The Saudi delegation had departed. Ke Ke Shu had gone back to the southern province. Milu had reported: a military-grade satellite phone had been arranged; Hu Sha was going to contact them directly now.

Cen Jin rose to her feet. Her expression gradually deepened — retreating to what it had been at their first meeting: detached and cool, like a painting rendered in stark black and white.

Wei Lai answered and spoke briefly, then held the phone toward her. “It’s Hu Sha’s side — they want to speak with you.”

Cen Jin did not take it. “Is it Hu Sha himself? Tell them I only negotiate directly with Hu Sha.”

Evidently it was not.

Wei Lai wasn’t bothered by that — as long as the call provided clear logistical information, it didn’t matter whether it was Hu Sha or a piece of sun-dried shark jaw on the other end.

Once the call ended, the road ahead was fairly clear.

“Hu Sha’s people have already reached open water. They say the negotiations will take place on a large deep-sea fishing vessel. The pirates on board are all disguised as fishermen.”

Cen Jin was unsurprised.

This was standard pirate practice. They typically appeared in the guise of ordinary fishing boats, identifying their target cargo ships first, then dispatching armed speedboats to attack and capture them.

In the industry this was called the “mother-ship method”: the mother vessel handled surveillance and cover, and when necessary, could fire shoulder-mounted rocket-propelled grenades at cargo ships to create chaos for the boarding assault.

“They want us to reach the coast as quickly as possible — the more remote the village, the better. Once we’re there, we transmit our GPS coordinates by satellite phone, and someone will come out by speedboat to bring us aboard.”

He felt unsettled.

It was like a game where the player controlled everything from the shadows — as anonymous as the Man in the Iron Mask — while he and Cen Jin were exposed, transparent, every piece of their information visible, including their movements.

Cen Jin smiled at him. “You can’t expect equal footing here — at the end of the day, they’re kidnappers.”

“Can Hu Sha be trusted? Would he move against you?”

“I don’t know him well enough to call him trustworthy.”

Wei Lai frowned.

He sat down on the ground mat.

Cen Jin looked at him. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t much like ships. The negotiations are on a boat — open sea, water on all four sides and sky overhead. If something goes wrong, there’s no way out.”

He could disappear in a jungle, survive in mountain terrain, stay alive on the snowfield — but the open sea…

At sea, you couldn’t hold your own fate in your hands. Everything was at the mercy of the waves.

“If I — I’m saying if — if I can’t protect you — then I’ll already be dead. And if you fall into the pirates’ hands, what then?”

Cen Jin gave him a look. “Is it appropriate for a bodyguard to say something this grim in front of his client? On the strength of that remark alone, I could go to the Saudi delegation and have a thousand euros docked from your pay.”

Wei Lai stared at her.

Can’t you tell I’m worried about you?

He must have lost his mind to have washed dates and offered them to her. She could eat sand for all he cared.

He turned away from her with a neutral expression, acting as though she didn’t exist: clearing sand from the van, reorganizing the equipment, hammering the jagged glass stubs flat and sealing the broken windows, checking the engine.

While he was wiping down the windshield, Cen Jin came over. She couldn’t hold back a smile and said, “Hey.”

“Miss Cen, could you step aside? You’re blocking me from working.”

Cen Jin opened the car door and settled into the driver’s seat.

“You don’t need to worry about my safety. To Hu Sha personally, I have almost no value.”

Wei Lai responded with a cold smile: Who said I was worried?

He kept wiping.

“First: the pirates’ goal is money. Oil tankers are a liability in their hands — they can’t sail them out to sea, the cargo can’t be fenced, and they still have to feed everyone on board. Every additional day is another day of expenses. So they’re desperate to resolve it, and they’re placing more hope in me than even the Saudi delegation is.”

Wei Lai shook out the cloth in his hand, snapping it hard. Sand flew.

“Second: pirates run a ‘business’ too. Hijacking passing ships is their current livelihood. To run a business, you follow rules. If they attacked even the negotiating representative, no one would ever agree to negotiate with them again — so when Hu Sha lost his temper during a failed round of talks, he shot the hostages. But not the negotiating representative.”

Not his concern. He was the bodyguard, not the negotiating representative, not a hostage. Right now all he wanted was to get the windshield clean.

“Third: I once saved Hu Sha’s life. That’s a fact, and that’s my insurance. Whether Hu Sha is trustworthy or not, he’ll give me face.”

Wei Lai wrenched open the hood and leaned in to look: not bad — some sand had gotten in, but overall the impact was limited.

“Fourth: the part about docking your pay — I was joking.”

Wei Lai shut the hood with a bang.

He turned to her, smiling as if nothing had happened: “A few windows and the cold air unit are gone, but the van itself is basically fine. I’ve been thinking — if you’re worried about the heat, we could drive at night. It cools down significantly in the desert after dark — should be comfortable enough.”

“We can rest here for a while and set out when the time feels right. Also — there’s plenty of water. You can use some sparingly to wash up. You’ve got sand all over you. It can’t feel good.”

Cen Jin climbed out of the van and studied him for a long moment.

“The moment I say it’s not about docking pay, your whole attitude shifts. Aren’t you embarrassed?”

“What?” Wei Lai looked genuinely blank.

“You had that straight face on just now, wouldn’t even talk to me.”

Oh, that. Wei Lai laughed. He looked toward the rear of the van. The tall antenna stood there, bare and slightly crooked.

“My mood was a bit low just now — but don’t take it personally. It wasn’t because of you.”

As he spoke, he placed both hands on Cen Jin’s shoulders and gently turned her to face the back of the van. “Look.”

“At what?”

