The Xingchang Medicine Shop was only a secret communications station, not meant for long stays. The group spoke quietly upstairs, appearing to be chatting over tea, though the matters discussed were of the utmost importance—how to relay information, how to make contact, how to hire a small boat to receive the incoming courier, and how to arrange a secret residence. Once all these matters were settled, they agreed to return the next morning to hear Lao Xiao’s decision, and Ling Wen and Yi Junnian prepared to leave.

“You said the newspaper archives could be found on Newspaper Row?” As Mo Shaoqiu and his wife saw the two of them off at the door, Ling Wen couldn’t help asking Mrs. Mo once more.

“Straight ahead is Guangfu Road,” Mo Shaoqiu said, pointing toward the eastern end of Jianglan Street. “There are a dozen or so newspaper offices there—you’ll just have to ask around.”

“Those old newspapers won’t have any real clues. If you want to find Long Dong, the best way is through the organization,” Yi Junnian said quietly as the two of them turned onto Guangfu Road.

“Maybe the newspaper has the address of that contact point.” She knew Yi Junnian had a point, but for some reason, she just felt she had to find that place, had to go see it herself. Because in all these years, that was the only place she could truly confirm Long Dong had once been.

Ling Wen knew what was bothering Yi Junnian. From the moment they’d boarded the ship for Hong Kong, Yi Junnian had kept reminding her, in one way or another, that the mission was important, that the enemy was formidable, and that they mustn’t create unnecessary complications.

That night at the Maochang coal yard, Chen Qianli had also told her that there had been no word of Long Dong at all, and that he was likely in a dangerous position, requiring strict secrecy. If that were true, then once she reached Guangzhou, she shouldn’t go around asking questions—doing so might bring unforeseeable risk. So they’d all known perfectly well that once she got to Guangzhou, she would inevitably try to find out what happened to Long Dong. Then why didn’t you stop me? she found herself growing rather angry.

“I know what you’re thinking. You care too much about your own personal feelings,” she said.

“After all these years, what could you possibly find in an old newspaper?” Yi Junnian, too, seemed rather worked up.

Before they’d set out, Lin Shi had suggested they pose as a married couple for the trip to Guangzhou. Like ordinary well-off merchants, they’d booked second-class cabin tickets on the Yihe Steamship Company’s ship Fusheng, the two of them sharing a single cabin. They had posed as a married couple many times before on missions, but spending days and nights together at sea like this was a first.

But this hadn’t put Yi Junnian in a more advantageous position—if anything, Ling Wen found that the closer she got to Lao Yi, the more she noticed all sorts of problems with him. He didn’t even seem as steady and composed as she’d always thought. In the past, even in moments of crisis, Long Dong had always eaten when he needed to eat and slept when he needed to sleep. But over the three days on the boat, Yi Junnian had never once slept soundly.

Once, waking in the middle of the night, she saw him by moonlight through the porthole, leaning against the headboard, lost in thought about something, his eyes glinting with a cold light that startled her. Even asleep, he often ground his teeth, and once or twice had even cried out in his sleep. Fortunately, the second-class cabin had two separate beds. She thought to herself: a seasoned underground worker shouldn’t have such trouble sleeping.

By the roadside stood the offices of the Guohua Daily, crowded with newspaper vendors waiting for the fresh papers to hit the streets. That was the Guohua Daily‘s business model—one daily paper published twice: the first edition came out the previous afternoon, then by evening, once the day’s news was complete, they’d quietly pull out the earlier pages in the middle of the night and replace them with the day’s news. Effectively, one paper served as both morning daily and evening edition.

“This is just the newspaper office—what do you expect to find here?”

Yi Junnian only wanted to stop her—wandering around the streets of Guangzhou asking questions was pointless and dangerous. But Ling Wen seemed almost possessed, completely indifferent to what he was saying. She wasn’t tired, wasn’t thirsty either, going from door to door on Guangfu Road, asking around. It was the first time Yi Junnian had witnessed the stubbornness of this woman writer—he began to wonder if he’d misjudged her all along. At that moment, Ling Wen seemed brimming with vitality, sweat on her forehead, her eyes bright.

He stood on the roadside smoking; Ling Wen went into another newspaper office. By the time he’d finished his cigarette, she came back out.

