From inside the tent came a tremendous clamor — the crash of the pail, the splash of water, the bleating of the goat.

Then the tent flap was thrown open and Wei Lai came out, drenched from head to toe, clearly without a moment to dry off. He had pulled on a pair of shorts, and in his hand —

Yes, he had gripped both of the goat’s front legs in one hand, and with a darkened expression was dragging it outside. The goat wore a look of horrified outrage at this assault on its dignity; its two hind legs kicked and scrabbled in the sand, its rear end digging in stubbornly.

— What are you doing, what are you doing, I was only looking, what are you doing.

Cen Jin slowly fanned herself with the excess corner of her silk robe.

“Wei Lai, you’re a foreigner, newly arrived in someone else’s village. That goat is a villager’s property. If you injure or kill it, the villagers could band together and injure you — that would be a diplomatic incident.”

Wei Lai clenched his jaw. For a brief moment, he had genuinely entertained the thought of butchering it.

But simply letting it go felt deeply unsatisfying.

He kept dragging it outside.

Cen Jin’s gaze followed all the way: Wei Lai stopped outside the shack, picked out a thick, sturdy fence post, hauled the goat up to stand on its hind legs, crossed its two front legs over the post, and wound a rope around several times in a tight knot.

The goat stood there with its legs splayed, let out a single baa, its eyes filled with despair — according to Darwin’s theory of evolution, it was not supposed to achieve bipedalism this quickly.

Stand there then!

Wei Lai wiped the water from his face.

Fortunately he’d been nearly done washing. The pail had tipped, but not much water was lost. He went inside, unhooked the towel from the tent frame, and sat down beside Cen Jin, sulkily drying himself off.

She continued to fan herself.

Wei Lai couldn’t hold it in.

“You didn’t see that goat?”

“I didn’t,” Cen Jin said earnestly. “I was thinking about how to answer your question, so… I completely didn’t notice.”

Fine. He knew she wasn’t entirely innocent, but what could he do about it?

Wei Lai let out a breath: “So — back to Somalia. What’s the situation with the pirates?”

Cen Jin looked at him: “Something like that happens, and you just… move on?”

She would have expected at least two words of complaint, two curses — and here he was, completely unbothered, picking up the conversation about pirates as if nothing had happened. What a startlingly easy-going disposition.

Wei Lai said: “What of it? The goat just got a look at me.”

Cen Jin smiled: “Who knows — whatever happened in that tent, only you and the goat are aware of.”

Wei Lai’s teeth itched: “The moment it got in, I drove it out. A matter of seconds. What could possibly have happened?”

Cen Jin turned her head away from him, fanning herself at an unhurried pace, murmuring to herself: “Who knows — a single glance across eternity, the instant that contains infinity — the Big Bang, after all, only took a second or two, and then all things came into being.”

Wei Lai laughed out of pure exasperation.

The words came out through his teeth: “Cen Jin.”

Cen Jin turned back.

He reached out a finger and pointed at her — it didn’t quite land, which was at least some restraint.

He said: “You’re lucky you’re my client.”

The employer-employee relationship, the contract — these still had a binding effect on him.

If it were Milu, provoking him like this, he’d have long since dismembered her and thrown her in a pot for stew.

If it were Ke Ke Shu, he’d have long since chopped her into firewood to cook Milu.

You’re lucky — you can still sit here. If you were actually my girlfriend and you tried this, I wouldn’t waste words on you, I’d just drag you over and —

Cen Jin gave him a sideways glance: “So what if I’m your client?”

She tilted her head slightly, chin lifted, and the graceful line of muscle along one side of her neck led his gaze down to the shallow hollow above her collarbone and the curve of her rounded shoulder.

His throat went dry. When he spoke again, his voice came out low and rough, in urgent need of a basin of cold water poured both inside and out.

So he said: “Tell me about the pirates.”

It was time to get back to the pirates.

The glow sticks were nearly spent. The entire fishing village lay in darkness. A breeze carried in the sound of waves and a faintly briny smell.

Cen Jin said: “The pirates are fishermen. Very poor fishermen.”

“Since the civil war, Somalia’s social and education systems have collapsed. Illiteracy is very high — approaching eighty percent. English is not the official language, and sometimes a small pirate crew might not have a single English speaker among them. To negotiate with a shipowner, they’d have to pay to hire someone who spoke English, and then also foot the international phone bill themselves.”

Wei Lai almost laughed: that pirate who had called him, then, had spoken reasonably passable English — so the claim that Hu Sha was the biggest pirate boss in the region did hold up. His ranks of various “personnel” were relatively well-staffed.

“Their resentment had been fermenting for years: first, that the waters their families had fished for generations were now closed to them, and foreign fishing boats drove them away when they tried; second, that the extractive fishing policies had depleted the sea and cut off their livelihood; third, that amid the warlord fighting, with people already dying of starvation, the relief grain sent by the United Nations was still seized by whoever carried a gun…”

Wei Lai fell silent.

He remembered Bai Pao telling him that Hu Sha, in the beginning, had been nothing more than a refugee standing in a food relief line.

“A few years ago, the Indian Ocean tsunami accidentally exposed an ecological disaster: some European nations, exploiting the chaos here, had been shipping their nuclear radiation waste and toxic chemical byproducts to be dumped in these waters.”

“But the tsunami churned that toxic waste up onto the coastline — many of the local residents who went to scavenge through the debris were exposed to radiation. Within a single year, over 300 people had died.”

Wei Lai was puzzled: “Europe is quite far from here. They came all this way to dump their waste?”

“Europe has processing standards for nuclear radiation waste — the cost to treat one ton is around 1,000 US dollars. But they went through backchannels and signed contracts with the local authorities here to dump one ton for eight dollars. When you do that math, the transportation cost is nothing.”

