Nearly five hundred thousand yuan is what it would take. He looked to his weeping mother, who nodded. His father lowered his cabbage-like head, then stepped outside into the smoky evening air. He heard from behind the worn curtain that divided the house the tender whispers of his wife as she soothed their three-year-old son. It was a sum too big to imagine.

They gave him an envelope containing a Japanese passport. He would travel with four others—two men and two women. They were to pose as tourists. The trip would be long: A twelve-hour car ride to the Laotian border, where they would be met by someone who would take them to the airport in Vientiane. From there, a flight to Hong Kong, and from there, another flight to Miami. Do not worry about details, he was told. Just do as instructed, just do what they tell you. It would take a little more than two days to get to Miami, during which time they should try not to talk to anyone unless absolutely necessary. When they got there they were to meet a man….

Two weeks later he was in New York City. The restaurant he was sent to was right on top of another restaurant, in a building next to one that housed yet another. Somehow all three shared a single basement, a cave-like place lit by two bare bulbs and stinking of water rot. The walls were black and slick, the ceiling so low he had to stoop whenever he was sent down to fetch a crate of scallions or a sack of corn starch. Make noise, the cooks laughed, each time he was directed to the basement; the rats are more afraid than you are. Make noise and the rats will run away!

His hands were bloodied—from the splinters and nails of the bursting crates, from the rusted steel pads he was given to scrub the pots. His feet became infected from working in the standing water of the sink room, from the black water that pooled around the pallets in the basement, from all the climbing—up and down a rickety set of back stairs that felt it might collapse beneath him. The first time he saw a rat in the wet, dark basement, the rodent reared up on its back legs and spat, then scuttled off beneath a sagging set of shelves, long tail dragging like a rope.

Asha Cane was like a god to him. Brandon Alpaugh would never admit this to anyone, such was the ass-kicking it would provoke. But it was the truth. Asha with his twists of hair, sprouting from just above his forehead like devil's horns, hard with gel. Asha with his black coat and take-no-shit attitude. Asha with his body like a professional wrestler's—chest and shoulders as visibly powerful as those of the Rottweillers he trained to fight in the narrow kennel behind his stepbrother's trailer.

Asha was part Indian, or so he said. Brandon couldn't tell one way or another for sure, though Asha did have jet-black hair and eyes that looked a couple of centuries old. A warrior, that's what he was.

"Two weeks," the warrior said now. "I'm treating it like a vacation. Too bad you only got two days."

Brandon shrugged. It was his first suspension, and he had caught serious shit for it at home. Two days had sounded like plenty to his mother. "Don't worry," he told Asha. "I'll make the most of them."

Asha poked at the Rottweillers with a broken broomstick he'd filed to a point. His poking stick, he called it. The gray-brown dogs twisted and leapt as they tried to snag the stick in their jaws, threw their bodies against the chain-link fence, saliva flying. They'd fall to the ground and then with wet snarls launch their attacks again. There were three dogs in there, but in their frenzy they looked to Brandon like a dozen. He didn't want to get any closer than he was, fence or no fence.

"So," Brandon said. "See you Monday?"

Asha still didn't look at him. His horns gleamed in the late afternoon sun. He drove the stick hard between the forelegs of the dog that seemed the most riled. It shrieked and fell back, then attacked the fence again. "You know where to find me."

Brandon, witlessly, stupidly, before he could think not to say it, recited the words he'd heard his mother use on Friday afternoons when left at the end of the driveway by another hotel maid who gave her regular rides home. He cringed before the phrase was even fully out of his mouth. "Have a good weekend," he told Asha Cane, wrestler, warrior, god.

On Friday nights he was handed a knot of one- and five-dollar bills cinched in a rubber band. He wouldn't dare count it where he slept. Instead, he'd go into the restaurant's employee bathroom. The shit in the cracked, waterless toilet attracted a shifting curtain of flies that drowned the sounds from the kitchen, the clattering pots and hissing flames and the hoarse, crude laughs of the sweating cooks. This time, it came to two hundred and fifteen. He counted off twenty one-dollar bills and slipped them into his pocket. Then he re-tied the remainder, took off his apron, and put the package of bills inside it. Finally he put the apron at the bottom of the plastic bag in which he carried his food, beneath the two small cartons of rice and a tin of dumplings wrapped in foil.

