A long, deep sleep, and he woke at exactly the right moment — just as the plane was serving meals. The first course, the main dish, dessert, a rich soup — a whole spread laid out in front of him.

He glanced at the flight information on the seat display: they were only a knuckle’s width away from Istanbul, the transfer hub. If the connection went smoothly, they should arrive in Khartoum before sunset.

He had no idea what Africa would look like — whether it would be like the movies, with dry, scorching heat shimmering above red earth, and a blood-red sun sinking on the horizon.

He and Cen Jin exchanged little. During the meal, her fork slipped and clattered to the floor; Wei Lai picked it up for her. Cen Jin said thank you; he said don’t mention it.

A natural exchange, with no awkwardness. One of the benefits of being a mature adult was that you could look at many things more lightly — pick something up and set it down again with grace — unlike the very young, who could treat a change of heart as grounds for lifelong enmity.

They landed on schedule.

The second flight was delayed. Wei Lai accompanied Cen Jin through the duty-free shops. Passing a bookstore in the terminal, he spotted a magazine on the rack. Its cover featured a large portrait of a Saudi man with a furrowed brow, and in the lower right corner, an oil tanker scaled down to a fraction of the size.

The headline read: The Vanishing Tanker — How to Break the Current Deadlock.

He picked it up and flipped through it. Journalists had interviewed multiple international negotiation experts, each offering analysis from a different angle on possible entry points for talks. Wei Lai thought it might be useful for Cen Jin and bought a copy.

He turned to find her. She was leafing through the latest edition of a fashion weekly — its glossy copper-tone pages overflowing with jewels and glamour.

At a glance, he caught a few words: This Winter’s Trending Elements…

The fashion world was truly baffling. This winter hadn’t even ended yet, and they were already busy predicting what women would want to wear the following winter.

Cen Jin said: “This article says fashion is cyclical — that modern plaid and leopard print will come back this winter. I wonder how the designers will reinterpret them on evening gowns.”

That was the focus she brought to this trip… It was genuinely hard to believe she was here to negotiate.

Wei Lai held out the magazine he’d bought: “You might find this useful.”

She glanced at the cover and didn’t take it: “Oh. That tanker again.”

Wei Lai found it amusing: “You don’t seem to care at all about that ship.”

“It’s not such a big deal.”

Not a big deal? It was everywhere — radio, television, newspapers, everyone was talking about it. The Saudis had paid an enormous sum to send her specifically for this.

And she said it was not such a big deal.

Wei Lai smiled: “Sounds like you have a plan already. You and Hu Sha — are you close?”

“Not particularly.” Her slender fingers trailed lightly along the spines of a row of weekly journals, then pulled out another. “Back then, when the rebel forces were shooting at the refugees, our local hospital was receiving dozens of critically wounded patients. I was busy coordinating medical resources and writing damage and situation reports — I had no time to build friendships with the patients.”

“But Hu Sha I remember. He was injured in the neck, with his head and shoulders wrapped entirely in bandages, lying in a corridor corner like a mummy. He said only one thing to me — when I was doing rounds, he looked up and said, ‘Thank you.'”

That was the entire basis of their connection. Could that translate into shaving the ransom down by some significant fraction? And besides, friendship traded for money — in most cases, the exchange rate was dismal.

“Then what, in your mind, counts as a big deal?”

Cen Jin smiled slightly: “In time… if there’s an opportunity, you’ll know.”

Wei Lai smiled too, and then abruptly shifted his approach: “Why did you choose me?”

“Mm?”

“You knew I’d ask eventually. That interview, from any angle, I was not the best candidate.”

“And don’t tell me it’s because we’re both Chinese and communication is convenient — I’m not that naive.”

A brief silence. The airport intercom crackled to life: the flight to Khartoum, their destination.

Cen Jin said: “Time to board.”

As she passed him, she reached out and slid the magazine he was holding from his hand, giving him a gentle smile: “Because we’re both Chinese, and communication is convenient.”

Wei Lai’s expression darkened. Without warning, he reached out, clamped his palm against her side, and shoved firmly inward. Cen Jin lost her footing and stumbled, the whole of her colliding into him.

His body was solid as iron.

Cen Jin steadied herself quickly and looked up at him.

Only now did she notice: he had a pair of eyes capable of stripping away all warmth and composure. The way he looked at her in that moment was the way one looks at a lifeless body washed up inside a smuggler’s boat.

“Miss Cen,” he said, “I know you are someone who makes very careful plans. But you had better not include me in those plans, or think about using me to accomplish something — because if you do, I will not let it go.”

Cen Jin laughed: “Then go ahead and don’t let it go.”

She leaned toward his ear, her voice so low it was barely more than a breath, the warmth of it drifting slowly across the curve of his ear — making him think of the two sluggish jellyfish drifting in Ai Lin’s jellyfish tank.

“There are a lot of people who haven’t let things go with me. Would you like to queue up?”

She flicked a light hand across his shoulder, as if brushing off dust.

“Butting heads is exhausting. There’s no fundamental conflict between us — I suggest we get along peacefully.”

“That day in the greenhouse, after you finished bargaining with Bai Pao — did you tell him the same thing afterward? That from then on, you’d all get along peacefully?”

He still remembered how, during the interview, the two of them had exchanged a glance. They had seemed at ease with each other, cordial, and perfectly civil.

“Once business is settled, everyone can be friends — of course you get along peacefully. There’ll be time enough to fall out later, if it comes to that.”

Wei Lai said nothing. After a moment, the cold edge in his eyes slowly receded, replaced by his familiar composure — his courtesy, his cooperation, even a trace of warmth.

“Fine,” he said. “Peaceful coexistence.”

Because of the delay, they never saw the blood-red sunset he had imagined.

