The plane landed in He’er Xinji at night.

The final stretch had hit turbulence, and the fuselage shook without ceasing. The entire cabin erupted in gasps and prayers. When the wheels at last touched down, everyone exhaled as one.

Perhaps because his wound had been going back and forth, Wei Lai had slept through it all—deep and dreamless, feeling only as though he were aboard a ship, with waves rising one after another, carrying him somewhere unknown.

A flight attendant woke him and indicated it was time to disembark.

Walking into the terminal, the noise of the crowd rose all around him. On a tall, vividly-colored advertisement board above: the young, bright faces of Finnish university students, with the words—

“Put a hat on spring! Welcome to He’er Xinji—Vappu!”

Beside it, a large digital display showed the date.

Every year on the thirtieth of April—also called Vappu—Finnish people celebrated the arrival of spring.

April was almost over.

Wei Lai was dressed for summer. The moment he stepped out the airport doors, the cold hit him like a shock. He hurried back inside and quickly bought a jacket, wrapped himself in it, and went back out.

He had to laugh at himself. At the beginning and end of April—the chill of a spring still not quite settled in—he had returned to He’er Xinji twice, and both times dressed completely wrong. Once bundled in a filthy, battered fur pelt, and once underdressed enough to turn heads.

Back to his apartment building. He stopped first at Ai Lin’s bar, as usual. Before going in, he looked up at the words above the door: “We care about the world.”

He looked at it for a long while. He had said it without really meaning it—only because he found it embarrassing that Ai Lin didn’t even know China existed. And Ai Lin had taken it as the name of the bar because she thought it was a wonderful hook.

——”Wei! I can play the news in the bar! No bar in He’er Xinji has done that before. So novel!”

Mentioning something again and again—usually a passing whim. The things one quietly commits to doing almost never get announced.

Someone came out of the bar and politely asked him to step aside.

He went inside. It was the busiest part of the day—smoke, alcohol, music, spectacle, none of it in short supply. The first face he saw was the woman who reminded him of the ancient Egyptian queen, eyes darkly lined, arms draped around the neck of some Russian man, laughing until she shook.

No one behind the bar. In the jellyfish tank the bubbles rose steadily, the dim greenish glow unchanged. The two ancient, slow jellyfish still drifted, tended and fed, incapable of learning to embrace life—and beside the jellyfish tank…

The white peace lily, growing beautifully. It had put out a new bud, its color a pale jade green. Two ivory-white spathes curled softly, their edges nearly touching, like something drawing gradually closer.

Wei Lai smiled. He was just about to walk over—

“David’s coming!”

Wei Lai smiled, his peripheral vision catching Ai Lin heading his way with a tray, practically skipping. He turned the injured shoulder away and left her the other side.

Sure enough, Ai Lin dropped the tray and practically threw herself at his shoulder. “Wei! I think about you every day.”

That was just something people said. He took it for what it was. But Wei Lai glanced at her and thought—this time, she was holding on for rather a long time.

His eyes swept across the bar interior. “You’re not doing this for someone else’s benefit, are you?”

Remarkably, he was right. A faint flush spread across Ai Lin’s face.

Then she tugged at his arm. “Look over there…”

Someone had just stepped behind the bar. She was a small, brown-haired young woman with a pointed chin and a pair of bright, lively eyes.

Ai Lin said under her breath: “That’s A’Sha.”

Wei Lai gave his assessment: “Not unlike that Bulgarian girl you had before. You always go for the small ones. Why not find someone tall, with curves, long legs?”

Ai Lin spat in contempt. “That’s your type, isn’t it.”

Wei Lai was accommodating. He pulled her over and wrapped an arm around her. “Just started seeing each other? Trying to make her jealous? Fair enough—but why come to me? Playing bisexual?”

Ai Lin was exasperated and twisted at him—but she wasn’t like Cen Jin; she could never find the one spot that actually hurt. No matter how hard she pinched, it didn’t sting.

Wei Lai patted her on the head. “Enough playing around. I’ll take my flower back, same as always, and go home to sleep.”

He walked in long strides toward the bar. Ai Lin’s eyes went wide. She came rushing after him. “Hey, wait…”

The same sound came simultaneously from A’Sha, who, the instant his hand reached the pot, with startling speed, gathered the plant—pot and all—into her arms.

