He endured the announcements, the boarding, the noise of voices, the flight instructions, the takeoff, and the steady hum of the aircraft — until at last, to avoid disturbing the passengers, the cabin lights were switched off.

The moment the lights went out, Wei Lai exhaled a long breath, feeling as though the world had only now begun to quiet down.

He opened the window shade. Outside was not pitch black — quite the opposite: it was a translucent ink-blue, with clouds that looked like thin wisps of cotton that had been pulled apart and scattered.

The airplane felt like a ship, drifting in a different kind of “sea.”

He waited patiently for a while. As his eyes adjusted to the cabin’s half-light, he could see that Cen Jin had fallen asleep, her breathing light and shallow. She was his employer, the one paying the bills — she had every right to sleep soundly and undisturbed.

A bodyguard, however, did not. There were routine procedures to attend to.

He unfastened his seatbelt and stood up.

During boarding, Wei Lai had observed most of the passengers and had confirmed that, for the most part, nothing seemed amiss — but to be safe, he needed to go through them once more.

First, he found a first-class flight attendant: “I’m going back to find a friend — I’ll be back shortly. But my girlfriend just had surgery. Could you keep an eye on her? If anything happens, please come and find me right away.”

The flight attendant smiled, with more than a trace of admiration in her tone: “You’re so attentive to your girlfriend.”

Wei Lai smiled too. Could he afford not to be? If anything happened to her, not only would he lose his pay — he wouldn’t even be able to hold on to his title as “Ace.”

He made his way to the rear of the aircraft — first through business class, then economy. Economy was large, not entirely full. Some passengers hadn’t yet fallen asleep; the small overhead reading lights were on here and there, and at a glance, they looked like fireflies scattered across a wild field.

He swept through the cabin quickly, found nothing unusual, and turned to head back. He was reaching out to draw aside the dividing curtain when something gently nudged his foot.

He looked down. A small rubber ball had rolled over and was still swaying, not quite at rest.

From the dim front row of seats came the soft voice of a young girl: “Excuse me?”

Wei Lai crouched down and palmed the little ball, tilting it into the narrow strip of light from the porthole to make out the small figure before him.

Ah — he recognized her. She was the little Black girl he had seen in the terminal, the one with the small, untidy braids.

Beside her sat who must have been her father, who had been deep in thought and was only now pulled back to the present by the commotion. He seemed momentarily disoriented. Wei Lai handed the ball to the little girl, and only then did the father come to himself and offer his thanks.

At the same time, the little girl extended something: “Thank you for picking up my ball.”

It was a small gummy candy.

The exchange was a preamble to friendship — it would have been rude to turn and walk away immediately. Wei Lai accepted the candy and asked her, “Where are you from?”

“Ka Long.”

“Ka Long?”

The father heard the surprise in his tone: “You’re thinking of the massacre, aren’t you?”

“Our Ka Long isn’t very famous — not like Sierra Leone with its diamonds or the Congo with its gold. These days, people who know Ka Long know it because of ‘The Tragedy of April.'”

Wei Lai thought for a few seconds before he placed the reference.

“Is that what you call the massacre — ‘The Tragedy of April’?”

“Because it happened in April. Afterward, a writer back home published a book called The Tragedy of April — it sold very well, and that’s what everyone started calling it.”

Shielded by the dimness, neither could clearly make out the other’s face. It was rare for Wei Lai to take any genuine interest in Ka Long — and that gave the father the opening he needed to speak.

— “When it happened, our family happened to be vacationing abroad. But many of our relatives and friends back home perished.”

— “We’ve emigrated now, but every year around this time, we go back — the memorial day is approaching.”

— “When I think about all of it, there’s no way I can sleep…”

“I heard that some foreign volunteers helped your people at the time?”

“Yes. We were deeply grateful. What they did then — they were truly risking their lives. You have to understand — the rioters even shot peacekeeping soldiers.”

Wei Lai was mindful of Cen Jin back in the front and couldn’t linger long in conversation. He wrapped things up quickly.

Returning to his seat, everything was as it should be. The flight attendant was conscientious and had remained stationed beside Cen Jin the whole time. Seeing Wei Lai return, she gave a quiet handover report: “Nothing happened. She slept very well.”

Good.

Wei Lai lay back. Since their departure, this was the first moment his entire body could truly, properly stretch out. He pulled the notebook from his back pocket and flipped through it rapidly in the dark — the smell of the paper fanning past his nose.

What to write tonight?

Well, Cen Jin was actually decent. As employers went, compared to the bloated and arrogant types he’d worked for — the wealthy who looked down on the world with their noses in the air, who wielded cruelty as a personality trait, who expected the entire world to accommodate them…

Wei Lai’s standards were not high, but she had far surpassed passing marks. In fact, he rather liked her temperament: she made her own decisions on the things that mattered, and let the small things slide.

Cen Jin shifted in her sleep.

— “What they did then — they were truly risking their lives — you have to understand, the rioters even shot peacekeeping soldiers…”

What kind of chaos had it been? How had she survived it? Wei Lai could not imagine. For most people in this world, war had ended with the Second World War — everything that remained was something distant and unrelated, just “conflict” in the news.

Her breathing had grown a little heavier.

Wei Lai frowned, listened carefully for a moment, then quickly sat up and moved to her side, leaning forward into a half-crouch.

Her hands occasionally lifted and grasped at nothing in reflex — empty, searching. Beneath her closed lids, her eyes were moving rapidly.

She must be having a nightmare.

Wei Lai called to her in a low voice: “Miss Cen?”

He called twice. No response. Wei Lai lowered his head, reached out, and gripped her shoulder, giving her a gentle shake.

This time it worked. For just a fraction of a second, he felt her body suddenly go slack — and then she opened her eyes.

