The group returned from Yamdrok Lake at seven in the evening, the sky still bright. Ba Yunye sat behind the counter picking at a takeout box when Peach-Blossom Eyes from earlier in the afternoon came sauntering over with a grin. “Hey, is the bar spot all booked?”

Ba Yunye smiled her professional smile. “All booked. Go shower and come with me.”

Peach-Blossom Eyes couldn’t have been more delighted — he actually went and showered, then came trotting after Ba Yunye with great enthusiasm.

As for the bar — the details may be spared. A few hours later, two burly men came grunting and heaving, half-carrying a completely plastered Peach-Blossom Eyes as they trailed behind Ba Yunye back to the Deji Guesthouse. “Master Ba, where do we put him?”

Ba Yunye was slightly tipsy herself. She jutted out her chin. “Take him to his room — that one on the second floor, ‘Norbulingka.'”

It was quite late by then, and most of the rooms had gone dark. Ba Yunye’s cheeks were flushed; she sat in the inner courtyard drinking a cup of honey lemon water. A few small night-lights glowed around her like fireflies, and the banners of several cycling clubs and outdoor clubs that had recently been hung along the railings of the second and third floors snapped and clattered in the wind that gusted through.

The two burly men came back downstairs, said their goodnights, and left. She locked the gate, came back to sit down, and her head grazed one of the night-lights — the glow swayed back and forth, landing just right on the nameplate of her own room, “Nanga Parbat,” blinking in and out of light and shadow. Her expression dimmed — last year, it had been on just such a slightly tipsy night that she had made her move on Diao Zhuo in there.

Then she found herself half-remembering a poem she had never managed to learn all the way through in school. What was it called… something about how the face is gone, who knows where, while the peach blossoms still laugh and bloom without a care.

And from that, she arrived at the conclusion that a person really ought to read more books.

She glanced at her watch. Should she… use the courage of the wine and give him a call? If the conversation went badly, or if she said something she’d be too embarrassed to face in the sober light of day, she could always claim not to remember a thing. She pulled out her phone, took a deep breath, found his number, raised her finger and was just about to press dial — when she heard someone upstairs call her name in a garbled slur.

She looked up and nearly leapt out of her skin — a very drunk Peach-Blossom Eyes was draped over the railing on the second floor, nearly his entire upper body hanging out over the edge, hollering her name with a dopey grin on his face. Anyone who didn’t know better would have thought he was about to throw himself off.

A drunk man falling headfirst from the second floor — there was no guarantee he’d survive.

“You! Get back inside right now!!” she shouted, and bolted up the stairs.

The moment she was gone, her phone lit up. Incoming call — Diao Zhuo. It rang several times with no one to answer it, and the screen went dark again.

She hadn’t picked up.

Diao Zhuo tossed his phone aside, pushed open the window, and a bone-dry cold wind swept in carrying fine specks of sand — he slammed it shut again with irritation.

After the project team resumed operations, he’d had no choice but to return to the work site. Ran Jinxian had told him that after the police showed up that day, He Zhengren had insisted the whole thing was just a misunderstanding. The next day, still not reassured, Ran Jinxian had asked the neighborhood officer to do a follow-up visit — He Zhengren was at home alone watching television. The housekeeper, A’Hong, said He Zhengren had no complaints apart from slightly elevated blood pressure and a recurring flare-up of the old ache in his legs. Ran Jinxian had also learned that the Beidou Search and Rescue Corps had approved He Zhengren’s resignation letter; He Zhengren had said he wanted to travel abroad to visit his son, and was in the process of applying for a visa. In the meantime, he appeared to have plans to travel domestically.

Diao Zhuo thought: was He Zhengren planning to flee the country?

“We checked — Ma He has no criminal record. Even if he’s currently driving for He Zhengren, we can’t conclude that He Zhengren planted him near Ba Yunye as a spy.” Ran Jinxian reminded him. “I know you wouldn’t contact us about Renlong Duoji without a reason. We’ve also tried to locate him again, but every attempt has failed. He’s someone who has trekked through uninhabited regions many times — a seasoned backcountry traveler. He may have gone into another such region. Keep an eye on things from your end; if you see him, do your best to talk some sense into him and tell him not to interfere with our police investigation on his own.”