She told Yi Junnian she’d found out—on Shibafu Street was the Guangzhou Journalists’ Guild, next to which was a clippings service that kept clippings organized by category for reporters to consult on old stories. For a major paper like the Guangzhou Republican Daily, every old issue, every page, was preserved there.

He hadn’t expected Ling Wen would actually manage something like this. He felt he might have underestimated her. He’d originally thought she was simply a modern woman absorbed in writing, following Long Dong into revolution out of a burst of passion. Once Long Dong disappeared, she’d lost her sense of direction. But it seemed now that, as long as she set her mind to it, she could immediately show her capable side too.

“You’re quite competent, aren’t you.” He sighed. “Women always turn out capable when it involves matters of the heart.”

Ling Wen didn’t respond. She knew what he was thinking. Though she couldn’t be certain how much of Yi Junnian’s current sullen manner was genuine, and how much was put on. That he had feelings for her had always been clear—her neighbors, comrades who knew the two of them, even the assistants at the shops near their home—he never bothered to hide his affection for her in front of others. But Yi Junnian never seemed to be someone skilled at expressing his feelings—more often than not, the harder he tried to express them, the less genuine they seemed.

Of course, Lao Yi, being experienced, always managed to find a solution when problems arose, whereas she herself tended toward anxiety—like on the boat, when she’d kept feeling that someone acting suspiciously was lurking around them, looking sinister. Lao Yi, unhurried, had quietly investigated and come back to tell her there was nothing to worry about. One of them, it turned out, was likely fleeing debt; the other was severely nearsighted and had just broken his glasses right after boarding.

Hearing Lao Yi’s explanation, she’d drawn a little sketch on a slip of paper of a pair of broken glasses; when Lao Yi saw it, he’d taken it and torn it up.

Sure enough, there was a Journalists’ Guild on Shibafu Street, a door beside the arcade leading into the clippings service. To consult the clippings, one had to register identity and pay a few small coins. The categorization was very thorough: Guangzhou Republican Daily, local news, the eighteenth year of the Republic. The bound clippings volumes sat on shelves; a large one was brought to the table by the window, raising a cloud of dust as it was set down.

The publication date of this particular item was marked on the left side of the clipping page: the thirteenth day of the sixth month, the eighteenth year of the Republic:

This paper reports that Guangzhou, being a strategic hub, has seen frequent Communist activity. The Garrison Command and the Municipal Public Security Bureau have conducted repeated thorough searches these past several days, successively breaking up numerous Communist installations. On the evening of the ninth of this month, acting on intelligence received in advance, the Garrison Command discovered that No. 23, Back Street, Tianguan Lane, off Haoxian Road, was a secret Communist operating base, and dispatched officers to surround the location, where three Communist suspects were found. They refused to surrender and put up desperate resistance, exchanging fire with the police and military for several minutes, after which one was shot dead on the spot, one captured, and one escaped.

This paper has learned that the captured suspect was Ouyang Min, Communist District Committee Secretary; the one killed was Lu Zhongde, a clerk in the Public Security Bureau’s Special Investigation Section, who, though a Communist, had long lain hidden within a confidential government post, causing tremendous harm to the Republic—his execution today brings great satisfaction to the public.

Further reports indicate that the one who escaped was Long Dong, head of a Communist intelligence network, who infiltrated underground after the Guangzhou uprising of the sixteenth year of the Republic, with his agents penetrating deep into the Guangzhou government and various military and police organs—the aforementioned Lu Zhongde being one of his secret operatives. It is reported that the Garrison Command has ordered a portrait made and distributed widely, with strict orders to apprehend this Communist and bring him to justice.

Residents of this area around Haoxian Road still called it Hao Xian Street—”Moat-String Street”—because it ran along the old city moat, curving like the string of a bow. Yi Junnian and Ling Wen got off their rickshaw at the bank of the Dong Hao Canal and began working their way in from the eastern end of Haoxian Road.

The streets and lanes crisscrossed with no street signs to guide the way. Aside from local residents, few outsiders ever came here.

A young man emerged from the mouth of a lane, neatly dressed, a cloth satchel slung across his shoulder, square and boxy, as though full of books—he looked like a student. Ling Wen went up to him and asked about Tianguan Lane. As it turned out, he could understand the accent of an outsider, and pointed to the lane he’d just come from, saying: go in, all the way to the end.

