Cen Jin was relatively composed. “Sandstorm — get in the car, now.”

Wei Lai tucked the knife into the leather sheath at the small of his back, tossed the melon into the woven basket, closed the doors first, then jumped in and pulled the roof panel shut with a heavy thud.

Outside the van, everything was darker — a blurred, ginger-yellow haze. Fine grains of sand began pelting the windshield. Wei Lai drove the van to a more open patch of ground and parked it steadily, then switched on both front and rear lights.

He knew the emergency protocol for sandstorms: stay off the roadway, keep your lights on to mark your position — to prevent any vehicles attempting to drive through the storm from colliding with you.

Cen Jin pulled a protective sleeve over the satellite phone, then asked Wei Lai to help her tear open several large plastic bags and seal them around the cold air unit with transparent tape.

She had her priorities straight: first, communications; second, the cooling unit.

Wei Lai thought she was overreacting. “The doors are already closed.”

He’d never been in a sandstorm, but he’d seen them in the news: a storm blows in, you stay indoors, close the doors and windows, and wait for it to pass.

Cen Jin laughed coldly. “Northern Africa is the Sahara Desert. The sandstorms here are the largest in the world — you can see them clearly from satellite imagery…”

Wei Lai cursed under his breath.

He didn’t need her to describe it. He could already see it.

Straight ahead, a rolling wall of sand — massive mushroom-cloud formations stacked into a near-black sand barrier closing in fast, blanketing the sky and covering the earth. It looked exactly like the end-of-the-world scenes in disaster films.

Before that towering wall of sand, the van was like a blade of grass with shallow roots.

“Can people die in this?” Wei Lai asked.

“If luck isn’t on your side — yes.”

Before her words had fully settled, a pattering of impacts struck the roof, the hood, and the windshield. Large clots of yellow, paint-like sticky dirty rain slid down the glass.

Cen Jin quietly explained: “That bright line at the top of the storm means there’s rainfall mixed in — but it’s too dry here for it to amount to anything.”

Sure enough, the dirty rain stopped quickly. What followed was a dense barrage of fine sand particles, driven by fierce winds lashing against the body of the van. From the sides and above came a rapid, continuous rustling — like rodents gnawing frantically.

The sound made Wei Lai’s scalp crawl.

“If I drove hard and pushed straight through it, could we make it?”

He had once driven through a rainstorm — an unforgettable experience. In the blink of an eye, he’d burst through the churning black curtain of rain and plunged into blazing sunlight on the other side.

“If the storm is large enough, punching through it could take fifteen minutes or more. Visibility is near zero — headlights do nothing. Hitting an obstacle is equivalent to suicide. And when the wind is strong enough, a fast-moving vehicle can be overturned.”

“So we just wait?”

“You could also pray.”

Wei Lai smiled bitterly. When the world outside went completely black, his hands tightened involuntarily, and a short burst of mixed tinnitus rang in his ears.

The van must have been swallowed entirely into the heart of the storm. The headlights were useless. He couldn’t see a thing — he waved his hand in front of his face and confirmed it: true, absolute darkness.

The smell of sand and earth filled his nostrils. He reached up and touched his face; without knowing when, his skin had taken on a coating of fine grit. In that instant, his mind flashed to the watermelon.

Gone. There was no way they could eat it now.

He paused — then suddenly felt something was off. The world around him was too quiet, as if he were the only person left on earth.

“Cen Jin?”

From the darkness, her voice came back softly: “Right here.”

Wei Lai exhaled.

“Isn’t this a sandstorm? Why is there no sound at all?”

He could handle the world turning upside down, flying sand and tumbling rocks — but this kind of stillness made his heart feel cold.

Cen Jin smiled. “You’re nervous, aren’t you?”

He answered honestly: “A little.”

“It might be desert dry fog — visibility vanishes entirely, even camels lose their way in it. It should be temporary; the storm is moving forward, the real wind is almost here. Doesn’t this total blackness remind you of sitting in a movie theater?”

In a moment like this, she could actually think of movie theaters!

He was only worried about whether the van could hold up. And — oh right — the honeybee on the roof antenna…

Cen Jin seemed to read his thoughts. “This is a natural disaster. Worrying won’t help. Save your energy.”