Wei Lai sighed. “The little honeybee got blown away.”

“Ke Ke Shu bought it especially for me. It was a precious parting gift. You know how it is — we hadn’t seen each other in a long time, and it was the first thing he ever gave me. I treasured it.”

Cen Jin looked at the antenna.

If he hadn’t said anything, she wouldn’t even have known there’d been an antenna modification, let alone a little honeybee — she’d never seen it.

She offered sympathetically: “You treasured it a great deal?”

“Mm.”

“And your habit is to hang things you treasure on the antenna outside the van?”

Wei Lai coughed. “That was a lapse in judgment…”

“My condolences,” Cen Jin said. “I’m going to wash up.”

Wei Lai set up the tent efficiently, giving her a space to bathe.

Perhaps because the sand-mist was slow to clear, the sky darkened a little early. He spread the ground mat in front of the tent entrance and lay down on it — resting, and keeping watch.

In his imagination, he’d once pictured this kind of scene as romantic — guarding a beautiful woman while she bathed, followed naturally by something even more romantic. But now that it was actually happening, he only felt like an attendant at a bathhouse.

The faint sound of water came from inside the tent.

“Is it dark in there?” Wei Lai called. “Can you see?”

“Getting darker.”

He felt around in the equipment bag he’d been using as a pillow, pulled out a glow stick, tapped it twice against the tent frame to crack it, then slid it under the tent flap.

Cen Jin took it. The back of her hand grazed his — he pulled away and looked: a few small, delicate white soap bubbles had transferred to his wrist, faintly fragrant.

Wei Lai narrowed his eyes and watched each little bubble disappear one by one.

Then asked: “Why didn’t you take that call?”

She answered: “Negotiation is about projection. I’m going to negotiate with Hu Sha — why would I waste time going back and forth with his subordinates?”

“Isn’t it the same?”

“It isn’t. Better to let them think I’m difficult, high-maintenance, prickly, impossible to manage — than to let them believe: this woman who’s come to negotiate can be passed around and directed by anyone.”

She pulled back the tent flap and stepped out, silk wrap around her shoulders, hair damp and loose.

“This way, they’ll push Hu Sha to negotiate with me directly — you have to lock in one person and negotiate with them alone. Get under that person’s skin. Force them to make decisions. Otherwise his deputy gets involved, his inner circle has a seat at the table, one mind per person, one decision per mouth — and the negotiation becomes impossible.”

It was like when the Saudi delegation had first approached her — Sai De and Yanus had played off each other, trading lines back and forth in a practiced double act, two voices weaving together.

She’d sat there smoking, languidly stubbing out the cigarette.

Then she’d said: “Excuse me, I couldn’t follow you. When two people speak at once, it’s too difficult to keep track. Could you choose one person to speak — and repeat everything again?”

Sai De’s face had flushed deep red in an instant. A flash of annoyance crossed Yanus’s eyes.

But she hadn’t cared.

With people whose dealings were purely transactional, why bother cultivating goodwill? Besides, she had long since stopped weaving the kind of social fabric called “friendship.”

She looked down at Wei Lai. “Are you washing up?”

Wei Lai braced himself upright. “Of course.”

He did a stretch, then dismantled the tent in a few quick moves.

“You’re not going to bathe inside the tent?”

“Men need that much fuss?”

Cen Jin got back in the van, crouching as low as possible, shielded by the door to change clothes. She glanced over at Wei Lai washing now and then.

This was no way to bathe.

He was down to just shorts. Like rinsing the dates — he scooped some water into a plastic bag, stuck his head in, and shook it around wildly.

Then he squeezed on some shampoo, worked up a lather, then dunked his head into the plastic bag again and shook it around again.

He rinsed once more. Done.

His body was even more perfunctory — a towel brushed off the sand, then soaked in water and wiped down once. Finished.

Watching him, she thought he seemed like a child who needed tending — someone to manage his clothes, his meals, his sleep, his bathing, his quilts, his bedmaking.

Had anyone ever managed these things for him?

As she stood up, she accidentally knocked into his travel bag. A pocket-sized notebook tumbled out.

Was it an expense log?

She picked it up to look. It was brand new, and when she flipped through it, every page was blank — except the first, which had a few characters on it.

Odd…

Suddenly it was snatched from her hand.

She looked up. Wei Lai was gripping the notebook, and asked bluntly: “Why are you going through someone’s things?”

“Is that even ‘going through someone’s things’? There were only a few words in there — hardly anything written.”

Wei Lai grabbed his travel bag with one hand, shoved the notebook deep inside — as if to prevent her from taking it again — and pulled out a black T-shirt with the other hand, shook it open, and pulled it over his head.

Cen Jin was both puzzled and curious. She propped her elbow on the window frame, chin in her hand, and watched him.

“You keep ladybugs?”

The first page had read: Ladybug Life Observation Diary.

Wei Lai’s movements paused for a beat. His face was still buried inside the half-pulled-on black shirt when he made a muffled sound of assent.

“Why would you keep that kind of… insect?”

Such a tiny creature, with those fine antennae — even the thought of it was uncomfortable.

Wei Lai gave one firm pull and the black shirt fell into place, fitted snug across his frame. He walked around to the other side and got into the driver’s seat, closing the door.

The temperature was pleasant. All the lights were on. It was time to go.

“Are they hard to keep?”

“Not easy. You need patience.”

The engine started.

“What’s the appeal of keeping ladybugs?”

She could understand keeping a bear — but this was completely beyond her.

“Ladybugs,” Wei Lai said, “when you first look at them, you might not like them. You might think they’re all faults.”

“But after spending time with them — you find they’re actually… rather endearing. So you just keep raising them.”