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but whether that was really a good thing or not he couldn’t say. The Vietnamese tended to be generous toward strangers, but what if the stream brought him to the people who had killed his friends?
    Moving was better than sitting.
    He was bruised terribly, and his knee hurt, but none of his bones seemed to be broken.
    After an hour or so, the sun battered its way through the clouds and the air turned sweet. After another hour, his aches and bruises melted. Except for the insects and the shape of the trees and bushes, he could have been back at school, taking a summer’s hike in the woods.
    Josh figured he’d been walking for nearly three hours when he spotted a small bridge made of bamboo and tree trunks spanning the creek. The bamboo on the bridge was bright yellow, relatively new—maybe in place for only a week or two. One of the posts was new as well, a rough-hewn tree trunk stuck into the ground at a slight angle, brown rather than gray like the others.
    The bridge connected to a narrow path on both sides of the stream. The jungle was thick on the left, but light filtered through the trees on the right; there was a field beyond.
    Josh climbed up the incline to the path, trying to muster his small store of Vietnamese words:
    Xin chào!
    Hello.
    Vâng.
    Yes.
    Tôi không hiu.
    I don’t understand.
    He knew other words. What were they?
    Grandfather— Ông . It was an honorific, a title that the Vietnamese used all the time. It was like saying “sir.”
    Other words.

    Josh tried to stoke his memory, dredging up full phrases and sentences. Vietnamese had tones that went with the sounds, dramatically altering their meaning—a word could mean a ghost, or a rice plant, or a horse, depending on how it was pronounced.
    Ngon. Very tasty. The food is very tasty. Can you call for help.
    Can you call for help?
    Công an. Công an.
    Police.
    Depending on whom he met, Vietnamese might be of little use. Most of the residents of the valley were Hmong natives, who didn’t speak much Vietnamese themselves. They were poor mountain people, still very close to their roots as nomadic, slash-and-burn farmers.
    The trail looped back around the side of a hill, then continued through a patch of jungle. Josh walked steadily, sticking to the side of the trail so he could jump into the grass and hide if he heard anyone. As he turned a corner, he saw a cluster of thatch-roofed huts on the opposite slope. They were about a mile away, across a steep, rock-strewn ravine.
    Josh ran his hand over the slight stubble of his morning beard. Would the people help him?
    Yes, he decided. They must. They would. He began trotting down the path, trusting that it would curve back toward the hamlet.

6
    Bangkok, Thailand
    Mara Duncan was engulfed in a human tidal wave as she stepped out the side door of her apartment building, swept along on the sidewalk with literally hundreds of other Bangkok residents making their way to their morning posts. The entire city seemed to be flooding to work or school, and a good portion of the population seemed to be using the small side street where she lived.
    It was always like this, not only here, but all through Bangkok and the close-in suburbs, where the population had gone from an unofficial
fifteen million to nearly thirty million in less than a decade. Bangkok—known to most Thai-speaking locals as Krung Thep—was the unofficial poster city for the Third World’s population explosion. The streets were perpetually crowded and a thick shroud of pollution hung over the city. But it was a place of great wealth and commerce as well, a twenty-first-century boomtown that justifiably evoked comparisons to America’s Chicago or even New York in the early twentieth.
    No fewer than five new skyscrapers were being built in the city; each was over one hundred stories tall. One of the buildings, Thai Wah V, was planned to top 455 meters—a height that would make it, not