Just past six in the evening, with sunlight still pouring brilliantly down, the convoy traversed broad grasslands and mountain ranges and drove into Lazi County on schedule. Between the two roads, four statues of Tibetan people playing instruments and dancing stood prominently, with the red characters “Welcome to the Home of Duixie — Lazi” carved into the base, everywhere reflecting the Tibetan people’s cheerful and hospitable spirit.

After a full day of getting acquainted, everyone had grown comfortable with one another, and the mood over dinner was warmer and more relaxed. Since most of what Ba Yunye brought along were tourists, she found herself involuntarily slipping into tour guide mode, explaining to them what Duixie was — and even tapping the table as a beat and singing a segment of “Lazi Duixie” a cappella. No one understood a word of it, but they all found it wonderful, falling in with the rhythm for her. She had an extroverted streak that fed on an audience, and she sang with growing abandon, her head swaying, her eyes uncommonly bright and expressive.

Diao Zhuo sat diagonally across from her, the haze of rising cigarette smoke blurring his line of sight. She had been ordinary to the point of irritation at midday; now, for some inexplicable reason, she seemed a little less so.

Ye Xun was a man who would not permit himself to suffer discomfort if comfort was available, and that evening they checked into the most luxurious hotel in Lazi County — an Ibis. It wasn’t comparable to what a major city offered, but it was clean and comfortable enough.

Next to the hotel was a large supermarket, and while daylight remained, everyone drifted inside for a browse, looking for yogurt, crackers, or something for a late-night snack or the next morning. Ba Yunye was walking around with crackers and sausages in her arms when she happened to spot Ye Xun hurrying discreetly toward the checkout, and took a second glance: he was holding a small box he had taken from the shelf of contraceptives, and was rushing the cashier to ring it up quickly.

Well, well. Ba Yunye smiled to herself. Ye Xun had been crying altitude sickness all day, but the one thing no one newly arrived at high altitude should be doing — he had no hesitation about doing it whatsoever. She looked across toward another aisle. Xiao Zi was leaning against a rack, absorbed in some mobile game. A male boss and a female assistant — inherently the kind of pairing prone to ambiguity.

At Ye Xun’s age, he had almost certainly been married before, and his children were probably in middle school by now. Ba Yunye had escorted this kind of client on more than a few occasions — wealthy middle-aged men bringing young, attractive women to Tibet to cleanse the soul, prostrating themselves before the Jokhang Temple in imitation of Tibetan pilgrims, praying for prosperity in their business and for their wedded wives to die young.

While her mind wandered, several things slipped from her arms and fell to the floor. She bent down to pick them up, and the rest tumbled out in one go. She let out a muffled curse and crouched down to retrieve them one by one.

A pair of camel-colored high-top waterproof boots entered her field of vision.

She raised her eyes.

From this angle, looking up, Diao Zhuo was powerfully built and striking in the way of a Greek god painted in oils.

She hadn’t expected him to be kind enough to help pick things up, but in the next instant he used his foot to sweep a few things along the floor — scattering them even further, making retrieval considerably more difficult.

“What kind of person—” Ba Yunye gritted her teeth, looked up, and caught the faint upward twitch at the corner of his mouth. Her irritation dissolved on the spot.

Fair enough. She had set him up earlier, and wanting a little payback was reasonable. She smiled, and slowly gathered everything up one piece at a time.

At the checkout, the two of them queued one behind the other. She watched Diao Zhuo reach toward the rack stocked with boxes of contraceptives, and stopped short — her eyes went wide, her mind immediately filling with images entirely inappropriate for children. She involuntarily glanced back at Xiao Zi — and in that distracted moment, everything in her arms clattered to the floor again.

Diao Zhuo, who had reached past that row to take a box of chewing gum from the shelf behind, turned around and stared at her with an unreadable expression, as though asking silently, “Was that deliberate?”

Ba Yunye exhaled with relief and set about miserably retrieving everything from the floor again. “A grown man just standing there doing nothing — you could at least help.”

“You don’t seem to have trouble telling men and women apart,” he said, turning away without lifting a finger.

So he was still holding a grudge. Ba Yunye smirked quietly and crouched down to collect her things. Everything went dark for a second — she saw him crouch down beside her, and thought, so the man does have some manners after all — only for him to simply pinch a single piece of chewing gum and push it between her lips, then stand and walk away.

