Time passed minute by minute, second by second.

Wei Lai’s strength had partially returned, but his awareness was sinking into a boundless haze: except for the sun’s shifting angle, the scene around him never changed — waves rising and falling in endless repetition, distant gulls skimming the surface like dark lines ruled across the horizon.

When the setting sun dyed the sea a deep crimson, a reindeer’s head suddenly surfaced not far away — long lashes blinking slowly, certainly wearing mascara.

He was hallucinating.

Wei Lai squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again, cursing inwardly.

He looked down at Cen Jin: “You need to talk to me. Cen Jin?”

She was already at the edge of unconsciousness. Wei Lai reached around and gripped her firmly at the waist, squeezing hard. She jolted, her whole body shuddering on instinct, curling in, eyes snapping wide open as she asked: “Are we there?”

Wei Lai smiled: “There where? Were you dreaming?”

She caught up slowly, looked up at the sun already half-swallowed by the sea’s horizon, and said softly: “It’s getting dark.”

A wind had come up over the water. The sea had grown a little cool. Cen Jin pulled down the black T-shirt draped over her head, exhaled a long breath, then settled her face back against his chest.

Soft. And a little cool.

Wei Lai lowered his head and blew at her hair. The damp strands parted sometimes in the breeze, revealing the fair skin of her neck — wet, faintly pink. He had the urge to run his hand across it.

“You need to keep talking to me. If I pass out, we’ll both drift away and go under.”

She gave a faint nod. After a pause she asked: “How did you tell they weren’t real pirates?”

I knew she’d ask.

Wei Lai teased her: “You could read that black ship well enough last time, couldn’t you? What happened — different boat, and suddenly you can’t tell?”

Cen Jin didn’t even have the energy to mock him back. She gave a quiet sound through her nose, and her eyes involuntarily closed for a moment — her lashes brushed against his chest like a soft, ticklish graze.

He said: “Five points.”

That many?

“First: they had called me before, and wanted to speak with you. You refused and said you’d only deal with Hu Sha. I passed your exact words back to them, and they had no objection whatsoever — meaning their initial attitude was quite cooperative.”

“But from that phone call to the meeting, and then to leading us onto a boat rigged with explosives, their control over us kept tightening, and their attitude kept turning colder. That made me suspect their true purpose.”

“Second: you’d mentioned that pirates are poor and often go barefoot, but pirates don’t necessarily go barefoot. Wearing shoes is possible — they’ve looted enough boats, and buying shoes with that money is perfectly ordinary. What was strange was that these men clearly weren’t used to being barefoot and were pretending to be.”

“That AK fellow — when a small stone dug into his foot, he yelped in pain. When he lifted his foot, I saw it clearly: not a single callus on the sole.”

“Third: when you said you felt dizzy, that AK was also unwell. He’d been all swagger and posturing on shore, constantly raising his gun — the moment he was on the water, he wilted. I suspected seasickness. Pirates might get carsick. They shouldn’t get seasick.”

“Fourth: while I was talking with you, I dropped a slang phrase — said I was nuts about you. The expression I used was nuts about you. They understood. Both of them understood.”

Somali English is not an official language. In some pirate crews, it’s hard to find anyone who speaks English at all — and even those who do, in his understanding, manage only basic everyday conversation.

Slang isn’t so easily grasped. Milu had nearly sharpened her skull studying Chinese, and she still frequently mangled it by false analogy — once pursuing him at length with complete conviction: “Shouldn’t a brother-in-law love his sister-in-law? Shouldn’t family love each other?”

He stopped there.

Cen Jin took the bait, as expected: “And the fifth?”

“Personal instinct and acute observation. Basic quality of a champion.”

Cen Jin looked at him without any warmth.

Wei Lai raised an eyebrow: “What?”

Cen Jin wanted to bite him, but lacked the strength.

Really. She had laid out her case about the black ship in four points, so he absolutely had to stretch it to one more…

She stared at him for a long time, then suddenly laughed.

This person — so unbothered, always smiling. Buried in a sandstorm and still smiling. Soaking in the sea half-delirious, and still smiling, still spinning out this and that nonsense.

She’d never once seen him actually lose his temper. At the Turkish airport he had turned cold for a few seconds and then smiled his way back. This morning he had thrown his bag — but that was deliberate.

A subtle shift moved through the water. Faintly, from the distance, came the puttering sound of a motor.

Wei Lai said: “That sound… is quite beautiful.”

