Some sort of code, clearly not from his mother, he decided. Maybe a message for Polanka, though if her compatriots could route a message past the Chinese security-grid, through a Sydney gateway, and back into China again, they probably would not need smuggled memory crystals to communicate with the West. Or maybe small messages were easier to slip past the filters.

In any case, someone knew he was close to Polanka. Perhaps the police outside Polanka's apartment had emailed his name to their colleagues, before getting shot, and now the authorities were finding tricky ways to ping his wallet and determine its position.

He stuffed the old thing under the tin basin with Polanka's jacket, no idea whether tin hampered wireless communication but feeling a dumb animal urge to cover all "aware" materials. Above, the surveillance dust was spreading, invisible, silent, already recording, collaborating, filing reports. He pulled the bill of a Kowloon Motor Bus Company baseball cap over his eyes and headed down the mountain. He went slowly, careful not to look hurried. The dust would hear if he shouted Polanka's name, so he kept quiet, repeating the strange text message mentally, wondering if it was a warning, something she needed to know.

Sheet-plastic roofs, tents, and earth-walled burrows obscured his view of Old Kowloon's commercial district. For the first time, he sensed that he did not know Hong Kong, that the people here—of whom he had not given a thought on his cousin's yacht, zoned on pre-party muscle relaxants and beer in front of a baseball game—had secret thoughts, plans they never talked about; he wondered about Polanka's savage exercise routine in the mornings, the Kanji graffiti on mailboxes and lamp posts, Polanka's wire-tough monologues that had come through the translator in syrupy grade-school monotones: "My ideas have much importance to me, and that is precisely the way it is," the great urban palimpsest of symbols he could not understand. It was hard to imagine how seemingly decorative patterns of light and paint could ignite such hatred, or fear, or send masses of people into conflict.

The street signs of Old Kowloon were a welcome sight, since many of them had been made famous by kung-fu films. He knew where he was.

He passed through the Mong Kok restaurant district, pausing at the place where his cousin had treated him the day of their arrival. The white tiger was still in the window, sprinting on a great creaking treadmill, spot-lit in crimson, the same metal box and peduncle of cables where its head should have been—or maybe this was a different tiger, since surely the other one would have been made into steaks by now. The sight had seemed so fun and exotic that first day, when everything Chinese had been a dancing chrysanthemum dragon, but seeing it again, so many weeks later, only revealed how quotidian the gimmick really was, meat from the lab, made in bulk for theme restaurants in who knew how many cities. At a table near the window a corpulent Asian man with slicked-back hair licked the blood from his knife, moistening his lips and smiling, his red tie loosened for the evening. Hong Kong had an appetite, revolution or no revolution, and Sloan could feel the need of its twenty million bodies as he lingered to let the reflection of a squad car pass below the tiger, twenty million people whose collective yearning seemed terribly manifest—serene and complete—in the blinking LEDs of the tiger's spinal matriculator. He was beginning to feel a little ill.

Prudence could not prevent him from glancing at the police. They rolled on by, apparently too confident about the city's SmartCams to bother checking the sidewalk themselves. He moved on with optimism until he noticed a newly waxed Honda Butterfly following the police car, in turn followed by a second police car. No more than one look was necessary to identify the man in the back seat of the Honda, who appeared to be in handcuffs. It was the sniper from the second story of Polanka's building, the man who had saved their lives. He was being taken toward the shore, which was less than a mile away.

Now he had no choice. He had to get to Mihn-Chao's fast—without running. Cabs were out of the question because of SmartCams. Buses, too. The elevated train. A bicycle would work, but bikes weren't allowed on Nathan Road, and besides he had given all his non-electronic money to the Chinese woman on the hill.

He kept walking, briskly, pretending to check his watch. Funny how he assumed the image-processing algorithms were intelligent enough to be fooled by pantomime. He had no idea how they worked, actually.

He kept to the shadows below the train, skipping along faster and faster. When the tracks branched, he cut over to Tong Mai Road, which took him to within a block of Mihn-Chao's. Polanka was already squatting outside, the man's shirt on her head tight as a cowl, hand out for change. He placed his fingertips in her palm, and she looked up.