Ba Yunye chewed. The mint was sharp and refreshing. She blew a few bubbles, paid with great cheer, and left.

A little past eleven, Ba Yunye was beginning to drift off when Xiao Zi finally came back to the room. She went straight for the bathroom and shut herself inside, and not long after, the sound of running water began. Beneath the rushing of water, there seemed to be something else — the muffled sound of crying, barely suppressed. When Xiao Zi came out, Ba Yunye glanced up to find her eyes were reddened at the rims.

“Some yogurt?” Ba Yunye asked, without moving an inch.

Xiao Zi shook her head, her expression that of someone who felt neither joy nor sorrow in particular. She thought of Ye Xun’s warning just moments earlier — “That Master Ba is a sharp one. You’re sharing a room with her, so say what’s appropriate to say, and don’t babble about things that aren’t.”

Ba Yunye turned to look at her directly, studying her face.

She had probably just stepped out of university, the kind of girl with a scholarly air about her — different from the overtly provocative type of third party Ba Yunye had encountered before. She might not have been entirely willing, but there was likely some difficulty that left her without a choice. During the day she had sometimes held a small video camera, filming Ye Xun as he complained loudly about his altitude sickness, filming the open road ahead and the grasslands, filming the road signs marking the elevation.

“Master Ba—” She started to say something, then stopped herself, having guessed that Ba Yunye knew what she had just been through. A company had no shortage of beautiful and attractive female employees. She wasn’t the most striking among them, and tended to keep a low profile — modest, ordinary in appearance. She couldn’t understand why Ye Xun had singled her out. It had begun with verbal harassment from the moment she joined the company, escalated to physical contact, and in recent occasions had turned into forced possession, growing more and more brazen. She had entertained a thousand thoughts of reporting it to the police or finding a way to retaliate, but she had been held back by hesitation on all sides: partly unwilling to lose a job that her parents and everyone around her considered stable and respectable, and partly too ashamed to speak of it.

Ba Yunye stretched lazily and reverted to her carefree, unbothered manner.

“The oxygen… Mr. Ye said he’ll need it again tomorrow.”

“No problem.” She agreed without the slightest hesitation. She had as much of that to spare as he wanted.

Xiao Zi pressed her lips together.

“He doesn’t actually have altitude sickness,” Ba Yunye said, cutting straight to it.

Xiao Zi managed the same small, awkward, polite smile as before, appearing somewhat meek — she seemed to be the sort of person with a soft temperament who didn’t want to offend anyone. Certain men specifically targeted girls like that.

“Enough of this,” Ba Yunye said. “If what you genuinely want is to film a documentary about a philanthropist organizing a search mission into the uninhabited zone, what matters is that you find the person you came to find — not the hardships and suffering along the way.”

Xiao Zi flinched as though someone had stepped on her tail, and sat bolt upright. “The person absolutely has to be found!”

“Don’t build up too much hope,” Ba Yunye said, pouring cold water on it immediately. “You’ve come to Tibet for the first time — even a pressure-cooked dumpling is new and exciting. Do you have any idea how large Qiang Tang is? The largest uninhabited zone in China. Once a person drifts from their planned route, there’s no telling where they end up. If he’d truly fallen somewhere within the planned search area, the first two rescue teams would already have brought him back.”

“But Mr. Ye said the person has to be found,” Xiao Zi said, a note of anxiety in her voice.

Ba Yunye had no interest in a pointless debate, and so she changed her approach: “In your opinion — does your Mr. Ye want Zou Kaigui found alive or dead?”

Xiao Zi started, and her eyes shifted for a moment. “Obviously he hopes Zou Kaigui is safe and well.”

Ba Yunye said, deliberately: “In my experience, Zou Kaigui is certainly dead. If we’re lucky enough this time to bring back even his bones, that will be a windfall. Understand?”

“Ah… in that case…” Xiao Zi’s level of skill was no match for Ba Yunye’s, and the truth slipped out before she could stop it. Her eyes held not a trace of sadness — if anything, there was a faint note of something like relief. “Even if it’s only bones, they need to be brought back properly for a burial.”