The lane was narrow and deep, flanked on both sides by the back walls of people’s houses, doors all tightly shut. The two of them walked to the end of the lane and found themselves before a large open space, a great banyan tree in the center, new shoots just beginning to sprout, with a few yellow leaves already fallen beneath it.

Ling Wen noticed a wooden sign hanging at the corner of a door on the right side—it read, indeed, Tianguan Lane—and was about to head that way when she saw Yi Junnian continuing straight ahead.

Ling Wen called out to stop him: “It’s here.”

Yi Junnian halted, looked to the right, and said: “That’s Tianguan Lane—the place you’re looking for is the Back Street.”

“Shouldn’t the Back Street be behind the neighborhood?”

“You never can tell direction, can you—coming in from Haoxian Road, isn’t the Back Street further north?”

Past the banyan tree, further north, lay a few mu of vegetable fields, planted with mustard greens; a large earthenware vat sat by the roadside, and a foul smell drifted on the wind that passed. North of the fields ran a small irrigation channel, spanned by a stone slab serving as a bridge; past the bridge was a cross-street. Ling Wen checked the house numbers along the street, and sure enough, this was Tianguan Lane’s Back Street.

By this point, though, Ling Wen felt a little lost herself—what exactly had she come here to see?

The cross-street ran right along the irrigation channel, its bed lined with yellow sand, where tiny red fish swam above the sandy bottom. She thought: Long Dong might have drunk from this very channel. What had happened here on the Back Street that night? How had he escaped when the military and police surrounded the house? Where had he gone after he fled?

“What did the two of you talk about, back there?” She raised her head, realizing Yi Junnian was speaking to her.

“What did Old Mo’s guest say to you?”

“You mean Lao Xiao, the one from Ruijin?” Ling Wen seemed a bit dazed at the moment.

“Right, why all the mystery?” Yi Junnian said, examining the house numbers along the street. “He came to see Lin Shi about conveying a new assignment?”

Ling Wen nodded. She gazed at the houses along the Back Street—these houses all had strange doors. Where had she seen doors like these before? She had the oddest feeling she’d seen this style of doorway somewhere before.

“Is the new assignment for us?” Yi Junnian sounded a bit excited. He’d said to Ling Wen on the boat that a mission like establishing a communications line—why had they transferred him for this? He was better suited for intelligence work, really—buying tickets, renting rooms, that kind of thing could easily be handled by the women comrades, with Liang Shichao along at most for protection. Ling Wen had thought at the time: he’s still holding a grudge over Chen Qianli not making him the leader of their two-person team.

“He didn’t tell me what the assignment is. It’s a top-secret message that must be delivered to Lin Shi in person.”

“Then why did he tell you?” Yi Junnian, seeing that Ling Wen kept pressing, didn’t seem like an amateur either.

“He’s a central confidential courier. The message is extremely urgent and must be delivered face to face. He’s planning to go to Shanghai himself, to travel with us on the ship.” Seeing Yi Junnian keep asking questions, Ling Wen explained patiently.

“That doesn’t quite follow the rules. Everyone’s on a separate secret mission—traveling together is a serious breach.”

“We can pretend not to know each other.” Ling Wen walked a few steps, examining the surrounding streets and lanes, and suddenly grew a little impatient. “Besides, there aren’t so many rules as all that. If you want to talk about rules, you shouldn’t have said the things you’ve said to me.”

Yi Junnian understood perfectly well what she meant by this, and whatever he’d been about to say next, he swallowed back.

As evening approached, the setting sun lit up the flagstone road, and this stretch of Back Street grew livelier, since a straight lane led north to the main road outside. Two or three small shops had walls painted with the words for soy sauce, firewood, and kerosene, and one shop sold nothing but cigarettes and rice wine. Ling Wen couldn’t figure out what “fire water” meant, until she saw someone inside a shop lighting a kerosene lamp.