What was this about? Did she not know whose flower it was?

Ai Lin pulled him aside, stammering. “Wei, that… could you let me have this flower?”

Wei Lai had begun to piece things together. He’d entrusted her with looking after a flower, and in the end she couldn’t even leave him a patch of soil? Could he really trust her with something more valuable in the future?

Ai Lin said: “I wanted to tell you when we talked on the phone, but your signal kept cutting out. This flower really does bring good fortune… you know, I can’t keep plants—in less than a week, I nearly killed it.”

“I thought: this won’t do. You said that if the flower goes, so do you—I couldn’t let you die. So I carried it outside and went looking for someone who knew what they were doing…”

People were passing back and forth on the street. She ran into A’Sha. A’Sha didn’t even notice her at first—she saw the flower before she saw Ai Lin, and cried out in alarm: “You just brought it out like this? This plant can’t be exposed to the cold!”

Even as she said it, she took off her jacket and carefully wrapped it around the windward side of the pot.

Wei Lai raised an eyebrow at her. “And that’s how you fell for each other? How far along are you now?”

Ai Lin hedged and fumbled: “A few coffees. She comes by the bar to help out after work every day. We’ve held hands… we haven’t known each other a full month yet. I don’t want to rush it. What do you think?”

Wei Lai said nothing. On the subject of whether things were moving too fast or too slow, he had nothing to offer.

After a pause he said: “So that’s how it is—my flower got lured away?”

Ai Lin had the audacity to argue the point: “How can you call it your flower? You only played a small part in getting it here. Have you looked after it? Watered it? Turned the soil? Removed insects? You’ve contributed nothing—if this flower is going to bring anyone luck, it certainly won’t be you.”

Wei Lai suddenly realized that Ai Lin was actually a born negotiator. She finished her argument and then put on the most endearing expression she could manage. “Wei, please let me keep it. A’Sha and I both love this flower. In consideration of how long I’ve loved you…”

Invoking her love for him again. She’d loved him for so long, never once made him a bed—and now, at the end, she wanted to walk off with his flower too. The nerve.

Wei Lai clenched his jaw. But the terrible thing was, he thought Ai Lin made a fair point.

She was right. He hadn’t done anything for it. If this flower was truly as mystical as claimed and could bring good fortune, it wasn’t going to bring it to him.

And so he said: “…Fine.”

He slept a deep, long sleep, but not a peaceful one. His dream was a whole production.

He dreamed he was in a desperate chase after someone. This person had a magical watch that could reverse time. He ran and ran, and when he finally pinned the person down and forced them to turn back time to six years ago—

The person moved too slowly, dragging their feet. Wei Lai ran out of patience, snatched the watch away, and gave it a hard turn.

He applied too much force and overshot it. The world spun. When he came back to himself, he was standing on a small country road.

It was autumn. Wild grasses lined both sides of the path, their tips dyed a long golden-ginger, leaves drifting slowly from the trees. And Cen Jin was walking down this road, slow and easy.

She was four or five years old. She wore a small floral dress and had two pigtails tied up at the sides, springing out at odd angles—stubborn as a person.

A small school bag slung diagonally across her back. She walked at a leisurely pace—stopping to look at every patch of grass, bending down to pick up small stones, pausing at every tree to compare heights with it. The kind of little girl who would make a mother lose her patience and come over to grab her by the ear.

Wei Lai followed behind her. Noticing someone there, she turned around with suspicion and said: “Who are you?”

Wei Lai crouched down and looked at her small face, screwed up in an attempt to look fierce. He didn’t know what to say, and after a long pause he finally said: “You’ll meet me later. You’ll get on my boat…”

Cen Jin said: “Get lost! You don’t get on bad strangers’ cars or their boats!”

She turned and ran, her small legs pumping, her school bag slapping at her bottom with every step. She had already run a good distance but kept looking back in a panic. She caught her foot on something and went down, then scrambled up instantly and kept right on going—a small top, spinning away into the distance.

Wei Lai had never realized before—Cen Jin was actually quite a fast runner…

He woke with a smile still on his lips. Outside the window, the sounds of the city had been filtered to something thin and faint, floating high above, unbroken.