“He sent Ba Yunye a message. Said he was in a bad mood and going somewhere to clear his head.”

“That’s good then.” A brief pause, and then Ran Jinxian continued: “As for the theory about the ‘hook’ that you mentioned to me… I was on the accident investigation team at the time — we were only investigating the crash itself, and no one thought about it from that angle. I’ve already passed your theory on to the unit that handles these kinds of cases. By the way — criminal organizations of this kind are very dangerous. If they’re operating across borders, some of them may very well be armed. If this group has been committing these crimes since more than a decade ago and hasn’t been caught in all that time, it means either they’ve been very lucky, or there are people within our own ranks… who are working with them. Even so, your priority right now is to keep yourselves safe. Under no circumstances engage them in a direct confrontation.”

The reason Diao Zhuo had kept the “hook” theory from Ba Yunye was precisely because he was afraid she’d let her confidence in her own physical abilities go to her head and try to take matters into her own hands.

Where Ba Yunye was concerned, Diao Zhuo was far less composed than he used to be.

These past few days, he couldn’t say how many data errors he’d made; he kept trying to scan purchases with his delivery recognition app and accidentally pointing it at his Alipay payment code instead of the right one. And that wasn’t even counting how many times he’d woken up in the middle of the night, mind thick with fog, not knowing where he was — reaching out to the space beside him to pull her close, half-expecting her to give that disgruntled little hum of hers, the way she used to, before settling back to sleep in his arms.

He often found himself replaying their first meeting on the Qiang Tang plateau — her fierce independence and blunt swagger had put him on edge from the start, yet they had drawn him in in a way he couldn’t account for. When he went back and looked at other women afterward, everything felt flat and flavorless, like someone who had eaten spicy hot pot in Chongqing for a full year and could no longer stomach a clear-broth pot — let alone what the two of them were like in bed together. He still remembered those few days in Xi’an: her crouching down in the museum to peer closely at the relics, eating wontons with a pleasant buzz going at the base of the city wall, the time she suddenly burst in on him in the shower and pulled him into a ravenous kiss…

She was so genuine, so utterly without artifice. Every little detail of her, haunting him. He didn’t want anyone else anymore — he wanted Ba Yunye. Yes — only her.

Parting on good terms was something you did when there was some unavoidable, insurmountable reason to separate. What exactly was the force majeure tearing him and Ba Yunye apart? They hadn’t raised a hand to each other. Neither had betrayed the other. They hadn’t gotten to the point of discussing marriage and fallen apart over long distance or anything else. They disagreed over whether to call the police, couldn’t give an inch to the other — so why part on good terms?

To hell with that! Damn this parting on good terms!

After returning to the project team, Diao Zhuo had taken up smoking again. He didn’t have a particularly strong craving for cigarettes — he’d noticed earlier that Ba Yunye didn’t particularly like the smell of smoke, so he hadn’t said he was quitting to her face, but had quietly kicked the habit on his own. Since coming back, though, he’d been going through pack after pack.

Truth be told, he was deeply irritated — a nameless fire burning somewhere inside him with nowhere to go. Helpless, yet at a loss. The degree of frustration was about on par with scoring the best grades of your life on the college entrance exam, higher than you’d ever achieved, only to be told the wrong exam papers had been handed out and you’d have to sit the whole thing again — and every single question on the new paper was one you’d never seen before.

This Ba Yunye — she really was Long Ge’s handiwork through and through. You could tell from the way she’d knocked on those thugs’ doors in the middle of the night and forced information out of them: her character, her way of thinking, her approach — a mirror image of Long Ge. He had warned her back then that the next time something like this came up, she shouldn’t handle it that way. Yet there had been no changing the value system and way of doing things she had already formed over the years. Having grown up without parents and encountered a man like Long Ge in her adolescence — someone who was entirely self-sufficient and capable — learning everything from him was only natural.

Who knew, there might even be something more complicated tangled up in all of that.

Diao Zhuo’s nameless fire — half of it born from her stubbornness, her refusal to be reasoned with; the other half from worry, and just a pinch of jealousy.

She wasn’t like those dramatic women who were forever threatening to break up at the slightest thing. She had a temper, but her heart was big, and broad — the two of them traded barbs all the time, but actual fights were rare. And of course, when they finally did fight, it blew up into something real.