Two or three children ran along the edge of the channel, holding lines that trailed small paper kites behind them—the little kites couldn’t fly high, drifting instead in the light breeze along the bank. At the mouth of the straight lane sat a small table, on it a bamboo tube of divination sticks, brush, ink, and inkstone, the table wrapped around with a cloth of indeterminate color, on which was written “Speak Plainly, Hide Nothing,” surrounded by painted trigram symbols. Behind the table, on a stool, sat an old man wearing bronze-framed glasses with crystal lenses.

The old man suddenly spoke up loudly: “By your accent, you two aren’t locals?”

“He can hear us?” Ling Wen was somewhat startled, looking at Yi Junnian.

“You two have been talking the whole way down the street,” the old man said, pushing the bamboo tube forward. “Not married yet, are you two? Why not draw a lucky stick from Wong Tai Sin and see how your marriage fortunes stand.”

“He can’t hear,” Yi Junnian said.

Ling Wen turned to leave, but Yi Junnian picked up the bamboo tube, shook it a few times, and held it out toward Ling Wen, saying: “When in Rome.”

Ling Wen drew a stick and handed it to Yi Junnian—it was the seventy-third.

“The peach and plum blossoms of spring speak no words themselves, yet bitterly suffer the clamor of birds beneath the fading sun.” The old man picked up his brush, writing out the verse of the stick as he recited it, then handed the paper to Yi Junnian once finished.

“Peach and plum, wordless; the fading sun, suffering; birds, clamoring and disturbing. Now, what matter do the two of you wish to ask about, on this stick?”

“This is a bad draw, isn’t it?” Yi Junnian said with a smile.

“That depends on what’s being asked, and who’s asking. If it’s a question of marriage—based on this stick, you’ll still have to wait some time.”

“I want to ask about a person,” Ling Wen said suddenly.

“Which person?”

“I want to know where he’s gone.”

“What is he to you? How long has it been since you last saw him? Where did he go missing from?” The old man asked three questions in a row.

“A family member. He disappeared three years ago.”

“From what direction did he vanish?” Seeing Ling Wen unwilling to say, the old man continued, “Judging from the stick, if you go looking for him, you’ll only disturb him. Perhaps, given time, he’ll come out on his own.”

“He disappeared right here.” Ling Wen steeled herself and said to the fortune-teller, “Three years ago, there was a killing on this Back Street of Tianguan Lane—someone was shot dead by the police. Do you know anything about it, sir?”

The old man raised his head to look at Ling Wen; the setting sun reflected off his dark green lenses, glinting unsteadily. He said slowly: “The two of you are educated people, aren’t you? This Hao Xian Street has always had plenty of people coming and going. Hao Xian Street—isn’t that just Haoxian Street? Since ancient times, heroes rarely meet a good end—one general’s triumph is built on ten thousand corpses. That great strike back then, two hundred fifty thousand people took part, and no small number from Hao Xian Street among them. Look at the people on this street now—who’s to say whose family didn’t have someone charge alongside the workers’ picket corps back then—”

“It seems you’re a man who’s seen a great deal of the world, sir,” Yi Junnian cut him off.

“Me, an old fortune-teller, half-blind—what could I have seen? Just the wind passing my ears.”

Somewhere, a woman was working late at a loom before dark, the machine clattering urgently and insistently, the wooden roller creaking, the shuttle knocking back and forth. Ling Wen turned to leave; the old fortune-teller, silent for a long while, suddenly called out to stop her: “That house is up ahead—everyone says it’s an unlucky house, no one wants to live in it, no one wants to buy it either. Even the owner’s family doesn’t want it. They locked the door and had the woman next door, Seventh Aunt, keep an eye on the place.”

“Where can I find Seventh Aunt?”

“Seventh Aunt is a self-combed woman, came to Guangzhou from Shunde to work as a mother’s helper. She has no husband, no children, deep into age now—her lamp burns alone night after night, spring comes and spring goes, sorrow only deepens—” he trailed off into song mid-sentence, then, the echo not yet faded, continued, “Seventh Aunt is old now, no children of her own. The owner’s family took pity and let her look after the house. You’ll see her when you get there—she sits weaving in the front room every day with the door open.”

They found No. 23, Back Street, Tianguan Lane—the door shut tight, the brick walls covered in moss.

Ling Wen turned to look at Yi Junnian and saw his face had gone ashen. Strange, she thought, and asked: “What’s wrong with you?”