Wei Lai lay in bed for a while before it occurred to him that today was Vappu. Tens of thousands of people were gathered right now at the south harbor square, where the bronze statue of the goddess Amanda stood.

In the early last century, one evening, a group of students had been celebrating wildly near the Amanda statue through the night. They happened to look up and see the goddess standing alone in the dark, and took pity on her for the cold. Someone wrapped her in a restaurant’s tablecloth; someone else took the white, round-crowned, black-brimmed hat off their own head and placed it on hers.

The goddess was lonely no more. She stood there in her makeshift shawl, her wavy hair peeking out from beneath the hat brim, a pigeon swooping past. The whole night turned playful.

From that day on, year after year on that same date, someone would always go to put a hat on Amanda. In time it became a fixed holiday.

Wei Lai had experienced it once before—the festivities began in the afternoon, and almost half the city gathered at the statue, spontaneously donning the white-crowned, black-brimmed hats, raising music, uncorking champagne, lifting glasses, embracing one another, celebrating through the night until the early hours, waiting for the arrival of May—the true sign of spring.

By the sound of it, the holiday celebrations had already begun.

Wei Lai got up, reaching for his phone. There was one message, from Mi Lu.

——Tomorrow night, nine o’clock. Bar.

He thought for a long while before realizing he had overslept—the “tomorrow night” in the message was actually today.

With Vappu drawing the crowds away, the bar was quieter than usual. Even the Egyptian queen hadn’t come in for her shift. Ai Lin and A’Sha were huddled together, whispering in a conversation that seemed to have no end.

Mi Lu arrived precisely on time. The door swung open and he made straight for the table where Wei Lai sat—their first meeting since that sauna parting.

Surely there would be volumes to say, like a sandstorm pouring out of Nubia. Wei Lai, taking precautions, had to guard against theatrical outbursts and also against mockery and teasing.

“Don’t call me a Christmas tree. Don’t come barreling in to hug me. Sit down properly. And if you dare laugh at me for falling for a client, you can get out.”

Every word landed exactly where it hurt: Mi Lu froze for a long moment, his face full of thwarted expectations. He finally, grudgingly, sat down.

Then he set the bag he’d been carrying on the table. “The Saudi paid your fee. Knowing you prefer cash, and don’t like large denominations—I had it changed.”

Wei Lai pulled open the zip and gave it a cursory look. Something occurred to him. “Did you donate it? The one for the ritual cutting?”

Mi Lu said: “You were actually serious?”

Wei Lai gave him a sideways look. “A little painful to part with. But you can’t take back what you’ve said.”

Mi Lu was equal parts astonished and delighted. “Wei! You actually feel the pinch of parting with money now? This past month has not been wasted! Donate half, keep the other half—you’re not going back to La Pu Lan to charter a boat again, are you?”

Wei Lai said nothing. After a pause he asked: “Would the money left be enough to buy the apartment I’ve been living in?”

Mi Lu couldn’t trust his own ears. “You want to buy a place?”

Wei Lai said offhandedly: “You need somewhere to put down roots.”

He waved over Ai Lin and had two black ales brought.

Mi Lu suddenly thought of something. He looked Wei Lai over and felt his mood was stable enough that it probably wouldn’t be a sore subject.

“Something you might be interested in. Do you remember—you asked me to look into the details of Re Lei Mi’s case?”

Wei Lai looked at him. “What did you find?”

“I spent some money to smooth a path, made contact with someone inside the department. They said the case was never closed, but there’d been no progress either. So they’d gone back and were re-examining some people who’d previously been cleared—Miss Cen among them.”

“And then?”

“Just on the way here, there was an update. They said that yesterday, the French police received a formal correspondence. The Hand of God of Ka Long, claiming responsibility for the murder of Re Lei Mi three years ago.”

Wei Lai was momentarily stunned.

Mi Lu clicked his tongue. “Didn’t see that coming, did you. They closed the case the same day they received the letter. Apparently they had a late supper to celebrate.”

Wei Lai murmured: “I really didn’t see that coming…”

He gave a soft laugh.

Was this what it meant to find life at the end of all roads? Throughout everything, it was the Hand of God that had wanted Cen Jin’s life—and at the very end, the one that swept away the last obstacle standing in her way was them as well.