That indifferent tone of hers… Wei Lai considered opening the door and pushing her out.

Then again, it did seem like worrying wouldn’t accomplish much of anything.

Wei Lai leaned back against the headrest. It was very hard — the seat digging into his neck.

What were they just talking about? Oh, right. Movie theaters.

That had actually been a dream of his as a child.

“When I was scrounging for meals in Chinatown, I heard people talk about movie theaters — how enormous the screen was, how many rows of seats there were. I was dying with curiosity to see one. But I had no money. I was barely eating from one meal to the next. Where would money for a movie come from?”

Cen Jin’s breathing was shallow. He knew she was listening.

“Later, someone showed me how to sneak in. He said that particular cinema was lax — it was chaotic inside, and they didn’t check tickets carefully. He told me I absolutely had to act the part.”

A loud clang from the direction of the door — a rock, caught by the wind, had slammed into the side.

The wind had finally arrived.

In an instant, everything changed. Countless grains of sand and stones pelted the van in all directions. The crackling sound seemed like it would never stop in this lifetime. The headlights grew faintly visible, like mist strained thin through a sieve, rocking and jolting in the sand.

Several times, the van suddenly felt light for a moment, and his heart lifted with it — then the tires found the ground again.

“So I blended into the crowd, head held very high, putting on the air of someone very wealthy and very proud… maybe I overdid it. You understand — nobody walks into a movie theater looking that arrogant…”

Cen Jin laughed out loud.

“The ticket checker suddenly yelled from behind me: Stop! I bolted — the cinema was on the third floor. I ran down the stairs, heart nearly bursting out of my chest… then I slipped, rolled all the way to the bottom, stood up, and when I wiped my face, it was covered in blood. I’d smashed my nose on the way down.”

“And that’s when I realized — no one had actually come after me. One ticket. The checker couldn’t be bothered to chase me down three flights of stairs.”

“Then why did you run?”

Cen Jin had a feeling he was the type — if someone caught him, he’d just go along with it, smiling and cooperative, telling the police, “Thanks for your trouble.”

“Because I thought getting caught would be too humiliating,” Wei Lai said.

“Embarrassing myself is one thing — you’d just get slapped, or kicked a couple of times. They’d call you a feral orphan with nobody to raise you… and they weren’t wrong, nobody was raising me. But if they said all Chinese people were thieves — that was a different matter. One person dragging an entire group’s name through the mud, you know?”

He turned to look at Cen Jin. “What about you? Northern Europe is a high-welfare society. You were adopted — you probably weren’t wanting for much materially. Did you go to the movies often?”

After all, even during a sandstorm, she could think of movie theaters.

Cen Jin shook her head. “I didn’t go to cinemas. There were no Chinese-language films there. When I first went overseas, I didn’t speak the language — I couldn’t read, couldn’t follow the TV programs. I was like an idiot.”

“My adoptive parents were worried I’d be lonely, so they put a television and a disc player in my room. They bought many Chinese-language discs for me to watch.”

Another clang — this time, sand and rocks struck the side window.

Wei Lai suddenly thought: the body of the van was solid and could withstand the beating, but the windows were the weak point. If one shattered…

He felt around for a roll of wide tape. He wanted to put at least one layer over every window.

Cen Jin remained calm as still water.

“Overseas discs at that time were mostly from Hong Kong. The lead actors seemed to be always the same few — Jackie Chan, Chow Yun-fat, Stephen Chow…”

That was right. Chinatown had dedicated video shops. Discs were stacked and sold in bulk. The small television sets were square and blocky. Most of the films were in Cantonese, period dramas and modern stories alike — he’d watched quite a few himself.

“When I found one I liked, I’d watch it over and over. I watched A Chinese Odyssey so many times. To this day I remember a line from it.”

Wei Lai had found the tape. With a sharp tearing sound, he peeled off a long strip and pressed it across the windshield.

A line from it? Was it that one — I will love you for ten thousand years?

He remembered: there’d been a little restaurant owner in the neighborhood who’d been having an affair; his wife found out. She had a ferocious temper and started hurling the man’s clothes and shoes from the second floor. The man knelt on the pavement below, wailing with tears in his voice: “Give me another chance, wife — I’ll love you for ten thousand years…”

The Chinese onlookers had nearly fallen over laughing. The unfaithful husband cried with snot bubbling from his nose.