Yi Junnian restrained his emotions: “Just to see this house, you’d disregard your own safety entirely.”

Seventh Aunt lived next door, and sure enough, her door was open. By the fading daylight, she sat inside, weaving patterned cloth.

The ground here sat low; two layers of stone slab had been laid before the door, weeds covering the steps. In the corner beneath the doorway, a centipede crawled slowly into the weeds. Seventh Aunt stood on the steps to open the door for them, and Yi Junnian, behind her back, reminded Ling Wen in Shanghainese that they were businesspeople from Shanghai come to Guangzhou, looking to rent a house.

Ling Wen, though, was fixated on that strange door. In fact, there were three doors in sequence. The first was a half-height screen door, only about five chi tall, standing right at the entrance, positioned exactly to block the view from outside. The middle one was a barred gate, its round wooden bars set horizontally rather than vertically, with a stray cat perched atop it, making it look almost like a ladder; below it were pulleys, the track running half into the wall behind. Seventh Aunt pushed to the right, but the door wouldn’t budge; Ling Wen stepped up and reached out to help her push.

The third was the actual door to the house; through it lay the main hall. Seventh Aunt could speak Mandarin—she’d left home to work as a mother’s helper in her twenties, traveling with her employer’s family to many places. She was about to lead them through to see the front and back rooms, but Yi Junnian took out a silver dollar and sent her off, telling her to go home and boil water—they’d come by for tea later.

The moment Seventh Aunt left, Yi Junnian turned to Ling Wen: “Once you set foot on this street, you stopped caring about anything at all. How could you go around asking questions like that?”

Ling Wen, for her part, was growing more and more disoriented—something about this house kept nagging at her, feeling not quite right.

“I think there’s something strange about this house,” she said. What frightened Yi Junnian most was precisely this kind of groundless intuition of hers—over all these years, he had never once managed to overcome it. She always seemed to know in advance what he was about to do; the moment he thought to say something to her, before he’d even gotten it out, she’d already cut in ahead of him. Her intuitions—you couldn’t really say she was wrong, either.

That day she’d gone to Qin Chuan’an’s clinic and, coming back, had told him Lin Shi wasn’t the problem—that it was rather strange how those three people had pressed him to confess. He’d asked her: which of the three had been most aggressive about it? She’d answered that if she had to pick one of the three, she felt Cui Wentai was the most suspicious. Yi Junnian thought—this was probably exactly why Chen Qianli had put Ling Wen in charge of the Guangzhou trip. Chen Qianli was no simple man.

Hanging from the beams of the main hall was a row of straw mats, riddled with moth holes and spiderwebs. The house was almost entirely empty now, just a few broken tables and chairs remaining.

“Don’t you think it’s a bit odd, this Lao Xiao?” Yi Junnian said, looking up at the straw mats—in the heat of summer, they would have stirred the stuffy, damp air inside the house.

“Why are you so interested in him? You’ve brought him up several times already along the way.”

“You’re impatient,” Yi Junnian said, changing his tone. “Comrade Ling Wen, I have to remind you—you seem to have forgotten that we have an important mission here in Guangzhou. Your mind has been entirely elsewhere. I think it was a mistake for Chen Qianli to put you in charge of this operation.”

“I think you’ve got something on your conscience.” For some reason, once inside this house, Ling Wen felt a vague unease stirring within her.

Yi Junnian’s expression changed; he suddenly sighed. “Is it really that hard for you to forget him?”

Ling Wen was startled for a moment. Standing in the dim main hall, she suddenly said: “I feel as though time stopped on that day—”

She didn’t explain to Yi Junnian which day she meant—the day she’d been released from custody and returned home to find Long Dong gone? Or further back, the last day she and Long Dong had seen each other? Without quite realizing it, she began humming that Yiddish folk song, dong-ba-la-dong-ba-la-la—

Seventh Aunt had finished boiling the water and invited them over for tea. The moment they sat down, Ling Wen asked her: “Did something happen in that house, before?”

“The year they built the great iron bridge over the Pearl River, I heard there were Communists in that house.”

“Did you ever see any of those Communists?”