There was a store on the corner, where he bought a package of cigarettes—Marlboros in a red box. He moved through the crowded streets until he found the windowless door, set in a building as narrow as a sapling. Upstairs, in a crowded room with a rusted sink and a small opening that gave on the air shaft, he took a seat at the table and fished one of the cigarettes from the hard red package. An hour later he had won eleven dollars. Someone extended a glass to him, a shot of American whiskey he downed without grimacing, without tearing, without making a sound. He took his food and money and went back down the tilting stairs to the street. Met with the whirling lights, the radios blaring from every storefront, the crowds that blocked the progress of cars, he didn't know what to do. He wanted to sleep, but it wasn't time for him yet; the man with whom he shared the wooden bunk still had another hour before he left for work, and taking an unused bed that didn't belong to him was an invitation to a beating from the others. He'd seen it happen to someone else the week before, an older man with pockmarked skin and a pleading smile that only made him seem weaker, that only seemed to heighten the anger of the other tenants in the room.

Now, he remembered his food. He was as hungry as he was tired. Finding a niche in the endless wall of buildings, he reached inside the bag, opening it only wide enough to snake his hand inside, lest any one of the thousands of people streaming by should see the apron and what it held. Chewing on one of the dumplings, he suddenly cursed. The cigarettes! Stolen, he knew, by one of the other gamblers—probably when he reached out for the shot of whiskey. How stupid of him!

But he still had the money. He'd taken his twenty dollars, spent six on the cigarettes, won eleven back, which made twenty-five left over. Twenty-five to keep to himself. Almost all of what was hidden in the bag would go to the man who came by weekly to the room where he slept. Such is the high price of travel, the man always said, laughing; but the price of not keeping up with payments is even higher, eh?

"Shouldn't you be at school or something?" Asha looked down from where he stood in the door to the trailer.

Brandon shrugged, turning his face away from the sun. "I thought I'd take a couple of more days off."

"As long as your mother doesn't care."

"Fuck her," Brandon said. The words tasted strange in his mouth, liquid and bitter. The walk along the roadside from his house to Asha's had left him sweaty and hot, and he was feeling hungry now too. "I can do what I want."

Asha smirked. "Whatever."

It was shadowy inside, not exactly dark, since the tattered gray curtains couldn't entirely block the sun. The TV was playing loud commercials, and there was a white enamel pot on the stove, resting on top of a low blue flame.

"What are you doing?"

"Check it out," Asha said. He thumped across the linoleum, a beast pacing his cage. Outside, the Rottweillers jumped and howled. Asha reached into a bucket on the floor and pulled out a squirming frog. "Cold-blooded," he said. "That's one thing I remember from science." He put the frog in the pot. It kicked its thick legs several times, webbed-feet slapping the sides and tossing water into the air, and then it calmed down. With its head up and its legs still and dangling, the frog could have been resting in one of the dozen sun-warmed ponds dotting the low-lying fields and thinning woods stretching away from the trailer.

Asha turned up the flame. He waited a bit, then turned it up some more.

"Gradually," Asha said, explaining what didn't need to be explained, "its blood will begin to boil. And it won't even know what happened. Cooked from the inside."

It didn't take as long as they thought it would. When it was over, Asha poured out the water, then tossed the frog through the window and into the dog kennel.

"They haven't eaten this well in weeks." Asha laughed, and Brandon laughed along with him. Asha's horns stood up like the horns of a mythical animal, his wide barreled chest like the trunk of a mighty tree.

"Too bad it's only a frog," Brandon blurted.

Asha stopped laughing, but there was still a smile there, just enough to lift the sides of his mouth in expectation.

"What do you mean?"

"Well," Brandon said. He wasn't sure what he had meant, but he knew he had to answer somehow. "Like, too bad there wasn't something more to give to the dogs."

"Something bigger?" Asha was now staring at him, smiling that same expectant smile, only now his eyes were narrower. Brandon felt his legs weaken.

"Yeah." He swallowed. "Bigger."

Asha suddenly left the room, and Brandon wondered if he might have said something wrong. The dogs had quieted down outside, but the television still blared its commercials. He was ready to admit he'd only been joking, he didn't really know what he was talking about, when Asha returned.

"What do you think?" He placed a gun on the counter, next to the stove. To Brandon it seemed as large as a football, though he knew it couldn't really be that big. But it was gray and thick and obviously heavy, forged from ancient metals pried from deep within a mountain. "Think it'll work?" Asha asked. Somewhere out on the road a truck blasted its horn.

The dogs raised up a howl in response. Asha laid his hand on the gun, stroking the barrel with the tips of his fingers. "Think it'll help nail us some big game?"

When the man came to collect the money he said not to go to the restaurant anymore. They needed him someplace else, so he was to go to a corner where a van would pick him up. If you have any things you want to bring, the man told him, looking around the filthy room with disgust, bring them.

He did as he was told, reporting at the appointed time. There were already five other men in the back of the van when he boarded. None greeted him; none, including him, said a word as the van crept northward on the crowded streets. They were still quiet when it got into a line of traffic and moved slowly across a bridge. Beneath them, the water glittered like fire.