"Gën wô laî." It was a simple command. Polanka pulled the shirt tighter and moved to depart.

He held her by the shoulder. "They got your friend."

She nodded and gave him a kiss. "Wô mén zoû."

He had to hold her by both shoulders this time. "No, Polanka. They know we're coming." He held up a finger to ask for patience. Since all of the videoplastic clothing was under a bucket on the side of the mountain, he had to pantomime the secret email message. It was hopeless. He'd learned only the first six letters of the sign-language alphabet for the sake of cheating during multiple-choice tests. "Come on."

He took her by the hand, careful not to run. A public terminal was easy to find. His baseball cap still snug against his nose, he leaned in below the videoconferencing camera and typed the strange message.

Polanka tugged his shoulder. "Gân kuaì!"

Sloan tapped the screen.

Her eyes hidden, Polanka might have been scared or simply exasperated. She pointed at the camera and cast a glance toward the thick Paulownia trees of Earthquake Park—the young Forest of the Dragons, genetically enhanced and in full bloom, representing a renascent city—and the harbor lights beyond.

He bounced the words off a Mandarin-English translation server, but she was not even looking when the reply came. He tapped the glass but she only glanced at the Kanji and pinyin translations.

"Wômén yí dìng yaò zoû." She was gone sooner than he could take a breath to reply.

He knew why she had pointed at the camera. Hooded faces at a computer terminal were suspicious in themselves. A minor alarm would already have been sounded.

"Wait!"

This time he feared that Polanka's feline grace and speed would elude him. She seemed to move through the trees without bending a blade of grass. The moon was gone, but the general glow of Hong Kong Island already seeped through the canopy and made the trees gray. He could hear the water.

He whispered her name as loud as he dared, sprinting now.

"3will 1half 894and." What the hell? She hadn't even blinked. 3will . . . It was a real word, probably out of some table, an index shared by all of the revolutionaries. Like the book he and his brother had used as kids, the D. H. Lawrence translation of something called Mastro Don Gesualdo. Only the D. H. Lawrence translation worked. You found the first occurrence of the word you wanted to use, then added . . .

Louis! No, his brother was studying in England. But . . . could it be? Was the message for him? His cousin . . . had they shown Sean the code? It had to be Sean. Sean was trying to reach him.

Idiot! He should have guessed.

Hard blue light from the shoreside walkway came through the trees in shafts, too bright to avoid, even if Polanka had had the markings of a leopard. A branch clawed at his face; he almost fell but kept going. An object was visible on the walkway, a car maybe, though no cars were allowed on the fine brick texture of fibrourethane. A Honda Butterfly . . . Was it? . . . Yes, it was the Honda. "Polanka!"

The time for caution was past. He shouted her name repeatedly, as loud as he could. He dove forward and wrapped his arms around her legs. She went down hard, protecting her face with her arms. He had no problem getting on top of her and pinning her on her side, but she kicked free of his weight. He held her wrists, keeping her down. He held on until the panic subsided. He could see what she was thinking. She was afraid but wanted to understand him.

To explain everything with signs was impossible. He simply made a fist, palm toward her, then brought the fist to his chest. "Trust," he said. He struck his chest a few times. "Trust."

He waited. She had the look of one who has received a bad translation. "You want to sell a blue goose?" he half-expected to hear her say. He pulled her to her feet. "Trust," he said.

Still, she resisted, craning her neck toward the bay. She wanted to see everything with her own eyes.

She got her wish. Two men appeared beside the yellow car, Han Chinese with business-cut hair and the somewhat baggy casualwear of mainland executives. Each stood with one hand in a slacks pocket and the other trailing curls of cigarette smoke. They were completely at ease, waiting patiently.

"Come on." He got her moving through the trees. They were no longer alone. A dark form moved off to the left. Another one straight ahead, crouched and hustling.