Cen Jin spoke softly, almost to herself, in a tone somewhere between wistfulness and reverie: “My destined one is a great hero.”

That was the line?

This was such an unexpectedly literary line to suddenly drop into reality. Wei Lai felt both awkward and amused: didn’t it hold true, regardless of what kind of woman — even someone like Cen Jin — that in her girlhood, she couldn’t avoid dreaming about a “destined one”?

Another sharp tear of tape, another strip pressed down. To protect the glass, each pane would need dozens of strips at minimum.

“In my darkest hour, he would descend from the heavens and come to my rescue.”

Wei Lai frowned.

Was that how the original line went?

“But he never came.”

Wei Lai stopped what he was doing and turned to look at her.

Cen Jin raised her head, her chin lifting slightly, the corners of her lips curling upward. In the faint glow of the headlights, her eyes held a trace of strange, captivating beauty — and a hollowness beneath it.

“So I stopped waiting. Forever.”

Wei Lai’s expression changed.

On the window beside her face, fine white cracks suddenly spread outward in all directions, like a dense, radiating spider’s web.

“Get down!” he shouted.

He didn’t stop to think. He reached out and wrapped his arm around her waist, rolled over and pressed down on top of her, both of them pushed as low as possible. At the same moment, the glass exploded inward. The sandstorm that had been held outside came pouring in. Inside the van, objects of unknown origin clattered and ricocheted wildly. At those speeds, even fine grains of sand became thin, slicing blades.

Wei Lai breathed hard, pressing himself as flat as he could. His right arm held her waist tightly. His left arm reached outward, searching blindly until it found the woven basket, and began rummaging through its contents.

He found it — the satellite phone.

Wei Lai exhaled with relief.

The two most important things — both preserved. Mission not failed.

As for the cold air unit, the watermelon, the little honeybee… let them all go with the sand.

After surviving the initial chaos, Cen Jin let out a muffled sound of discomfort. Sand and dust had rushed into her nose; she kept coughing, her forehead pressed against his neck. Wei Lai bowed his head and arched his shoulders upward as much as he could, trying to create a pocket of space for her.

“Are you hurt?” she asked quietly.

“Probably… a little.”

He couldn’t say for certain. Scrapes were unavoidable. It felt like a shard of glass had raked across his back, but the skin exposed to the sandstorm had gone numb quickly, and there was no pain.

“How long will the sandstorm last?”

He could feel the van rocking and slowly shifting where it stood, gradually turning sideways. Now there was wind blowing clean through the interior — which meant both side windows had been destroyed.

“About an hour, I think. It keeps moving forward. In the second half it’ll weaken — the wind and sand won’t be this fierce.”

An hour?

He needed to find something to cover himself. At this rate, another hour of this would shred his back to ribbons.

Wei Lai looked down at Cen Jin.

“Can you help me with something? Help me get my shirt off.”

“I have my knife tucked into the small of my back. When you pull the shirt up over my shoulders and neck, cut through it with the knife. Use the fabric to wrap my head and face — I need to get to the back of the van to find the tent.”

Cen Jin made a sound of assent. She tried to reach around from outside his arm, but Wei Lai stopped her: “Go through my shirt — there’s sand outside, it’ll cut your hands.”

She withdrew her arm and lifted the hem of his shirt from below, sliding her hand up along his firm abdomen, around his waist, to his back.

From inside his shirt.

She couldn’t see the rest, but the patch her hand found was like this: the fabric was nearly shredded — only ragged strips remaining. In one spot the skin was slick and tacky. Even through the cloth, she could feel the grit.

Cen Jin said nothing. She reached to the small of his back and drew out the knife, then slowly withdrew her hand.

Wei Lai heard the sounds of the knife slicing through fabric and cloth tearing — but it wasn’t his clothing being cut. She was working carefully with her hands still inside his shirt, and she used the torn strips to tie a bandage across his back.

Then, rising slightly, she pulled her own shirt off her back.

“Lower your head,” she said.

Wei Lai lowered his head.

He owed her another shirt.

This debt was becoming impossible to settle.