Pennsylvania, he heard the driver say it to his companion—a word strange and mysterious, but no more mysterious than so much of the language he heard his countrymen adopting. Two or three more hours, the driver said, gesturing at the road ahead; the air is clean and you can see the trees—that's more than these sons of whores deserve! Outside the window of the van, empty factories lined the highway like ravaged soldiers waiting for food. But soon these were behind them, replaced by trees and rolling hills, and then, red barns and fields of corn. Eventually, they left the highway and drove along a narrow winding road whose dips and bumps made him feel sick to his stomach. At an intersection, the driver pulled into a parking lot before a row of storefronts. The driver's companion turned and motioned: You.

As the van pulled away, he was led in through the front door of a restaurant. The cooks behind the counter lifted their black eyes a moment and went back to work. Someone handed him a white smock and an apron and pushed him toward the rear, toward the large steel stink overflowing with grease-caked pots and blackened utensils. He could see from the sink that there was only one customer in the restaurant, a fat woman in a hooded sweatshirt at one of the hard, brightly colored tables that were bolted to the walls like shelves. She had yellow hair that looked tough and brittle. All the food went into white cartons as it was prepared, and the cartons were placed in bags, and then a slouching man wearing a baseball cap took the bags and left with them. The fat woman rattled a set of keys. When her bag was ready she took it, smiled, and left.

He worked until ten o'clock, hands and forearms turned scarlet by the endlessly running water, but it was easy compared to where he'd been. At first he had wondered if he was being punished, but maybe he was being rewarded. Maybe they had recognized his willingness to work hard. Behind the restaurant was a shed with a clean cement floor and four sturdy cots. There was a bathroom with a shower. He brushed his teeth and sat down warily on the only cot that was left; none of the other three men made a move to stop him. Soon he lay down and stretched out. Someone turned off the only light. In the darkness he listened to the singing of the crickets, millions upon millions in the fields and woods that stretched away toward the hills. He was scared to close his eyes, wondering what these men might to do him in his sleep. But soon their collective snores put him at ease; they were already asleep themselves. Lying on his back, smoking, he listened to the night sounds, and the occasional car as it whispered along the smooth-paved road.

Their target was a mound of sand thirty paces away. There was a stack of warping plywood and piles of cinder block, left in preparation for construction of a house never built. A hole for the foundation had been started, but that was all, while a vacant, falling-down house stood at the far-away fringe of locust trees like a forgotten parent.

The gun still felt like an anvil in Brandon's hand, even after all the practice. Yet when he squeezed the trigger a fountain of sand immediately spouted out from the pile, from more or less the spot he'd been aiming at.

"Getting better." Asha took the gun from him. He posed like a movie action hero, letting the gun dangle at his side, arm straight and rigid against his long black jacket. He spun and squeezed off three quick shots. Sand sprayed everywhere. He howled and threw his arms up in the air.

Brandon had learned the gun was a Mark III 678 Hunter semiautomatic. That it fired especially flat and could bring down a four-hundred-pound buck at fifty yards. That a human should never be unlucky enough to get in front of its business end. Asha had said all of this at one time or another since that day he'd brought it out into the kitchen. But he still hadn't said where it came from.

"Hungry?" Asha asked, stretching his arms over his head now, the gun glinting in the sun like some magical weapon of legend, the all-powerful blade of an epic hero.

"I could eat," Brandon said, hearing his stomach rumble.

"Let's get some Chinee," Asha said. "You want some Chinee?"

"Sure." Brandon laughed at the way Asha said it.

"Chinee good shit. Me likey. You? Shrimp fried rice. Good shit." They passed the abandoned house and crossed back through the trees to the trailer. "I need some money," Asha said, after phoning in the order. Brandon pulled out the crumpled ten-dollar bill he had taken from his mother's purse that morning while she slept. It soon passed into the hands of the deliveryman, who bowed nervously when he handed over the food, chattering something they couldn't understand.

Asha and Brandon looked at each other and laughed. "Damn chinks coming out of the woodwork," Asha said. "This seem like America to you?" He faced the deliveryman, who smiled and bobbed his head. "Get off my property," Asha shouted, making as if to lunge at the man, who flinched in response. "Dumb slant. Get back to China."

The man hurried away, and they laughed together as they opened the food. The rice smelled good, but Brandon liked to start with the fortune cookie. He split it with his thumbs and read from the strip of paper. "'You have tasted both the bitterness of coffee, as well as the sweetness.'"

"Whatever the hell that means." Asha dumped some steaming rice into a bowl. "Give me something I need to know. A real fortune. 'You'll get your driver's license this year.' At least that tells me something."

"Like what a fortune teller does." Brandon watched Asha spoon the rice into his mouth, which he followed with a large swallow of soda. "They let you know what your future holds," he said, trying to get him to listen. "They read your palm, or look into your eyes, and they know." Brandon waited for a response. "Wouldn't it be great to know the future?" he asked.

