk the land without fear."
     
     
As he shielded his eyes from the glare of the sun, now high in the sky, Shan could see a large radar antenna sweeping the sky from the center of the compound. Brilliant white domes were arrayed beyond the antenna. Satellite communications links. The small buildings were not sheds, he realized, but entrances to an underground complex.
     
     
"We call it the Mushroom Bowl. One night I saw them do a test," Jakli said. "It went far into the sky, like a shooting star going back to its home."
     
     
A shiver swept down Shan's spine, and he could bear to look no longer. "I'm sorry," he said, without knowing why.
     
     
Jakli returned his gaze with a small, wise smile. "It is just our nest of scorpions."
     
     
The main purpose of Tibet and western China was to act as a buffer, Shan had once heard a top general opine at a Beijing banquet, a staging area and shield against the next wave of aggression. Which meant, more than anything, that the vast wilderness was the hiding place for the country's most important weapons. Many politicians boasted in the capital that Tibet received the equivalent of billions of dollars from Beijing. All but a fraction of that money went to hollowing out mountains for troop garrisons and building secret nuclear missile installations like the one Shan had just seen. The Mushroom Bowl.