He said: “Cen Jin had good judgment. En Nu is someone who gets things done.”

Mi Lu snorted. “Of course she has good judgment—she had good enough judgment to choose you, didn’t she? Though back in the reserve she was blind enough…”

Wei Lai’s expression darkened. “She had no choice in the reserve.”

Mi Lu couldn’t hold himself back. “Still defending her? She nearly got you killed. If that sniper had been just a little better, if I hadn’t told Ke Ke Shu to watch those three bodyguards, where would you be right now? Could you still be anyone’s Christmas tree? You’d be ashes by now.”

Wei Lai laughed. After a moment he said: “After I got off Hu Sha’s boat, I was the one setting the route the whole time. I asked her: you’re following me—if I lead you into real danger, will you blame me?”

“She answered: following you wasn’t something I said lightly. It was my decision. If real danger came, I’d have to live with it. It wouldn’t be fair to put all the blame on you.”

Mi Lu listened, bemused. “What are you trying to say?”

Wei Lai asked: “Do you know why I had to, at all costs, fight that hard to help her?”

“Because a woman had you bewitched, obviously.”

Wei Lai laughed out loud, lifted his black ale, clinked it with Mi Lu’s, took a long swallow, then set it down.

He said: “I like her—of course that’s one reason. But another reason is: in all the time we were together, no matter how close we’d gotten, she never once said to me: ‘please stay with me,’ ‘please protect me,’ ‘please don’t leave me behind.'”

“She was clearly in danger. She’d already become my woman—why didn’t she make any demands of me? You know, I gave her… two scarves. Wait, no—she didn’t pay for the scarves. What I actually bought her was one of those locally-made lipsticks. Barely worth half a euro. In a bar, if you buy a pretty girl a drink, you’d probably spend more than that.”

“You like a girl, and either you spend everything you have on her, or you give everything you feel for her. She didn’t want any of it. What would you do?”

“In the first half I was protecting her because of the Saudi’s payment. In the second half she said she didn’t want to hire me, and I forced her to sign an IOU—that was my choice.”

“I hadn’t even met her yet when I knew she’d received a severed hand. When I went to sign the contract, I knew someone had already broken into Bai Pao’s room. We hadn’t even boarded Hu Sha’s ship and the speedboat had already been blown up at sea. I made my choice knowing full well what I was walking into. In plain terms: I accepted the gamble. Whether they sent a sniper after me, or a rocket launcher—I was mentally prepared.”

“I fought with everything I had to protect her, to shield her from every danger she faced—whether the Hand of God was founded by her, by Re Lei Mi, or by Ke Ke Shu for all I care. Even if the blade was in her own hands, I wasn’t going to stand there and watch her cut herself with it. I’d still go and take it from her.”

Mi Lu was completely lost. “So then why did you still leave…?”

Wei Lai said coldly: “What, a man can’t have a little pride? She suffered through six years of pain. I have no right to reproach her for anything—if anything, I feel for her. But one thing has nothing to do with the other.”

“Emotionally speaking—I’m not comfortable with it. I don’t want to be magnanimous, smile it off, and just let it go. That would be too suffocating. So I left. On matters that count, you have to take a stand—otherwise you get taken for granted down the line. No standing at all.”

Mi Lu opened and closed his mouth several times before he could get words out.

——”Wei, back when my wife and I fought, it was always Yi Fu who left home, and I went after her… I’ve never heard of a man walking out and expecting the woman to come and find him…”

——”What if she doesn’t come? That Miss Cen looks rather proud and spirited.”

——”It’s been several days already. Wei, maybe you’d still have to go back and find her yourself. Though where does that leave your dignity? Not that it matters—your skin is thick enough. Besides, didn’t you once say you would absolutely never develop anything beyond money with a client…”

Wei Lai had clenched his jaw. The black ale in his hand was on the verge of being dumped over Mi Lu’s head—when the clock on the wall suddenly chimed.

Ten o’clock. Time for the news.

The regulars all knew the rules. In Ai Lin’s bar, news time was like a ceasefire agreement. Whatever you were doing, whether you actually cared or not—you stopped, and gave it your full attention.

Tonight’s top story arrived without warning.