Asha belched. He turned and looked through the window over the sink. "I guess so." The dogs thumped and rumbled outside. "As long as it didn't suck as bad as the present."

Had he stayed home and worked in the factory, he would be worse off. Imprisoned within its walls, receiving wages that amounted to nothing, bent by unfathomable rules. For brushing teeth on the balcony, the penalty was to copy the employee hygiene policy thirty times. For picking your nose when in line for meals, a small fine. For sleeping during the two ten-minute breaks that divided the day, a flogging. He'd seen a man pulled from his bunk two hours before the work day, chained naked to the wall, and drenched with buckets of ice water; the charge was desultory work practices. They had similar stories, which they exchanged as eagerly as the cigarettes and wrinkled dollars they pushed across the table. Sometimes there was a bottle of American whiskey to share while they gambled, but more often he drank coffee, sweet and black and poured from an old stained pot taken from the restaurant. Always he was the last to go to sleep. Lying on his back in the darkness, he smoked, and listened to the night while the rest of them snored.

He had learned to drive. When sent on deliveries, he drove carefully and slowly. He'd been provided a license bearing a photo that could have been him but wasn't. Carry it, the boss said; just don't get stopped by the police. He didn't mind scrubbing pots but he would rather make deliveries. He liked being outside in the evening, when the sweet smell of the trees as darkness fell and the rising sound of the crickets could almost make him think of where he'd come from, of his wife and son, only their shadows visible through the curtain. The people in their doorways sometimes gave him extra money when handed their food, and he'd learned to smile and nod and turn away before they could take it back. He knew there was no special generosity. Whatever he received in this manner, he gambled with at night. Most of everything else was collected from him before he could even count it. Less and less went home to his parents, to his wife and child.

Coming back to the restaurant one evening he had to stop the car to let some deer cross in front of him. It was the first wildlife he'd seen here, other than the birds that flocked to the trees behind the shed or the occasional rabbit they'd toss rocks at on smoking breaks. The deer paused in the headlights to stare at him, and he stared back. They were bigger than anything he'd seen. He could see the power in their torsos and flanks, the mottled gray of their throats, and, on one, a pair of firm hard horns sticking up like fingers. Another car came up from behind—police! he thought, raising his eyes to the rearview mirror-but when its driver impatiently sounded the horn he relaxed. He looked back at the road. The deer were leaping away, disappearing one by one into the woods, and he had a sense of traveling with them, of pushing aside the branches and leaves as his feet found the path he knew was there.

Asha paced the length of the vacant house, his long black coat sweeping up brush, twigs, and even small stones in its wake. He seemed to Brandon bigger than the earth itself, a force capable of stirring up a tornado with each giant step he took. "The longer he takes, the easier he makes it for me."

Brandon pulled the hood of his sweatshirt up against the rain. Now and then a car swept past, and they'd step back around the corner of the old house, out of sight of the road. If only they could wait inside, Asha kept saying, but the windows were boarded up tight and the padlock swinging from the front door was sturdy; it would be stupid to announce their presence by trying to shoot their way in.

He lowered his head, the rain soaking through his sweatshirt to his shoulders. "God damn it!" Asha shouted, as another car passed by the house. The words came down like thunder—like more than thunder—like an explosion! It made his whole body shudder; he felt it moving from his feet up to his forehead-a creeping fever. Each drop of rain felt like the sting of something, some insect he could see but couldn't name. For some reason he laughed at this. Asha looked at him.

"That stuff messed you up," he said. "You took too much of it."

Back on the other side of the trees, the dogs howled. He remembered using the phone and giving the address of the abandoned house. Shrimp fried rice, fortune cookies, four cans of soda. They could have asked for half the menu, all of the menu—it didn't matter. Just call the goddamn restaurant, Asha commanded, and he had. That was before he'd gotten all messed up, before the stuff Asha had given him to counteract the beer and tequila had kicked in. He was useless now, and he knew it. Wasted! He saw himself among the thumb-sized field mice, busy with their own plans, darting in and out of the cracks of the house. He was down there with them, in the dirt, looking up at the huge, godlike Asha Cane, waiting to be stomped on if it came to that. One wrong move.

From around the turn in the road came the soft hiss of tires on wet pavement. Asha cocked his head and reached into the deep pocket of his coat. The car was slowing down, and then it pulled into the overgrown driveway, chassis moaning over the humps and ruts. A door slammed. Asha stepped around the corner of the house, and at the sight of the Mark III—freed like an animal from its cage—Brandon pulled the hood tighter around his face. He hung his head and let the rain work through to his bones. Like ice water, he thought, like torture. A punishment he wasn't meant to escape.

He heard Asha speak to the deliveryman.

"Took you long enough."