Ba Yunye understood now. Ye Xun knew better than anyone that Zou Kaigui could not have survived. If the earlier rescue missions, in which Ye Xun had no involvement, had been genuine attempts to save a life, then this third search — which Ye Xun himself had organized — was nothing more than a retrieval of a corpse.

Whether that corpse was going to receive a proper burial, only Ye Xun knew for certain.

Zou Kaigui was nothing more than a wretched father who had spent years searching for his daughter. Even if Ye Xun had once funded him, was he really worth all this expense and effort to find? Ba Yunye had a quiet, growing sense that Ye Xun’s real reasons for accompanying the rescue team into the uninhabited zone had very little to do with philanthropy.

Diao Zhuo had just finished bathing. His bare torso was still lightly sheened with moisture. Their group had come in an odd number, so with two per room, he ended up alone.

His phone rang. He glanced at the incoming call display and his expression dimmed, his brow pulling tight.

“Hello.”

“I’ve thought about it for a long time. I finally worked up the courage to call you.” A woman’s voice came through the receiver.

“Save your courage.” His tone was unfriendly.

“I know there’s no real possibility of seeing each other after this. I just—”

“Then why are you calling me?”

“I just… wanted to sincerely apologize to you, and then I—”

“The signal is poor here. That’s all.” Diao Zhuo had no interest in receiving any more of her apologies. What was the point?

Things had ended cleanly and without animosity. There was nothing more to be said.

“You’re—”

“Hanging up.” Diao Zhuo gave her no opportunity to pick up the thread and ended the call.

He regularly spent a month or more at a project site without returning, and search and rescue missions routinely took ten days to two weeks at a stretch. He and his former partner had ended things amicably, without either being a burden to the other — that was his principle. His teammates had said that although women were never in short supply around him, and he was often the one being pursued, he should invest a little more effort into relationships if he wanted them to last.

He said he didn’t have the time.

His teammates had said: you don’t have the time because you haven’t met anyone you genuinely think is worth it.

These days, justice itself was frequently late to the party — let alone a woman he and she could both genuinely regard as worthy of each other.

He drew out a cigarette and was searching for his lighter when his phone rang again. He grabbed it with mild irritation — and saw the name on the display, “Master Ba,” still unchanged, flashing at him.

He pressed answer, but it was her voice that came first.

“Asleep?”

“Yes.”

“Still picking up calls when you’re asleep?”

“Something you need?” — This single sentence was all the evidence needed to understand how a man of uncompromising directness could remain single entirely through his own efforts.

“Open the door.”

Diao Zhuo glanced at the wall clock. Midnight. According to the plan, they were supposed to be up at six.

What was there to think about getting up for, at a time like this? He drew a slow, measured breath. “Why can’t you say whatever it is over the phone?”

“I could. But it’s cold outside the door.”

She was not exactly a threat to him. He pulled on a single layer of shirt and trousers, walked to the door in two strides, and pulled it open. And there she was, right outside — wearing a black-and-yellow color-block fleece jacket that made her look like a food delivery courier, continuously stamping her feet. So it was genuinely cold.

“I didn’t order anything.”

“Even if you had, it wouldn’t arrive.” She tilted her face up and met his eyes. “Don’t believe me? Try.”

He didn’t indulge her.

“Go on, order something.” She was enjoying this. “Louder.”

He looked at her. She was wearing nothing but a pair of flip-flops — bare feet, toes slightly turned up, painted a vivid burnt orange, with a small mole on the outer edge of the left big toe. The wind outside was strong, blowing her hair into disarray, half of it plastered against her cheek and the other half flying outward like a swallow’s wing, snapping and fluttering. No wonder she was freezing.

He reached out, pulled her into the room, and shut the door.

She hunched her shoulders and bounced slightly on her feet, seeming to warm up a little. He went and sat down on the chair across the room, legs spread slightly apart, one hand holding an unlit cigarette, the other resting on his knee, spine straight, watching her with the air of a superior waiting to receive a report.

“Don’t you think something is off about both Ye Xun and Zou Kaigui?” She narrowed her eyes as she asked.

“Off in what way?” He thought for a moment, then asked a second question. “And you — do you know Zou Kaigui?”

“I don’t. But… I just went through every news report about him carefully.” Ba Yunye had a particular quality: no matter how many questions someone asked her, she would only ever answer the last one.

Diao Zhuo extended a hand, palm open, gesturing forward. “The floor is yours.”