Seventh Aunt’s mind wandered between lucid and confused. When lucid, she spoke concisely and to the point—clearly, in her employer’s household in the past, she’d been a capable woman. But when confused, there was no telling what she was talking about. She hadn’t seen them—she hadn’t lived here at that time, hadn’t yet grown too old to work.

“Is there anyone on this street who lived here back then, and never moved away since?”

Yi Junnian looked at her with a strange expression, as though he thought she’d lost her mind.

“Why are you asking me these things? Are you Communists?” There was no telling, at this point, whether Seventh Aunt’s mind was lucid or confused. She began talking about the families who had moved away, naming them one by one. Some families in the Back Street had bought their own land and built houses; others had leased the land and built on it; many families had lived here only a few years before moving on. Seventh Aunt talked more and more, but Ling Wen understood less and less of what she was saying.

Outside, the sky had already darkened; Seventh Aunt was nearly asleep. The two of them quietly slipped out, took an oil lamp, and went back next door. As they reached the doorway, the stray cat darted out from the main hall.

“This is called a tang-long door,” Yi Junnian said, pulling the ladder-like barred gate shut and sliding the bolt into place.

He told Ling Wen: “Outside the main door there are two more layers—this one’s the foot-door, and this is the tang. Guangzhou is humid, so ventilation matters more than anything else when you live here.”

The wind blew in through the tang-long door, and the oil lamp flickered on and off.

“Wandering around asking questions like this will only bring trouble down on you. I really didn’t realize you were the kind of woman so prone to courting disaster—even Seventh Aunt guessed you were a Communist.” Yi Junnian spoke as he walked further inside.

“That Secretary Ouyang who was captured—I wonder what happened to him afterward. He might know where Long Dong went.” Ling Wen said, somewhat absently.

“Why don’t you ask that Lao Xiao—whether he might know where Long Dong is.” Yi Junnian deliberately changed the subject.

This remark reminded Ling Wen that they still had a mission to carry out. Earlier her mind had been in such disarray—the moment she’d arrived at this place, she’d felt a sudden agitation, as if, after all these years, she were close to Long Dong again for the first time, almost as if she could reach out and touch him. But it wasn’t really so.

Guangzhou was dangerous, and outsiders here drew attention easily. This was Yi Junnian talking. Walking around Haoxian Street like this today, plenty of people had seen them—perhaps by tomorrow morning, or even tonight, someone would report it to the detective corps. Have you forgotten what happened in Hong Kong? How dangerous that was! The slightest thing arousing suspicion, and the enemy could discover them.

At the Hong Kong docks, they had been taken into a room by the British police. She didn’t know what they’d done wrong—they’d considered every detail, the night before landing they’d rehearsed everything once more, gone over every cover story several times, including what to say if the enemy discovered a problem with their identities—the second line of defense, and the third.

The British police had put them in two separate rooms; once the Chinese police arrived, the interrogation began. Half an hour later, the British let them go.

Before their release, they’d been locked together in the same room; she’d asked Yi Junnian what exactly had happened. He’d answered that perhaps there’d been some problem with the shop guarantee. Coming ashore from Hong Kong required a shop guarantee to be submitted, even for just a few hours ashore—the Marine Police still had to verify identity. Yi Junnian told her that the guarantee document they’d brought this time listed a shop they’d used a few times before, one the police had seen before: “I’d guess that the last time someone used it to come to Hong Kong, they must have grown suspicious.” She’d asked him, then how had it finally been resolved? He said he’d asked to send a telegram to Shanghai, addressed to one of his operatives—someone working as a translator in the concession police.

They took up the oil lamp and passed through the main hall into the second hall, then up a staircase from the south corner to the second floor.

“What could you possibly find in an empty house—you’ve waited five years for him already, how much longer do you plan to wait?” Yi Junnian said quietly.

“As long as he’s alive, there’ll be a day we meet again.” The room on the second floor had windows on three sides—it must be very bright during the day. Ling Wen stood by the window, looking out, and suddenly added, “The revolution, too, will have its day of victory.”

“Perhaps that day will come only after we’ve made our sacrifice. Some things matter more now than they will in the future.”

“I have no present—only the past, and the future.” Ling Wen answered quickly, but thinking it over, she realized this wasn’t quite right either. How could she have no present—right now, she and Yi Junnian bore the most important mission of all, their whole group, having sailed all this way to Guangzhou.