Polanka took down the first cop before Sloan knew he was there, the gun cracking like a jackhammer in her small hands. He groped inside his jacket for the pistol. To the left and behind them a great commotion ensued, the sound of bodies colliding with trees. The corpse of the first cop was still trembling when they passed, the top part of his skull knocked off. Polanka took them hard toward the right. If they could reach the dense crowds of the waterfront clubs and restaurants, they might stand a chance.

She followed the cinder path at a dead run. Just beyond the trees, the silence was like a spell, a stopping of time. She gradually slowed, holding him back with her hand. Sniffing, she searched the night with her yellow cat eyes. Mihn-Chao's patrons made the only sounds: sedate conversation on the patio deck by the water, the clicking of cups on wood. She stopped. She took his cap and tossed it ahead like a Frisbee. Fibrous sheets of static discharge fought over the hat like starving sylphs. A wall of aerostat capacitors blocked the path—"stun dust." They were penned in.

A soldier fell nearby, behind a tree, close enough for his Mandarin curses to be heard.

The aerostats could be dispersed temporarily with a large fan or disabled with a heavy mist. Buckets of water had been known to deaden part of a wall. Sloan's only thought was to trigger the park's sprinkler system somehow. He fell to his knees, searching for the nearest nozzle. Meanwhile, Polanka swung her gun around. When he heard the shots, he thought she had spotted a police officer. Instead, she was emptying her magazine into the trunk of a tall dragon tree, a Lucky Dragon, whose white petals trembled in the moonlight. Chips of white wood fell like bits of toadstools. When the shooting stopped, the only sounds were of people at Mihn-Chao's shouting and fighting to get back inside. The police had taken cover.

He was beginning to think that Hong Kong parks did not need sprinklers because of all the rain. Cautious movements in the woods indicated an encirclement, so he fired a warning shot into the ground near a woman in camouflage gear who was crawling toward the stone obelisk commemorating the 300,000 killed in the earthquake. The police were showing remarkable restraint, probably aiming for a surrender; he only wanted to slow them down.

Polanka reloaded and went back to shredding the tree. The gelignite-tipped bullets took such a deep bite out of the tree trunk that he decided he could bring the thing down. He used his shoulder but the tree resisted like a steel pole. Pulling himself onto the lowest branches, he used his weight to make the tree lean. No luck. It wasn't until most of Polanka's third and last magazine had been fired that he and the dragon tree came down, slow as falling snow.

A lightstorm like a dragon's scream swallowed the upper portion of the tree, subsiding gradually into sated spit-bubbles of ball lightning. Polanka crawled hand-over-fist into the wreckage of branches. Sloan followed. Blue filaments of energy stung his face and neck like a tattoo artist's laser, but the pain was bearable. He would make it.

The order to fire must have come late because they were almost to Mihn-Chao's when the first shot sounded. Then it was too late. They were on the street and in a crowd, running this time, seen by everyone and everything and not caring.

He noted the bits of trash in the road, a straw, a gum wrapper, a sock, a dish towel compressed by tires into the asphalt—nothing even remotely "aware." He needed to bring up Mastro Don Gesualdo in order to decode the email message.

They passed ticket stubs, broken green glass, a morph-toy with only enough goo left for half a lizard's head, an overhead billboard for rice wine that was aware but probably would not give access, a shoe lace, anonymous metal parts, a paper magazine—

He knelt down. Yes, the magazine had the dead slippery feel of paper. Between the pages, though, he found an insert that advertised some kind of subscription. A hebephrenically delighted Asian woman turned pages of the magazine while wiggling her toes against the arm of an easy chair. A Kanji button presumably led to the publisher.

Polanka had kept moving. He wondered if she had a plan. She waded into a traffic jam on the ground lanes of Canton Road, heading back toward the city.

"Polanka!"

He caught her at the palm-lined median, where green lights left them abruptly stranded between passing cars. "Just wait a minute." He spun her around by the shoulder. He held up one finger. "Hold on."

He rested on his knees, dizzy and sore in the throat, pushing at the little card like a child angry at a video game.