Santos and his crew should have been out on the water long before this. Usually the local fishermen pulled their nets in the afternoon, not bothering to avoid the full sun — after hauling in the nets, they could spend the return trip gutting fish, using the strong sea light to half-dry the catch. By the time they got back to shore, just a few more days of drying and the fish jerky would be ready.

Today they had gone out late. Because that morning, pirates had come to the village, and two foreign visitors had been taken away.

That was a major event for the village. The villagers had gathered and talked amongst themselves at length, with even the goats crowding in to listen: the conversation ranged from how to report this to the government, to whether they should still go out to pull their nets. Eventually it settled on the latter question.

After all, the foreigners were only foreigners — but the fish were a matter of whether there would be anything to eat.

One side argued that pirates had just appeared in the fishing village, which meant the sea was certainly dangerous now. The other side felt that a place pirates had just come from would in fact be safe for the time being — and besides, if they didn’t bring the fish in, what would there be to eat?

The sound of the engine was drawing nearer. Which side had prevailed was self-evident.

Wei Lai exhaled a long breath and untied the pants wrapped around their waists: “Here — put your pants back on. Someone’s coming.”

Cen Jin gave a cold laugh. “Now you want me to put them on? Who took them off?”

What does that mean — whoever took them off is responsible for putting them back on?

Wei Lai said: “I genuinely don’t have the energy to dive down and help you put them on. Your choice — let people see, or figure it out yourself.”

Fitted jeans, waterlogged and wrung into a rope — putting them on underwater would take an enormous effort.

Even men got tired. At this moment, in this state, no legs in the world held any appeal for him.

Cen Jin was remarkably unbothered.

“Let them see, then. It’s not as if I’ve never walked on a beach in a bikini — with hundreds of men around me, no less. Besides, I’m a foreigner here. I don’t have to worry about gossip. I wouldn’t understand it anyway.”

What is that shamelessness made of? All that Chinese cultural education your foster parents gave you — completely wasted on you.

The boat pulled up alongside them. A tumult of startled shouts and cries came from on board.

Wei Lai steeled himself, made up his mind, and dove under.

The moment he hit the water he tucked and turned, stripped off his own shorts in one motion, let the current carry them deep, then felt for her ankle and threaded the shorts onto her foot, working them up as he surfaced, pulling them snug, tucking and folding the waistband inside her own waistband to keep them from falling.

Then he broke the surface with a rush of water, streams pouring down from his brow. Several people on the boat surged forward with outstretched hands. Wei Lai held Cen Jin and spoke through gritted teeth into her ear: “I stripped down to my underwear for you. You’d better remember that.”

He lifted her with both arms, and the people on the boat received her.

Others reached down for him. Wei Lai waved them off, gripped the side of the hull, paused for a moment to catch his breath, then used both arms to hoist himself up and swung onto the boat.

The moment he came out of the water, he wished the fishermen would forget this sight for the rest of their lives: a champion bodyguard, wearing nothing but his underwear — with a gun tucked into the back of it.

Buku village’s people and their goats were the people and goats he never wished to see again in his life.

He dropped, exhausted, onto the floor of the boat’s cabin, then after a pause reached behind his back to draw the gun.

Santos was speaking to him urgently: “Did the pirates throw you overboard? We sent someone to the big village to report it to the police, though who knows if the police are working today…”

He caught sight of the gleaming gun barrel and froze, shrinking back.

The other fishermen on the boat all stiffened in unison.

Wei Lai hadn’t noticed. The seawater was stinging his eyes badly, and he kept closing and opening them. He field-stripped the gun, shaking out the water that had gotten inside: a gun that had taken on water could misfire if used without clearing it first, so it needed to be cleaned.

He was shaking out the ejected chamber when he glanced up absently. The men had stepped back together again — one of them seemed to be reaching toward a nearby fish spear, but the moment he caught Wei Lai’s eye, he snatched his hand back.

Wei Lai laughed out loud.

“It’s all right… this has nothing to do with you. Go ahead and pull your nets — but I need a favor…”

He snapped the magazine back into place, tested the slide, then looked out across the distant sea surface with a cold smile. “Take me around this area a couple of times… On the off chance someone’s fallen in the water, we might just save them. Right?”

After the fishing boat had circled the vast sea twice, the sky had started to dim. Santos carefully lit the fishing lantern. The live fish pulled up in the nets lay piled in the hold, flopping, rolling their eyes, gills opening and closing — not one fisherman dared go near them. They sat with their arms around their knees, staring at each other with uncertain expressions.