Lin Shi had said: the stretch of the communications line from Shanghai to Ruijin, the most crucial and most dangerous stretch, had been entrusted to them. The rest of the journey led through wild mountains and desolate country, where the only threat was scattered bandits and stray soldiers—but from Shanghai to Guangzhou, the entire way was crawling with military police and secret agents.

“I brought you here so you’d know what the past really is.” Yi Junnian ran a hand along the flower stand standing lonely beneath the window. “The past is nothing but dust now—blow on it, and it all scatters. We’ve watched so many people, in just a few short years, turn into the past, turn into dust.”

She had never seen Yi Junnian like this before—his words sounding somewhat despondent, yet his expression strangely animated, like a man exhausted to the bone who had drunk too much wine. What’s wrong with him, she thought to herself.

“What’s the matter with you?”

Yi Junnian suddenly reached out to touch her; Ling Wen blocked his hand and stepped back half a pace. She expected he might try again, but instead he slowly relaxed, took out a cigarette from his pocket, and lit it: “This damp, dark room is enough to make anyone feel not quite themselves.”

He thought for a moment, then added: “By the rules of the organization, this Lao Xiao from Ruijin shouldn’t be traveling with us at all. We only answer to Comrade Lin Shi’s single-line leadership—we’re not supposed to reveal Comrade Lin Shi’s whereabouts to anyone else either.”

“He’s the one making contact with Comrade Lin Shi. He has to deliver that message as quickly as possible. Principles can have exceptions. Didn’t you used to say that all the time yourself?”

She had no wish to keep trying to convince Yi Junnian on this point. She told him that Lao Xiao’s mission came directly from Comrade Shao Shan. The newcomer had passed the identity verification code—a code known to no one else—which Lin Shi had quietly given her before they set out.

Now, there was only one thing left for Yi Junnian to do, but he hesitated. He wanted to find himself a few more reasons first. On this point, perhaps he really was inferior to Long Dong.

He could never quite shake off that strange sensation—as though, from somewhere he couldn’t place, Long Dong were watching him. Ever since entering this house, that feeling had grown ever stronger.

Like downstairs, the upstairs rooms connected front to back as well. The second room was small, windowless, like a dark, hollow den.

Further back still, Ling Wen saw the stars of the night sky—it was a terrace, walled on two sides by waist-high brick, the night air not cold, even carrying some warmth. In the distance, a dog barked. She looked out past the brick wall at the houses around them, rising and falling unevenly. One four-story building, wrapped in the night mist, looked so thin and fragile it seemed almost about to collapse. These houses stood gable to gable, roof-tile to roof-tile, a stray cat flashing across the ridgeline in an instant.

Ling Wen thought to herself—that night, had Long Dong vanished just like this cat, flipping over the roof ridge and disappearing without a trace? The Nationalist agents couldn’t find him. Even she couldn’t find him.

She lingered in this reverie a moment, then turned around—and saw Yi Junnian leaning against the west brick wall, watching her.

She felt a jolt of shock, and a kind of daze. Why did this scene before her eyes feel so eerie? Why did she have this feeling of déjà vu? Through the gaps in the patterned brick wall, she could faintly make out the door of a house across the way—so there were households here too, with doors opening onto the alley. What was that kind of door called again—tang-something?

The old banyan tree, its foliage thick and lush—Guangzhou’s banyan trees didn’t shed their leaves until spring, she remembered Yi Junnian saying so earlier. Those two strange gable walls, with a raised section at the top like a protruding tongue, or like a pair of cauldron ears. Where had she seen this scene before?

Yi Junnian stood there, staring at her, the smile at the corner of his mouth looking rather forced. He wasn’t smoking—perhaps it was fortunate he wasn’t, or he couldn’t have struck that pose leaning against the brick wall.

It was a photograph. She could no longer quite remember when she had seen it. It had been back when she’d first met him. That’s right—after they’d met in the bookshop, before she’d even finished reading that novel, February, he had come to find her.

Her downstairs neighbor had led him up, knocked on her door. She’d opened it to find him standing there sideways, like a guest who’d knocked on the wrong door and was about to leave.