She watched what he was doing, interested now instead of skeptical. In the baggy clothes she looked like a peasant who sold soup to motorists. The light turned red, but she made no move to leave.

The ad resisted its termination, begging him to take one more look at the delight this publication would bring. Cancel. No. OK. No. Abort. Most ads would release the system only after every possible sales angle had been explored. Only the most obnoxious . . .

But this one kindly departed. He brought down Mastro Don Gesualdo from London University's Free Lending Library.

The omnipresent sirens of Hong Kong all seemed to be moving closer. The middle of a causeway was a hard place to avoid notice. He searched for the third occurrence of the word "will." It came in a sentence about a mansion going up in flames. The word it preceded was "go." He found the first occurrence of "half." The second word after it was "to."

The light turned green again. Traffic once again left them marooned.

The last word to look up was "and . . . "

Go to cactus. "The Cactus Cafe! Polanka! He's waiting for us a block from the Space Museum!" One of the only clubs still bearing an English name. A more thorough Chinese crackdown might have eliminated such an easy landmark for English-speakers.

Polanka smiled when he smiled. For a brief instant he felt like they spoke the same language. "Zaìjiàn Hong Kong!" he shouted.

Before the light turned red, flashing dome-lights already announced themselves, weaving through traffic. Sloan and Polanka braved the cars and plunged back into the sidewalk traffic.

He took a chance, firing off a message to Sean, his brother, and several other relatives, yelling into the card as he ran. "Hey, it's me . . ."

Polanka knocked over a basket of clams. He had to swerve to miss the vendor's flabby, obese arm, which she shook at Polanka as if she were an extra in a movie.

"Ping this card to find us. Might not get that far. Watch the shore . . . You better get this."

Nothing on-screen indicated an error or interception. Sloan just hoped the yacht was out there somewhere.

They reached the end of the restaurant district. Instead of following the road around the old loading dock, Polanka took a sharp right into an alley. An odor of oil and rotting produce lay in the dark passage. Puddles broke like oval mirrors. She took him to a dead end, onto a dumpster, and over a cement-block wall.

The strangest thing about this final foot-race was the growing stillness as they went deeper into the ghost-city of open spaces and tall sheet-metal buildings, the silence, the city noise like a wind heard from inside a forest, scattered by many shapes, high cranes keening beside the sea, dry freight containers stacked into rusted castle-like structures or fallen on their ends like crumbled stones, papers still loose about the grounds, real paper, flimsy records of imports and exports, from the wild days before Cultural Preservation, the seven empty berths holding nothing but choppy water. Even the huge old security-cams showed no signs of life. So this was the price of protecting a language and a way of life. Isolation implied stillness, he supposed, even in Hong Kong.

He dangled his feet off the side of the concrete platform, watching for the yacht. Polanka paced behind him, casting long looks into the ruins of the dockyard. The red dome-lights they had seen on Canton Road found their way into the alley, and bright patches of light now came over the fence and flew up into the openwork of the cranes. Sloan felt a hand close on his shoulder and pull—Polanka preparing to run yet again. "No!" he shouted. "This is it! Our last chance!"

She grabbed his wrist and pulled him off the ground, not bothering to say a word.

"We're surrounded!" He looked out to sea. A large military ship had taken a sharp turn toward the loading platform where they stood. No sign of the yacht. He knew suddenly that there was no exit—that the only question left was whether they would be captured or killed.

He caught Polanka's wrist, returning the grip with which she held his own wrist.

"Wô mén zoû!" she cried. "Qîng!"

"Trust," he said, making a fist with his free hand and touching it to his heart. "Trust." He couldn't save her from Hong Kong, but maybe he could save her life. She would thank him someday—he hoped.

She stayed, watching the military ship anxiously. He let her believe it would save them. Meanwhile, Hong Kong police dashed between the freight containers, body-armor shining with reflected points of light. He held up his hands in surrender.