The broadcaster could barely keep the excitement out of her voice. “Today, the protracted standoff in the Saudi oil tanker Sirius hostage case reached its final resolution. At three o’clock this afternoon, following the pirates’ terms, the Saudi side deployed a seaplane to air-drop a package containing three million US dollars in ransom to the sea zone specified by the pirates…”

Mi Lu’s eyes lit up. “Wei! That’s the Sirius!”

He was practically bursting to shout it to the entire bar—to let everyone know he had been involved, had even met Bai Pao himself.

There was no need to remind him. Wei Lai was already watching.

On screen, the seaplane released the package. An orange parachute opened almost immediately above it. Below, several of the pirates’ speedboats cut rapidly across the water, tracing vast white circles on the surface.

Everyone aboard wore scarves or shirts wrapped around their faces. The footage was unstable and blurred; impossible to pick out which of those figures was Hu Sha, and which was the one always so enthusiastic about offering him qat leaves to chew—Sha Di…

In the bar, everyone was riveted. And it was at this moment that Wei Lai stood up and slipped quietly out.

Outside the apartment building it was very quiet. All the evening’s festivity had presumably gathered at Vappu. Wei Lai leaned against the wall, head bowed, cigarette between his lips. He lit it, took two drags, tapped the ash lightly with his finger, and watched it fall and disappear on the glistening, ice-cold pavement.

More than ten days ago he had still been aboard that ship. Those two days, a sandstorm had dragged itself across the Red Sea like a great snake, wild and relentless. The ship was always bustling: Hu Sha volatile and careful, Sha Di unhurried and easy, the smaller pirates always looking for opportunities to swagger and show off.

And now they were separated by a television screen, ten thousand li apart.

By now, the pirates would be dividing the money—easy enough to picture the scene: arguments, shouting, and the chorus of voices rising in unison: “Money! Money! Money!”

From the direction of the south harbor, another surge of distant cheering rolled through—thinned out by distance and the uneven rooftops of the city.

Such noise everywhere.

Life was full of passing noise. Countless people gathered around you to fill the air with sound—yet so few could sit with you in silence.

On his left arm, from the wrist inward, a faint, tingling numbness stirred. Slowly it made its way toward the elbow.

The quiet street filled with the sound of footsteps.

Wei Lai went completely still. The cigarette smoke drifted into his eyes.

He didn’t look up—but he saw a shadow stretching far too long, drifting slowly until it merged with his. And then the person, wearing brown high-heeled ankle boots of soft lambskin, stepped in front of him.

Wei Lai smiled. With one hand he flicked the ash from the cigarette; with the other he reached out, wrapped it around her waist, and drew her in.

He heard her say: “Wei Lai…”

Wei Lai said: “Shh… let me finish this cigarette.”

The street was so quiet. The cigarette burned past its halfway point. The cold of the wall seeped into his back, but what he held in his arms was warm—and that warmth settled into his chest, and his chest was full.

He liked sitting somewhere high, listening to the sound of the city, looking down at people passing below like streams of ants.

Mi Lu and Ke Ke Shu had both been up on rooftops with him. Both had asked what he was looking for up there.

He’d answered: “The breath of people, I suppose. People put out a smell, a presence—they talk, they fight, they connect, they lose themselves, they live and die with feeling. All of that takes breath.”

Ke Ke Shu had told him he was making things up.

Pressed further, he’d said: “You can see a lot of stories—ones happening, ones still forming, ones already gone.”

He was still making things up, really.

He just liked watching those people. Especially the ones who weren’t in any hurry.

Those people were almost always in pairs or small groups.

There were couples—some sweet, some bickering.

There were families—a father coaxing a small daughter softly, a son throwing a tantrum that had his mother at her wit’s end.

Wei Lai would watch and smile, sitting for a long, long time.

He had always thought none of this would ever happen to him.

He had thought he was just a ship passing through the crowd—nothing to delay a lifetime, nothing to obstruct the view, but no one ever stepping aboard. He would drift forever with the current, in a life derailed from its track, watching the world go by like carriages on a road—until the boards rotted, rusted out on some unmarked, forgotten shore.

Wei Lai bowed his head and asked her: “Have you thought it through? Once you’re on my boat, there’s no getting off.”

[End]