Yao Wang fairly flees Joshua Flat, northward along the road to Alila. He does not stop for at least a mile, and then continues walking, until the silver in the bag on his back grows too heavy. When Joshua Flat is a smudge on the horizon, wavering in the heat, he sets the bag on the side of the road and sits down next to it, stirring a small cloud of grit and dust as he does.
He shudders, though the heat is baking across his back.
What has he done?
The object of a prison, of a chain-gang, is, at the end, to break the prisoner. To bear them down beneath the weight of the chain, the guards, the lost years, the unending work. To take people and make them coyotes, to take a man — as Yao Wang was taken — and twist until there is nothing left, and yet this process does leave things behind. It leaves the people whom it has battered, and it leaves hate.
Yao Wang was left hate. Hate for the guards, hate for the judge and jury, hate for himself for being turned into this coyote-man who would steal from a woman who offered him shelter and succor, hate for the world that had done nothing but grind him small and swallow his sister, his nieces and nephews.
Yao Wang was left hate, and it churns inside his belly, hot as the sticky asphalt of the road to Alila and with the acrid smell of tar in his nostrils. Something else also rolls in his stomach — guilt, fear, regret knotted into a ball that pulls and pulls and pulls at his insides.
What has he done?
Yekateryna Chernenko had had every right to turn him back over to the officers. She had had every reason — she'd taken Yao in and he'd repaid her like that and she'd had every right and reason to not even allow him in in the first place, and yet. And yet. She had.
She had shown him kindness, had trusted him — him — and why?
Become honest, she had said. Yao doesn't know if he can. If the chain-gang had left that in him, if there was anything in him that could ever turn from the red desert and white sun and the guards on horseback as they broke rocks and laid roads. If there is any way out from this, from what he is now, a life on parole where nobody would extend a hand.
(And yet, Yekateryna had.)
How did she know if he could? Yao could, right now, stand back up and take the bag of silver and sell it off and that money would last for a while, and then it would run out, and nobody would hire a man who was parolee, dangerous. And what then? Stealing, again, and for nobody but him, and for no reason but to live, and the chain-gang again until nothing was left. What made her think that Yao Wang could escape — ever escape from this?
The sun climbs higher in the hazy sky, and the wind shifts until it carries the smell of creosote from the foothills. Yao narrows his eyes against the glare, thoughts chasing themselves through his head.
The chain gang had taken Yao Wang, changed and twisted him — and Yao Wang had stolen from Yekateryna, which seemed to him now to be the greatest of his crimes — and Yao Wang would steal, would continue to be forced to steal and to steal when there was no force, dogged always by the yellow papers in his pocket, and the only way out —
— the only way out was for Yao Wang to be gone.
Without realizing it, Yao had taken the papers out of his pocket, and he stares at them now, hands steady in their grip. "Parole for life" stares back, and "dangerous convict". Yao bows his head, and lets out a long and near-silent sigh.
Two days later, a young ranch-hand who sits on the back of the rattling truck that drives them all up to Axel sees, amid the cloud of dust raised by its wheels, several scraps of yellow paper fluttering in the early sun. He thinks it odd at first, but by the time the truck reaches Axel he decides they must have been dropped by someone coming home last night, and does not think on it further.