She hadn’t originally been his type. But once you fell for a woman who rubbed you the wrong way in every particular, it was absolutely deadly. One day she had said to him — as though she’d had some premonition — “Many years from now, when you’re dragging around a whole family, a kid in each hand, I wonder if you’ll remember that there was once a person called Master Ba who turned your world completely upside down, if only for a little while.”

He had no throne to inherit. He didn’t need that many children. But what he had said back to her then was the truth — if there were children, they would be their children, his and hers. Besides, knowing Ba Yunye the way he did, she probably wouldn’t be willing to be tied down by children anyway. His own work kept him away from home; he’d thought it through — they’d take things as they came, however she wanted it. Even a childfree life would be fine. Even not being married at all would be fine.

It was precisely because he had been thinking that far ahead that he could not accept the precarious state they were in now. And at the same time, he was worried that Ba Yunye would be swayed by Long Ge, get carried away in a moment of hot-headed loyalty, and join the “revenge alliance” herself.

Just now, Diao Zhuo had decided he could use asking after Long Ge’s whereabouts as an excuse to contact Ba Yunye.

She hadn’t answered.

He didn’t know whether it was deliberate, or whether her phone simply wasn’t on her.

In truth, he simply wanted to hear from her.

Ba Yunye hauled Peach-Blossom Eyes back to his room. Whether he was truly drunk or playing at it was hard to say — he kept calling her name and declaring his love for her, which nearly made her die of laughter. They had known each other for all of a few hours. How could he already be talking about love?

After a great deal of struggle, Peach-Blossom Eyes finally conked out — the sort of deep sleep where you could poke him with a knife and he still wouldn’t stir. Peace at last. Ba Yunye rolled her eyes, pulled the door shut, came back downstairs, and saw the missed call on her phone. She blinked in mild surprise — it had come in half an hour ago. By now… had he gone to sleep?

Oh, who cares. Call back!

The phone rang a few times. The other end picked up.

“Asleep yet?” She didn’t wait for him to speak.

“Ba Yunye.” Diao Zhuo’s voice came through — resonant and textured in the surrounding stillness. He said her name once and then fell silent.

Ba Yunye didn’t know what to say either. She picked at her fingernails for a bit, then asked: “I saw you called me… I was wondering… what did you need?”

“Nothing.”

She gave a light snort. “If it’s nothing, I’m hanging up.”

“Ba Yunye.”

“Hmm?”

“Ba Yunye.”

“What do you think you are, a parrot?!” she snapped.

“Can you not hang up?”

“Uh… I guess I don’t have to hang up. But we’d have to say something — otherwise… what a waste of airtime.” A straightforward person. A blunt truth.

“Don’t hang up.” His tone hardened.

Ba Yunye got up and started heading toward her room, fibbing to him: “I just got back from outside, I’m covered in sweat. Going to shower.”

“Which kind of sweat?”

“What?”

“This so-called ‘covered in sweat’ of yours — are we talking the sweat of hard work, or the sweat of, say, other exertions?”

“Oh, for—!” She was furious again. “You’re the one covered in the other kind of sweat!” She flung the phone onto the bed and went to shower. When she came out, the call was still connected. “Diao Zhuo? You… are you still there?”

“…Here.”

The stubbornness of a man made of steel — she really couldn’t make heads or tails of it. She set the phone on the pillow beside her to charge and lay there tossing and turning, unable to fall asleep. After some time had passed — she wasn’t sure how long — she grabbed the phone and checked. The call was still going.

“Hey, still there?”

From the other end, a response — the low, hoarse, muffled baritone of a man half-asleep.

“Hang up,” Ba Yunye said. “Like this, I can’t fall asleep.”

“Haven’t we slept together before?” A tease.

“Well yes, we have slept together… but if you don’t hang up, all you can do is listen to each other snore. What else is there?”

Nothing else, when it came down to it. And yet what purpose it served, both of them understood perfectly well — it was nothing more than being able to sense that the other person was there.

Ba Yunye was genuinely drowsy now. She rubbed her eyes. “Hey, be honest — are you deliberately keeping the call open to, I don’t know, use it as some kind of stimulation while you do something?”

Diao Zhuo hung up.

“Ha! Guilty conscience.” Ba Yunye gave a dismissive scoff.