By the time they arrived, the sun had almost entirely set. The night was like an upturned pot, with a thin line of light that hadn’t quite sealed shut along the rim — and the plane pushed stubbornly through that crack of brightness and landed on the East African earth, which rose to meet them with shimmering heat.

The moment the cabin door opened, Wei Lai felt as though he had been transported back to the sauna rooms of He’er Xinji.

April — daytime temperatures here hovered around forty degrees Celsius, and the surface temperature of the ground could reach seventy.

Walking into the airport terminal, he stripped off every layer he could. The sweat on his back clung between his skin and his shirt, and the heat pressed in from all sides. The capital’s airport terminal was no bigger than a small-town bus station back home, and it was chaotic — when Cen Jin went to the bathroom to change her clothes, he was left standing guard outside the door, drawing plenty of withering looks from local women.

She came out quickly. A black camisole, over which she had tied up the hem of a light grey checked shirt; denim shorts; her hair wound into a loose bun, with fine strands of it plastered by sweat to her neck, fanning herself with the magazine she held.

Wei Lai said: “Once we find Ke Ke Shu and get settled, it should be fine.”

Cen Jin fanned the magazine with a rustling sound: “I’d suggest you not be too optimistic.”

At the exit, Wei Lai spotted their greeter immediately.

Some people were simply impossible to miss — they stood out like a deity surrounded by mortals: among the crowd in their brightly colored trousers, their shirts fanned up at the hem for air, or wearing traditional robes, Ke Ke Shu might as well have descended from another world. Unless you were blind, there was no ignoring him.

He wore a suit, a tie, gleaming black leather shoes — the sleeves of his white button-down shirt with cufflinks were carefully folded to show beyond his jacket cuffs, and on his wrist flashed a Jaeger-LeCoultre watch.

Wei Lai deliberately slowed his pace, curious to see whether Ke Ke Shu would collapse from heatstroke any moment now.

But Ke Ke Shu had already spotted him, and broke into an excited shout: “Wei! My Christmas tree!”

Wei Lai still didn’t move. It was Cen Jin who gave him a nudge from behind: “Christmas tree — he’s calling you.”

Ke Ke Shu was of mixed heritage, with lighter skin leaning toward his Caucasian side and the thick, tight curls of a Black man. His father had apparently been some roving Western journalist, who had a brief encounter with a Black woman and produced him — and then that woman had left him in a cocoa grove frequented by gold prospectors.

So from childhood, he had panned for gold, cooked, served as a boy scout, then a mercenary, and eventually been convinced by Milu’s incessant chatter to take up professional bodyguard work.

The first time they met, he had said to Wei Lai: “You know what? Until I was eight years old, I never once wore underwear! My very first pair was stripped off a drunk old man — the stench! I crouched by a riverbank scrubbing them clean, and I swore to myself: one day, I am going to wear the finest, most expensive clothes there are!”

So sincere — meeting someone for the first time and sharing something that intimate — and just like that, Wei Lai gained a friend.

And Ke Ke Shu had been making good on that riverside oath ever since:

— Food and daily necessities could be rough, could be improvised and random — but clothes had to be branded, top-tier, the envy of everyone around him.

— When meeting a stranger for the first time, you dressed in gold and silk to display your wealth and standing.

— When reuniting with an old friend after a long separation, you dressed your finest to show that you had flourished in the time apart and had not fallen on hard times.

Wei Lai walked over.

The two of them sized each other up for a few seconds, and then burst out laughing at almost exactly the same moment — hands extended, fists knocked together, shoulders clapped hard.

Ke Ke Shu turned to greet Cen Jin with an enthusiastic: “Hello!”

Wei Lai asked: “What’s the situation like here?”

“Bad. The south is worse — looks like war is coming. The person I’m protecting is in the southern province, and there’s a huge number of military and political figures and their bodyguards down there…”

Wasn’t there a saying that while the south was at war, the north was singing? Wei Lai didn’t think their route would take them south: “Never mind the south. What about here?”

“Also bad. Two days ago, a Spanish diplomat was stabbed to death in his apartment. A little before that, seven workers from an Asian engineering company were kidnapped — negotiations failed, government troops and armed forces exchanged fire during a rescue attempt, the mission failed, and three hostages died. A few months before that, right at this airport, a plane went down…”

Wei Lai said: “Stop, stop, stop!”

He tugged at his collar. He was suffocating even more now.

What a nightmare.

Ke Ke Shu stared at him, and stared — and then suddenly burst out laughing, flashing a wide, somewhat uneven set of white teeth.

“Wei! I was joking!”

“What are you scared of — the worse the place, the more it’s our paradise.”

“Those kidnappings and murders all had political motives — who’s going to come after a nobody like you?”

Wei Lai couldn’t be bothered to engage. Ke Ke Shu was the type who could be standing in a hail of bullets and would treat it as nothing more than thrilling background music.

“Did you drive here? Is the car parked outside?”

“Yes. But there’s a slight issue with the car.”

Ke Ke Shu explained: originally there had been a decent four-wheel drive arranged, but it had been reassigned when he was about to set off. So he’d had to borrow one from a hotel in Khartoum — something a bit more basic.

“Does the car have air conditioning?”

As long as it could cool him down, basic was fine.

“No, but it has a ventilation system.”

That sounded reasonable enough. Wei Lai figured it was acceptable: “Then let’s go.”

Five minutes later, outside the airport, on a dusty dirt lot, Wei Lai laid eyes on this “somewhat basic” vehicle.

A tuk-tuk. The kind known back home as an electric three-wheeled cart.

No roof — just a sheet of cardboard propped up at the back of the passenger area. No doors on either side. The ventilation was, indeed, very natural.