Again, Polanka began tugging on his shoulder. "It's over," he said. She kept tugging. He turned his head. The military ship was less than a hundred yards away, coming into the light. He could make out the blue-and-white prow of a U.S. Navy cutter. Polanka slipped her machine gun into the water. Stunned, he followed her example, using his foot, because he had already dropped the gun in preparation to surrender to the Chinese.

As the ship slowed and approached the platform, Hong Kong police spotlights converged on the spot where he and Polanka stood. Two American soldiers manually extended an aluminum ramp, letting it drag across the concrete. A female police officer with a megaphone stepped out from behind a freight container and began making demands to the Americans, but Polanka was already clambering up the ramp on all-fours. "You got nothin' to fear from us!" shouted one of the Americans to the Chinese. "It's comin' from the mainland, which is where you shouldn't be turnin' your backs!"

Sloan climbed onto the aluminum ramp, and the soldiers pulled him onto the deck with the ramp like he was an ant stuck to the tongue of an anteater. The cutter accelerated, having never come to a complete stop. The Hong Kong police were left with their spotlights and megaphones in the abandoned shipyard.

"Had some strife with the ducks and geese, did you?" Sean's red face shined with bald good cheer. A can of Budweiser occupied his left hand.

Sloan got to his feet among the soldiers and refugees—dozens of them—and saw that his girlfriend was standing very straight, examining the soldiers with a taut expression, ready for the next challenge. "This is my friend, Polanka."

"Not the best day to be out playing sillybuggers, eh? My dearest pleasure," he said, bowing to Polanka.

A magazine open and tacked to a lifeboat showed similar scenes to what Polanka had smuggled inside the Li figurines, enhanced by a running commentary in English and by quick-cuts to a stooped Chairman Li with snow for eyebrows, shivering fingers, and subtitles calling for peace.

Other Westerners, mostly Americans, had made the ship's narrow deck into a kind of patio, with coolers of beer, chairs made from suitcases, and very light agreeable conversation all around. "Is it serious?" he asked Sean.

"Don't see any fires. Wha'd'you know about it? City looks quiet to me."

"What is it? Revolution?"

A sailor approached with a clipboard. "Mr. Theodore Sloan?"

Sloan nodded.

"Is your friend here also an Australian?"

Polanka listened with a stiff smile, hands clenched inside the pockets of her long robe. By law, she had been forbidden from learning any languages besides Mandarin.

"She's Chinese."

"We can't participate in political refugees. She'll have to go back."

The ship had already left shore. "She can't stay in China. They'll—"

"Nî shüo zhöng wén ma?" said Polanka. "Chinese?"

"We'll take care of the little lady," said Sean.

"That's up to Philippines Immigration, at this point," said the sailor. "We aren't turning back."

Polanka said something else. She clenched the man's arm in earnest.

The sailor eyed Sloan. "What'd she say?"

Sloan shrugged.

"Know each other well, huh? Here, why don't I give you this." He unclipped what looked like a brass decoration on his epaulette. "Adds a certain dimension, you know?"

The pin was a translator, apparently a single crystal customized for Mandarin. Sloan pinned it to his sleeve.

For an hour the pin gave little wasp-buzz translations of what Sean told them about the widespread unrest in China, the panic into which Sloan's mother had fallen, the help of the U.S. military, Louis's idea for the code. Sean scolded Sloan for never calling his mother. Polanka simply agreed with Sean's descriptions of her country, making the same two-sentence comment again and again: "The backward reactionaries are finished. Tomorrow comes even when it's a day late."

Only toward sunrise, when Sean settled into soft snoring on the deck, a squashed can for a pillow, did Sloan finally get a chance to talk to this woman he had lived with for three weeks in ignorance of her social ideals, her passion for the West, what else?

"Do you feel free now?" he had to ask.

The morning had brought a vista of rosy new light. Polanka's hand closed over his wrist just in time to muffle the buzz of the translator. Her face glowed. She kissed him with slow, tender attention, eyes bright. He knew her meaning. He told the translator to shut down, and together they faced the light of a new day, hand-in-hand, not saying a word.