Wei Lai was glad that visibility inside the van was poor: Cen Jin had almost certainly wrapped him up in a way that looked absolutely ridiculous.
He slowly withdrew his arm from around her waist. “When I go back there, you drop to the floor under the seat immediately — curl into a ball, protect your head and face. Understood?”
“Understood. I’ve sheltered from artillery shells before — I don’t need instructions.”
Wei Lai smiled, drew a breath, braced his arms, narrowed his eyes to find his bearings, and prepared to make one swift, decisive lunge into the rear compartment.
“You’re young — don’t be so pessimistic. If he never came, just wait a little longer. It’s like waiting for a bus — one always shows up eventually.”
“What?”
She had apparently lost the thread entirely.
“The world is an unsettled place. Maybe something came up, maybe he was delayed — maybe his ship got hijacked, or there was a sandstorm. You need to be patient. Don’t go grinding your teeth and declaring ‘I’ll never wait again’ — how immature.”
Before he finished speaking, his gaze sharpened, and he launched himself forward.
The moment he was gone, the shelter he’d created vanished. The sound of wind and sand instantly pressed in from all directions. Cen Jin reacted without hesitation — she dropped low, her hair whipped upward by the wind, her scalp stinging sharply.
A man who played with paper airplanes, and he had the nerve to call her immature.
She didn’t have to wait long — only three or four seconds. Then a light, quick whistle sounded from the rear of the van, followed by Wei Lai vaulting over the top of the seat and landing in the front, pulling something open as he landed.
It was a large canvas tent — it fell exactly right over the front seats, enclosing both of them inside. The sand immediately began to patter against the tent fabric, the rustling sound dense as a heavy downpour.
Cen Jin raised her head and opened her eyes wide.
Just above her eyebrows, after a faint cracking and bending sound, a pale green horizontal line of light appeared — a glow stick.
Above the glow, Wei Lai’s smiling eyes looked down at her.
“Hey,” he said in greeting.
Cen Jin sat up, unamused.
Wei Lai sat down too and handed her pack to her.
“You might want to take out that silk wrap and drape it around yourself.”
Purely out of goodwill — grateful that she’d sacrificed a shirt for him.
But Cen Jin didn’t take it. “Is there something wrong with how I’m dressed?”
She was wearing a black strapless top, bare at the shoulders and neck, a slender span of pale waist showing. The gentle dip of her collarbones formed two shallow diagonal curves. She looked very much presentable.
“Have you ever been to the beach?”
Wei Lai nodded. Of course he had.
“Those women in bikinis — they were wearing less than I am, and you stared at them openly. Now I’m dressed like this, and you want me to drape a silk wrap over myself? Am I bothering you?”
Life was full of baffling questions. How did she know he’d stared at women on the beach?
Wei Lai quickly held out the first-aid kit, hoping to change the subject. “Could you give me a hand?”
He turned his back to her, grabbed the ragged hem of his ruined shirt, pulled it up and off entirely, then unwound the strips of cloth she’d tied around him.
Cen Jin held the glow stick close to look.
Numerous small abrasions, two lacerations down to raw flesh, the cuts packed with grit — it was difficult to look at directly.
She wedged the glow stick into the gap between the seat and the door frame, soaked a piece of gauze with alcohol, and began carefully cleaning the wounds.
Wei Lai asked, “Are you sure you can manage this?”
“Even if my reasons for going to Ka Long weren’t entirely pure, my emergency first-aid skills are more than adequate. I was there when Hu Sha’s severed head was being reattached — if you think I can’t handle this, do it yourself.”
Wei Lai smiled. His broad shoulders shifted with each breath, the skin surface radiating heat.
A man’s body seemed to run hot by nature — unlike a woman’s, which always tended toward coolness.
Cen Jin lowered her gaze and reached for the cap of the skin adhesive, twisting it open.
Wei Lai asked abruptly: “What was that about the radio?”
This man remembered everything, and chose the most unguarded moments to ask — just like that day at the Istanbul airport, in front of the newsstand stacked with fashion magazines, when he’d asked: “Why did you choose me?”
Cen Jin was silent.
After a while, she bowed her head, pressed gently around the edges of his wound with cool fingertips, and applied the adhesive in careful strokes.
A few strands of her hair brushed his back. Faint and delicate, tickling him.
“During the Ka Long massacre, the Huka people simultaneously activated radio broadcasts to incite the crowds. Over radio and loudspeakers, twenty-four hours a day, on a constant loop: Kill the Kasi people. They are our enemies. They are vermin. They are cockroaches.”
“We established a shelter in an elementary school to protect Kasi refugees. Wave after wave of Huka men arrived in vehicles surrounding the school, mounted speakers blaring toward it: We will break through soon and hack the cockroaches to pieces. We will kill you all, and your blood will flow in rivers.”
“That sound was in my ears every day. It would stop occasionally, but before you could finish exhaling in relief, the crackling static would start again — daytime, nighttime, in dreams. Inescapable.”
She stopped. Her gaze went blank as she stared at the adhesive in her hand.
The sound started up again, rising all around her, surging — mingled with frenzied laughter and the clashing of blades.
— “We will kill you all, and your blood will flow in rivers. We will exterminate every cockroach and everyone who protects them…”
“Hey,” Wei Lai said.
She hadn’t noticed him turn around.