◎ Nothing Happened ◎

The driver slammed the accelerator to the floor. The truck surged forward; Gu Qiao kept her eyes wide open as the boulder was sent flying more than ten meters. Although it was daytime, the sand and dust that billowed up blended with the thin, lingering morning haze. The truck’s headlights blazed ahead, and Gu Qiao kept her gaze fixed on the road.

The boulder rolled away. Ahead, a spiked plank appeared in the road. The driver wrenched the wheel hard and skimmed around the edge of it.

Gu Qiao heard her own heart beating — one strong pulse after another. Through that drumming, she caught what sounded like the sharp crack of shattering glass. She asked the driver: “Which window just broke?”

The driver’s full attention was on clearing the obstacles. “Didn’t hear anything.”

Then a voice, ragged and hoarse, called out: “Anyone hurt back there?”

Gu Qiao heard Lou Deyu’s voice shout back: “We’re fine!” The shout traveled all the way from the fourth vehicle — the one Lou Deyu was riding in — forward to Gu Qiao’s ears.

Gu Qiao kept her eyelids open, blinking in time with her heartbeat, until at last they reached Hohhot. When she spotted other trucks pulled over by the roadside to rest, she nearly shouted: “Pull over for a moment!”

“One, two, three…” All four vehicles had started out together — but now there were only three. The license plate of the fourth truck was nowhere to be seen. The fourth truck was the one Lou Deyu was riding in.

She turned to the drivers behind her. “When did we lose the last truck?”

“What do you mean it’s gone? Damn it—”

“Did you all hear glass breaking?”

Peng Zhou spoke up quickly: “There was that sound, but I called back asking if everything was all right, and I heard Uncle Lou say they were fine.”

One minute passed; the fourth truck did not appear. Two minutes passed; the fourth truck still did not appear.

Gu Qiao suppressed the urge to turn back and look. “Get to the police station — quickly!”

As she went to step forward, Gu Qiao stumbled. Peng Zhou reached out to steady her; he noticed that the full, healthy color usually in Gu Qiao’s face had drained to a sudden, stark white. Gu Qiao stepped away from his hand, drew a deep breath, and climbed into the truck. She gripped the seat with her whole hand, tendons standing out along her fingers.

“It’s back! Gu Qiao — it’s back!”

What Gu Qiao saw was Lou Deyu, his scarf wound around his head, blood running down his forehead.

The robbers had waited by the roadside for a long time. Watching all four trucks smash through the boulder and swerve around the spiked plank, the ringleader, in a fury, had grabbed a rock from the roadside and hurled it at the moving fourth truck’s window. The glass shattered on impact. Lou Deyu had no time to duck; shards of glass flew across his head and face. When he shouted that everything was fine to the truck ahead of him, the glass fragments were already embedded in his skin, and as he spoke, blood flowed into his mouth, staining his lips and teeth red.

Lou Deyu had told the driver beside him to keep going. A gang bold enough to attack four trucks at once was surely no small operation. The best way to handle this kind of situation was to drive straight through, all the way to wherever people were. If they stopped, there was no telling what might happen.

What Gu Qiao found was a face obscured by blood. “Dad!”

Lou Deyu gave a weak, smiling reply.

Gu Qiao didn’t ask how things had come to this. She grabbed the arm of a passing stranger. “Excuse me — where’s the nearest hospital?”

She, who never failed to say thank you, completely forgot to do so this time. The moment she had her answer, she repeated it twice to the driver: “To the hospital! Get to the hospital now!”

When Lou Deyu had been taken into the operating room, Peng Zhou tried to offer some comfort to Gu Qiao. “Try not to worry too much.”

Gu Qiao pulled out her money pouch and extracted a ledger. “Don’t travel back with the trucks. I’ll have the two young escorts go with you to the train station — take the train back to Beijing. It’s safer. When you get back, settle all the final payments. The ledger has every transaction laid out.” She went on without waiting for him to speak. “Help me bring my money back too. When you get home, go to the bank and get me a cashier’s check made out in my name. It’s not that I don’t trust you — I just can’t afford to take any risks right now.” Gu Qiao tore a page from the ledger, then fished out another slip of paper from her money pouch. She pressed both sheets against the palm of her hand as she wrote; the pen left faint impressions across her skin. The slip recorded every amount she was entrusting to Peng Zhou — how much was to go toward final payments and how much was to be deposited for the cashier’s check.

When she finished, Gu Qiao handed the slip to Peng Zhou. “Sign it.”

Any other girl who had just seen her father injured like this might not have wept outright, but she would have shed at least a few tears. Gu Qiao had not cried a single drop. She was handling every financial detail with her mind in perfect order. Her composure unsettled Peng Zhou more than he could say.

Peng Zhou took the slip and was signing when Gu Qiao drew the switchblade she always carried. She made a small cut along her own arm — she may have dropped out of high school, but she had paid close attention in the Ba Fen – Chapter on blood vessels, and she knew exactly which cut would simply bleed without causing real harm. Blood welled up, not much of it. She held the knife handle, still wet with blood, out toward Peng Zhou: “Use this to press a fingerprint.”

Peng Zhou was more shaken by the sight of the blood on the switchblade than he had been by Lou Deyu’s blood-covered face. The girl in front of him seemed like an entirely different person from the Gu Qiao he had known before.