Wei Lai had always felt there was something in her eyes, as deep as a world hidden inside them.

Perhaps it was the disorientation of first waking that had stripped away her guard, or perhaps she was still half-submerged in the dream, not yet remembering who she was — but in this moment, her eyes were very bright, and her gaze was soft. Like a newborn looking at the world: without love, and without resentment.

She looked at Wei Lai’s eyes.

He looked back at hers.

He had never held eye contact with anyone this long.

He suddenly felt that the dimness of the cabin was perfectly calibrated: he couldn’t see her clothing, her accessories, the color of her face, her body language, her micro-expressions — none of those chaotic, distracting signals that normally flooded in.

He had attended specialized training courses, and the curriculum had been meticulous: teaching you to observe a target’s clothing, habitual gestures, personal accessories, whether the corner of the mouth twitched upward, whether the eyelids contracted — cataloguing every single hair if possible, all in order to strip away a person’s true face.

Why had they never taught you to look at someone’s eyes?

Wei Lai said: “You were having a nightmare.”

She nodded.

“Would you like some water?”

She shook her head: “Do you have wine?”

First class had a wine service. Wei Lai pressed the call button and had a glass brought for her. Cen Jin took it and drank it down as if it were water.

The dim air filled with the faint sweetness of wine.

Wei Lai smiled slightly and settled in beside her. Sometimes surviving a nightmare left you more exhausted than surviving a real brush with death — and at a moment like this, she probably didn’t want to move, didn’t want to be disturbed, but she certainly didn’t want to be alone either.

The aircraft was buffeted by small, continuous tremors — they must have hit some turbulence. Cen Jin asked him: “Have you ever had nightmares?”

“Yes. Often, when I was young.”

He narrowed his eyes, staring at the seatback in front of him, as if he could see straight through it and into the dreams of his early years.

“I dreamed that seawater poured in through a hatch in the deck and flooded the hold. I drowned, floating belly-up inside the ship like a dead fish, with moss growing all over my body.”

A brutal dream — and what was more brutal still was waking up afterward and having to press a sewing machine pedal, and gnaw on bread crusts so hard they could cut your lips. Back then, he had thought: if I can survive this, I’ll amount to something great one day.

And now, whatever that “something great” was — it had turned out to be fairly ordinary.

He asked: “What about you — what did you dream?”

“I dreamed of Ka Long.”

“After I left Ka Long, I saw a psychologist for a long time.”

Wei Lai remembered what Milu had said.

— “Many people who were evacuated from conflict zones suffer severe psychological trauma.”

The human body and mind are soft things — put them up against the sharp and iron edges of this world, and of course they take damage. But there was some comfort in knowing that wounds still had the chance to heal.

Wei Lai wanted to offer her something comforting: “Just now, in the rear of the cabin, I met a family from Ka Long. The father said he was deeply grateful to the volunteers who helped Ka Long during that time — your choice then, it was genuinely admirable.”

Honestly speaking, he could not have done the same himself.

Cen Jin laughed.

It started as a low, cold laugh, and then it loosened into something almost undignified — as if she had just heard the punchline of an extraordinary joke.

“Do you think,” she said, “that I went to Ka Long out of compassion? That I went because I believed in some higher ideal, because I wanted to rescue people from the depths of suffering?”

Not exactly… but from her tone now, that was clearly not it.

“In university, I majored in international political relations. I wanted to go into politics.”

“But for people of color, it isn’t easy. Working up from the bottom in government, by thirty or forty, you might still be a senior assistant, a secretary, or holding some empty title with no real power.”

“I wanted a shortcut. An investment. I wanted to add a spectacular credential to my résumé. I chose the most dangerous place in the world because I believed: the greater the danger, the greater the reward.”

She leaned her head back, her gaze settling on the cabin ceiling, and gave a quiet, rueful laugh: “And then, my luck ran out. Maybe I deserved it.”

Wei Lai was silent.

She had said: her train had already gone off the rails long ago.

Milu had also said: after Ka Long, Cen Jin had withdrawn entirely from the Africa aid organizations.

Perhaps it was because the severe psychological trauma had thrown all her carefully laid plans into complete disarray.

But that shouldn’t be called “deserved.”

Wei Lai said: “Miss Cen, I think — the purpose behind anything you do doesn’t have to be pure.”

“Take studying, for example. You can study to pursue academic excellence, to earn a degree, to find a better job, or you can study to meet people, to escape from the world. Going somewhere that dangerous, even if it was for personal gain — that’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“And besides, you saved so many lives.”

……

A long silence, with no response. Wei Lai looked down: “Are you asleep?”

No — she was looking at him, her expression complex. In the very instant he lowered his gaze, she reached up naturally and wrapped her arm around his neck, and pressed her lips to his.

Soft. Slightly cool. Sweet with the scent of wine.

Completely unexpected. A thin thread of warmth shot from his wrist up through the crook of his elbow.

Wei Lai’s mind was clearer in that moment than it had ever been. He placed one hand on her shoulder and said: “Miss Cen.”

She tilted her chin slightly upward, her breath drifting softly across his lips: “Mm?”

“People’s willpower is at its lowest at night. You’ve just had wine, and you’ve just had a nightmare.”

“Please think carefully about whether this is an impulse of the moment — whether you’re looking for comfort — because after all, we still have to face each other come morning.”

A second or two of silence.

Cen Jin looked into his eyes and said: “I don’t remember what just happened.”

Wei Lai smiled slightly.

“Neither do I,” he said.

As he settled back into his seat, Wei Lai felt a little regretful.

If she weren’t a client, he probably wouldn’t have had any desire to play the gentleman.

After all — the timing, the setting, the chemistry, and the feeling between them had all aligned. Moments like that didn’t come around often in a lifetime.