Wei Lai sighed.

He thought of the old man from Chinatown, swaying his head as he recited classical Chinese: The life of a person is like a tree in full bloom.

Formed in the same womb, all flowers from the same tree — but where they drift to, that was hard to say: a ditch of filth, a grand banquet hall, the front steps of a mansion, the ground beneath someone’s feet.

There, a life was precious — nuclear waste had to be sealed, isolated, processed with high technology. Did that make life here cheap? Eight dollars, poured out in a rush — followed by infection, mutation, death and injury.

“So you can understand why the local fishermen came to hate everything — to hate foreigners, to hate their own government. At first, when foreign ships passed through, they would board and loot, vandalize, detain crew members — purely out of rage.”

“Then one day they discovered that the shipowners were sending intermediaries to contact them, offering to pay a ransom to get the ship back. It turned out you didn’t need to fish at all, and you could still make money.”

“And just like that, an industry was born.”

The glow sticks went out completely. The bound goat cast a tilted shadow on the sand below, punctuated by one or two mournful-sounding bleats.

“Unless this country can truly become strong again one day, the piracy problem will be very hard to solve — the more it’s suppressed, the more defiant it becomes. The naval escort fleets in the Gulf of Aden have been growing, yet pirate attacks haven’t decreased — they’ve increased.”

“And there have been surveys done. More than half of Somalia’s general population supports this behavior. They see the pirates as heroes who avenged them. On top of that, when pirates receive their ransom, they go and spend it lavishly — and the whole area, feeding off pirate spending, has developed its own particular supply chain: food, alcohol and cigarettes, women. In other words, the pirates are also supporting a large number of other people.”

She looked toward Wei Lai.

It was too dark to read his expression, only his outline and his eyes.

She said: “When you meet the pirates tomorrow, don’t look at them with that wide-eyed foreigner’s curiosity. Apart from the leaders, most of them are poor people who followed the tide — barefoot, illiterate, full of fury, unable to afford medicine when sick, and spending freely the moment they get money. Don’t argue logic, reason, or legality with them. They don’t understand any of that.”

Wei Lai was quiet for a moment, then smiled.

“You say over and over that the ship isn’t important, that it’s just one ship — but in private, you’ve done quite a lot of preparation.”

“I didn’t really prepare much — when I was in Turkey, someone handed me a magazine analyzing piracy. When I had nothing to do, I flipped through it.”

Wei Lai’s mind stirred.

“You read it?”

“What else would I do with it — use it as a fan?”

“What else did the magazine say?”

“It also said some experts had condemned the first shipowner who ever paid a ransom — they felt he’d set a very bad precedent. If the pirates had never known they could get a ransom for a ship, maybe none of the subsequent hijackings would have followed. To date, the highest ransom ever paid for a vessel hijacking in the Gulf of Aden has been 1.5 million US dollars.”

No wonder the whole world’s eyes were fixed on the Sirius Star. This time, the pirates had demanded 20 million dollars — and the shipowners everywhere were afraid the Saudi side would set yet another ruinous precedent.

Wei Lai lowered his voice, almost whispering: “Can I ask you… a question?”

What he wanted to ask probably counted as a trade secret, so he instinctively kept his voice down, afraid of being overheard — even though on the other side of the wall there was only a goat.

Cen Jin leaned in slightly, lowering her voice too, deliberately, like passing a secret: “Go ahead.”

Really… she could perform.

“What is the Saudi side’s acceptable price?”

Cen Jin reached out and touched the back of his hand with her fingertip, then lightly traced the number “5.”

“Five million?”

“Five million at most. My fee is 300,000.”

Twenty million down to five million — that wasn’t even cutting it in half. They needed to pry 15 million out of the pirates’ grip.

Wei Lai frowned. He couldn’t figure out where to even begin.

“Are you confident?”

Cen Jin smiled: “I agreed to the job at first, then I raised my price. I want 500,000.”

“What a coincidence — I think I witnessed you raising that price.”

He remembered how Bai Pao Yanus had been so furious at her sudden demand that he’d nearly jumped out of his skin. And that wasn’t even all — she’d also refused the standard half-deposit arrangement, requiring full payment to reach her account before she would set out.

Wei Lai had always wondered: “How did he agree to that?”

“Because I told him: give me 500,000, and I’ll negotiate the ransom down to 3 million.”

Wei Lai drew a sharp breath.

Three million.

Would the pirates accept that? This wasn’t even spitting out a bone — this was spitting out actual meat.

“Miss, how are you going to negotiate that?”

She said: “Once we’re on the ship, don’t miss a single word between me and Hu Sha. Then you’ll see how I do it.”

Then: “You don’t believe I can pull it off, do you?”

Wei Lai said: “I believe you.”

He lay back, both hands folded behind his head as a pillow. The sticks beneath him were hewn unevenly, with knots still on some of them, digging painfully into his back.

He said it again, in a deliberately light and careless tone: “I believe you.”

Cen Jin gave a cold laugh, stood up, pulled her silk robe tighter, and said: “Then we’ll see.”

She walked all the way into the tent. Wei Lai lay on the bed and watched her silhouette, smiling.

He couldn’t quite explain it himself: when she said I’ll bring the ransom down to 3 million, he had felt a strangely inexplicable thrill and pride.

The silhouette she left walking away was like that of a warrior charging into battle.

Go then — go into the world of pirates and make waves. Turn everything upside down.

I’m willing to ride alongside and guard your path.

He closed his eyes. On the edge of sleep, the corners of his lips still wouldn’t stay still, and he murmured: “Three million.”

…

The moonlight was bright and clear.

Outside the shack, the tethered goat had accepted its fate, head drooping to one side, thoroughly bored.

I only looked… I only licked you a little…

So dramatic.