He looked up at her. She still hadn’t shed a single tear, yet her face was unnaturally, starkly pale. Gu Qiao produced a white handkerchief and swiftly, efficiently bound up the cut.

Peng Zhou didn’t press his finger to the knife handle. Instead, he bit his own finger and used that blood to press a heavy, deliberate thumbprint onto the slip Gu Qiao had written.

“Can you manage on your own? Do you want me to stay with you?”

“Get to the station now. The next train leaves in one hour.” Gu Qiao had memorized the train schedules from Erlian to Hohhot and from Hohhot back to Beijing before setting out.

“Tell the trucks to get moving too — no more delays.”

Peng Zhou still hesitated. Gu Qiao said to him, perfectly calmly: “If you really want to help me, do what I just told you. Once everything is handled, send a message to my pager. I won’t say much in the way of warnings — you’ve been making runs to Moscow long enough. I know you’ll get the money back safely. As for me — don’t worry. Nothing is going to happen.”

Gu Qiao watched until Peng Zhou disappeared around a corner of the hospital corridor. Her tears still hadn’t come. Her eyes were fixed unblinking on the three characters above the door that read “Operating Room” — until Lou Deyu was at last wheeled out and taken to a ward.

The doctor told Gu Qiao that all the fragments had been removed from Lou Deyu’s body. Gu Qiao sat beside the hospital bed. Lou Deyu’s face was covered in wounds; talking pulled at his mouth and it hurt, so he pushed out one word at a time: “Money — still — there?”

Gu Qiao shook her head.

“Get — moving — while — it’s — still — light…”

“They’ve already gone. I’m staying here with you. Don’t worry — you, me, and the money are all going to be fine.” Gu Qiao looked at Lou Deyu’s bandage-swathed head and face — and then suddenly began to laugh. There was something absurd about the sight of him. She laughed and laughed, and then without warning she covered her face with her hands, her shoulders heaving in rhythmic, shuddering spasms. Every sob was muffled beneath her palms.

“I’m — fine.”

Gu Qiao suddenly dropped her hands, rearranging her face into a smile. “Dad, please don’t try to talk so much right now. Get better quickly — Mom is waiting for you to come home.”

Two days later, eight characters appeared on Gu Qiao’s pager: “Final payments settled. Cashier’s check issued.” She called Peng Zhou; he picked up within seconds.

The moment he heard Gu Qiao’s voice, Peng Zhou launched straight into the accounts.

“How’s Uncle Lou doing? When are you two coming back? I’m still waiting to go register at the hotel with you and get the business started.”

“The doctor says he needs more time to recover. He’s not recommending we move him just yet.”

Once Lou Deyu’s condition had improved, he was able to speak in complete sentences again, though slowly. “You head back first,” he told Gu Qiao. “I can manage here on my own.”

“I said we’re going back together. I’m not repeating myself.”

“Your birthday is coming up soon. Who spends their birthday in a hospital?”

It was only then that Gu Qiao remembered her birthday was approaching. Luo Peiyin had said he would come back from the United States to celebrate it with her.

Placing an international call to Luo Peiyin was nothing like calling Peng Zhou. There was no way to reach him across borders by pager either. Gu Qiao worked out the time difference in her head, calculating when Luo Peiyin was most likely to be reachable, and called. A foreign voice answered. In her imperfect English, Gu Qiao asked to speak to Luo Peiyin — and heard the other person say he wasn’t in.

She had no way to keep waiting there for a return call. With no other option, Gu Qiao dialed Luo Sijing’s number.

Even knowing that Luo Sijing was aware of their relationship, saying what she needed to say into the receiver was still difficult. Asking his older sister to pass on a message that she was stuck in Hohhot on business and he shouldn’t fly back from America just to celebrate her birthday — what exactly did that sound like?

But she couldn’t let him make a wasted trip.

The moment the line connected, Gu Qiao, afraid that hesitation would rob her of courage, forced the words out all at once: “Sister, I’m currently in Hohhot on business and I can’t reach Luo Peiyin. Please pass on a message for me — tell him that I can’t step away from my work right now, so he… doesn’t need to fly back from America.”

It was the first time Gu Qiao had said his full name to anyone else, rather than simply calling him “my older cousin.”

What followed was not Luo Sijing’s response — only silence. Even knowing about her brother’s relationship with Gu Qiao, she hadn’t known things had developed this far. He had barely arrived in America and he was already planning to fly back to see her — and now Gu Qiao was saying it wasn’t necessary. This surprised Luo Sijing far more than learning they were together had.

“Are you certain you want me to pass this on?”

Gu Qiao bit her lip. “I’m certain.”

“Then what does he mean to you? If you don’t like him, you can just tell him directly — he would never push you…” Luo Sijing had never imagined there would come a day when she would feel her heart ache for her own brother in matters of love. She had always assumed he was the one who left others hurt.

“Of course I like him. I just — I’m worried I’m so busy I won’t have any time for him. Once April comes I’ll be free, and when he comes back then…”

“Have you considered that by then he might be the one without time?” Luo Sijing stopped herself from saying more. Even if it was her brother, love was a matter between two people.

Without waiting for Gu Qiao’s answer, Luo Sijing said: “I’ll pass your message along.”