Finding two people at sea was not much better than finding a needle.

Wei Lai felt there was no hope left. “Enough. Let’s go back.”

Santos immediately turned the helm, the motor started up, and the stern began churning out wake, the bow carrying a single faint orange light.

He looked back after they had gone some distance. The night sea glimmering with water-light seemed to chase them like a closing mouth, swiftly swallowing the white wake the stern left behind.

Cen Jin moved closer to him and asked quietly: “Those two men… will they die?”

Wei Lai said: “I’m inclined to think they won’t.”

Anyone who had made a careful plan to kill them — thorough enough to include a boat rigged with explosives as a contingency — couldn’t have failed to arrange a fully prepared escape and backup plan as well. Whatever the method, the probability of those two getting out safely was far higher than his or Cen Jin’s had been.

Cen Jin said nothing more.

It felt as though they traveled a long, heavy stretch of water in silence, and when they finally reached shore, Wei Lai barely registered it as a village. Buku had no custom of keeping lights on at night — seen from the sea, it was simply a dark mass, no different from open wilderness.

Wei Lai brought Cen Jin back to the shack.

The van was parked outside the door, and after a full day in the sun, the inside was like a greenhouse.

Cen Jin moved toward the shack. Wei Lai caught her arm and tilted his head toward the van: “We’re not staying here. Get in.”

Once they were out of Buku, he asked Cen Jin to pass him his bag and picked through it for clothing while driving, putting his shirt on as he went. Glancing into the rearview mirror, he caught sight of her: “You’re not changing?”

“Most of my things are gone.”

She’d packed light to begin with, and her most important belongings — including the satellite phone — had been destroyed on the boat. Wei Lai cursed under his breath and dug through his bag, pulling out one of his own dress shirts and tossing it back to her: “Make do with this for now.”

A soft rustling sound came from the back seat. Wei Lai tilted the rearview mirror away so he couldn’t see: “I know roughly the direction. We should reach the big village Santos mentioned by tonight — they have phones there. I need to get back in contact with Milu and the others as soon as possible, or everything grinds to a halt.”

Cen Jin acknowledged with a sound: “Done.”

The moment he angled the mirror back, he saw her head was bent, fastening the last buttons. The shirt tail lay angled across her knees — his shirt on her was long enough to wear as a dress.

Wei Lai pressed the gas down and asked her to watch the road: he didn’t know how large this so-called “big” village was. If it turned out to be only a few dozen households, missing it was quite possible.

Fortunately, it wasn’t: the village had a telephone, which meant it also had electricity. About half an hour’s drive on, Cen Jin spotted lights not far ahead and pointed them out in time.

Wei Lai turned the van and drove slowly into the village.

This place had more of a trace of civilization than Buku: there were still crooked shacks and wandering goats, but here and there stood houses built from fired brick and mud. The brightest spot stood in an open clearing — a building made from an old shipping container, a bare lightbulb strung under the eaves. Several doors had been cut into the container’s wall, each marked with a white-on-black painted sign. It was the village administrative office.

The middle door stood wide open; inside was noisy and crowded, and a long queue of people had formed. Wei Lai parked the van and walked straight in. Everyone turned to look at him in surprise.

Cen Jin had followed and stood waiting outside the door.

The queue started from a desk in the far corner of the room, where a Black man in a white shirt was talking to whoever stood at the head of the line. When he saw Wei Lai, he too stopped and stared.

Wei Lai asked in a level voice: “Where is the telephone?”

The man answered on reflex: “Next door.”

Wei Lai paid him no more attention and turned toward the adjacent room. The man caught himself, and called after him in a loud, sharp voice: “Hey! Hey, I’m a police officer!”

Wei Lai pushed open the door to the next room, pulled the light cord, and nudged Cen Jin gently toward the officer: “Tell him we’re international tourists and we were robbed by pirates. Say whatever you need to — just don’t let anyone disturb me while I’m making a call.”

He pulled the door shut behind him, sealing the noise outside: no one would force their way in. He knew Cen Jin could handle that situation.

Wei Lai exhaled a long, slow breath, walked to the desk, and picked up the receiver.

He dialed. He waited a long time — endured even one manual patch-through. And then, at last, someone on the other end answered.

“Hello?”

Milu’s voice. The long-missed atmosphere of Helsinki washed over him — and it seemed to carry a trace of ice that hadn’t fully melted this season.

Wei Lai said: “It’s me.”