The moment he stepped in, he told her he’d come on behalf of the Party organization, that he knew she was a secret Party member, that he knew Long Dong was her beloved. On the strength of that one sentence alone, she’d believed him completely, because she’d thought that by then, no one else could possibly have known this: that Long Dong was her beloved.

His name was Yi Junnian, and he led an underground Party cell mainly engaged in intelligence work. She had found her own people again—for a time she felt an overwhelming warmth, and for more than a month afterward she carried within her a long-lost sense of warmth.

Perhaps that was when she’d seen that photograph. During that period, Yi Junnian had talked with her constantly; she’d assumed the organization was using this method to assess her. But Yi Junnian rarely asked her about anything—it was as though he already knew everything about her affairs. He talked at length about himself, and even took out a photograph to show her.

This photograph she should remember more clearly—yet it was only now that she recalled it at all. When Yi Junnian showed it to her, he’d been quite excited, saying that by then he had already joined the Party, and that the place in the photograph was a secret liaison point where he had taken his oath. He’d used a camera meant for photographing intelligence to take this picture. Though the photo was dim, she could still make out this place.

“You’ve met Long Dong?” She shouldn’t have asked it as a question, framed as though asking him.

She remembered again—the news of Long Dong’s death had been confirmed a second time, three months after Yi Junnian’s appearance. One day, a visitor came to her home. He had the contact code Yi Junnian had established, coming to deliver intelligence, but Yi Junnian hadn’t arrived on time. Ling Wen had sat chatting with the visitor in the living room; the visitor, seeing the photograph of Long Dong, suddenly told her that this comrade had given his life.

That day, Yi Junnian never showed up at all; it was many days before he came to her home again. At the time, she hadn’t even thought to ask where he’d been. In underground work, unexpected situations happened constantly—and besides, she’d been entirely consumed by grief.

“That’s right.” Yi Junnian looked past Ling Wen, as though someone were watching them from behind her. “You’ve seen that photograph.”

She waited for him to explain, but instead he led her downstairs. With each step down, she felt as though she were sinking a bit further into dark water.

“It’s too dark here, I can’t see anything,” Ling Wen said.

Yi Junnian understood the implication behind her words: “I’ve done many things. Every time I finish something, I lock it away in a room with no windows, just like this one. You think Long Dong is any different? What he and I did is no different at all—he’s simply got the one extra thing, communism. Can you see him clearly? Can you find him? Let me show you.”

Ling Wen stopped in the darkness, staring in shock at the human shape before her, and instinctively stepped back. Yi Junnian grabbed hold of her and pulled her into the back room on the ground floor.

That windowless den had a kitchen behind it; the stove had cracked at one corner, a few dead leaves and two broken bricks sitting in the iron pot. There was a door on the back wall of the kitchen; Yi Junnian opened it, revealing more darkness beyond.

Yi Junnian turned to face Ling Wen: “Where could Long Dong possibly have gone? He had only this one path before him. It’s the same for you and me. Darkness, everywhere.”

Yi Junnian stood a moment before Seventh Aunt’s door. Seventh Aunt had woken up, pacing back and forth in her room as though searching for something. He thought for a moment, then tore off a strip of a door-couplet and used it to wipe the blood from his hands.

There was no light on the Back Street of Tianguan Lane now, and no one about. Just as Yi Junnian turned into the lane running north, he suddenly heard someone speak behind him.

He turned; a half-shadow of a figure stood in the corner. Yi Junnian said nothing.

The voice spoke again—it was the old fortune-teller.

“You’re speaking to me?” he asked the old man.

“How is it you’re alone now? Where’s the lady?”

He didn’t answer, staring at that shadowy silhouette. After a moment, Yi Junnian asked again: “What is it you want to say?”

“I’ve been waiting for you. You were in such a hurry earlier, I never finished. That fortune verse—there were two more lines I hadn’t written down yet.”

“Go on,” Yi Junnian said, stepping closer.

“‘Borrow the eastern neighbor to imitate Xi Shi, how does it compare to Guo Su’s design—'”

The old man drew out the recitation, and before he could finish, Yi Junnian closed the distance in a flash, reaching out both hands to seize the old man by the throat.

Yi Junnian arranged the lifeless arms neatly, then set the fortune-teller’s head squarely between them.