Diao Zhuo felt an odd itching on his face. He swiped at it with his hand, and then whatever it was pressed itself against him again, tickling his nose with a prickling little itch. He opened his eyes to find Ba Yunye lying beside him, grinning, a strand of her own hair in her hand — she had been tickling him with it.

“You rarely sleep in so late. It’s already past ten.” She propped herself up on her chin, long since washed and dressed, looking bright and fresh — not a trace of last night’s drunkenness.

That was because he had carried her back, helped her wash up and change, and the whole business had taken until nearly four in the morning before he could finally lie down.

“Rescuing drunken women also falls under the scope of services I provide free of charge.” He threw off the covers and padded toward the bathroom, talking as he went.

Ba Yunye saw the T-shirt and athletic shorts he was wearing and bellowed, pointing at him: “Why was I completely bare when I first woke up, but you’re fully dressed?!”

“Since you were unconscious, what clothes you sleep beside me in is my prerogative.”

“You didn’t do anything to me, did you?”

“What would you like me to have done?”

“Did you or didn’t you?!”

Diao Zhuo pretended to fall into deep recollection, looking her up and down — but said nothing.

Ba Yunye felt neither shame nor embarrassment; her wandering-hero spirit was undiminished. “Hmm — if we’re true comrades, we share what clothes there are; if there are none, neither of us wears any. That’s only fair.”

“You can regard me as a man who lacks that kind of honor — because I don’t think of you as a comrade.” Diao Zhuo stopped at the bathroom doorway and turned around. “Have you ever known a man who would stay away from home for days on end and sleep in the same bed as his buddy?”

Ba Yunye rubbed her chin. “That’s not unheard of — I had a client once who…”

“Stop right there. I like women.” Diao Zhuo turned to face her, holding her gaze. “You, in particular.”

She was briefly taken aback, then smiled with mischief: “I deeply admire your taste.”

Seeing him about to go into the bathroom, she bounded over and grabbed his arm, refusing to drop it: “What if I were a man?”

He pulled a face of unmistakable revulsion — irredeemably iron-boned and straightforward. Ba Yunye decided to show mercy and let it go, lest he turn around and ask “what if I were a woman?” — an even more horrifying prospect.

He showered. Since Ba Yunye would be leaving that afternoon, neither of them felt like going out. They lay around watching television, and at some point — unclear who started it — they ended up rolling into each other’s arms again. Time passed quickly. That afternoon, Diao Zhuo drove her to Xianyang Airport. On the way, she was already sending voice messages to the clients on the western Sichuan loop, telling them how to get from Chengdu to the designated meeting point.

“Six clients — how will they all fit in your car?”

“We have a business van too — we alternate between the two. My car is probably still en route to Lhasa. Good thing I didn’t pre-book any rideshare passengers. Dropping everything to run off to Inner Mongolia really threw off my schedule.” Ba Yunye was busy sending messages, eyes not lifting from her phone. When she got into work mode, she was quite focused — not at all someone who let personal matters affect professional ones. Or perhaps she was already used to farewells.

After a while, the western Sichuan group chat apparently wrapped up, and she glanced at Diao Zhuo, putting on a look of exaggerated excitement, fist pressed to her heart like a fan at a concert: “I get to see the mighty Khampa men!”

Diao Zhuo smiled faintly, calm as a still pond.

The tomboy tried her usual trick, going deliberately cute: “Meow?”

The iron-boned straightforward man was unmoved, steady as a mountain.

“Hmph, not even a hint of jealousy…” she tried to provoke him and got nowhere, so she turned to look out the window.

At a red light, Diao Zhuo reached over and pulled her toward him. “Master Ba — between friends, what is there to be jealous of? We’ll drink together again sometime.”

Ba Yunye arched an eyebrow and gave him a look. “Now I’m your friend?”

He made a sound that was close enough to an affirmative.

“Not the woman you particularly like?”

His hand rested at the back of her head, and he looked at her steadily. “If I treat you as my woman right now, you won’t be able to leave.”

She smiled and cupped his chin, like a dissolute young noble teasing a respectable maiden: “Congratulations — you don’t just get an extra woman, you get a good friend too.”

He pinched her cheek. “Master Ba contains multitudes.”

Was there just a hint of tenderness in that gesture?

Xianyang Airport, connecting the western provinces to the rest of the country, had a large passenger flow — after queuing for quite a while to pick up her boarding pass, there was only an hour until the flight departed, and Ba Yunye had to get through security quickly. Diao Zhuo walked her to the security checkpoint. There were a lot of people there too. He patted her on the back, signaling her to hurry up and join the queue.

“See you next month.” Ba Yunye waved her boarding pass with a cheerful flapping sound.

Diao Zhuo lifted his hand lightly in farewell — the gesture was dashingly casual, exuding a distinctly masculine coolness.

At the last moment, she called back to him: “Hey — smoke less.”

He pulled his cigarette box and lighter from his pocket, looked down at them for a moment, then looked up at her. “Starting to look after me?”

She said, half-joking: “Obey me or don’t?”

He tossed the whole lot into the discard box at the security checkpoint.

Ba Yunye stared at him in surprise, pointing at him with a puzzled look. He offered no explanation — just waved, and told her to go get in line properly. She passed through security, quickly boarded the plane, and turned to look out the small window at the open expanse of the airfield. She, who was usually carefree and untroubled, felt an unexpected pang of reluctance to leave — and then, all at once, Diao Zhuo filled every corner of her heart, the way he filled her on those nights — surging into her until she was full, so full it felt as though the rest of her life had room for nothing but him.

She was a little lost in thought. Only when the flight attendant reminded her to fasten her seatbelt before takeoff did she come back to herself. Before switching off her phone, she sent Diao Zhuo a message.

“Off I go.”

She had wanted to say something warmer, but in the end didn’t — she was too used to being easygoing. As the plane lifted into the sky, she remembered a sentence she’d once read in a travel journal —

Mountains and rivers stretch vast and wide; the world is full of human warmth. Nothing in it is you. Nothing in it is not you.

The notification tone sounded. He Zhengren received several photographs. He put on his reading glasses and downloaded them one by one to look through, then switched to handwriting input and wrote, stroke by stroke: “Since Xiao Ba isn’t Renlong Duoji’s woman — why does he keep helping so eagerly with looking all this up?”

The reply came: “He’s a shrewd one — it’s very hard to get anything out of him. I once suspected he might be with the police, but he came out of the military and spent a few wild years before he started driving tours — there’s no way he’s a cop.”

“Have you met his family?”

“No — they’re all back in his hometown, haven’t made a special trip to see him. He’s had quite a few girlfriends but no sign of getting married.”

“Does he suspect you?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“Then keep a lower profile. Right now, Song Fan has been confirmed dead, and whether Zhang Chenguang is dead or not still isn’t clear.” Perhaps finding typing too slow, He Zhengren switched to voice input: “But the goods were sold, the money was taken — and then something went wrong on their end. They say what Zhang Chenguang sold got lost. They’re too afraid to make a fuss, so they’re looking for it quietly.”

“If you’d sent me then, it would have been sorted by now.”

“You’re trailing Xiao Ba all day — when would you have had a chance to do the deal? And Xiao Ba is no pushover — and now she’s gone and gotten involved with Diao Zhuo. Looks like Diao Zhuo has lost his mind too — had plain food for too long, suddenly got a taste of something wild, and he couldn’t hold himself back.”

“The way things work out in this world really is strange. She’s always refused to believe her eldest sister had anything going on with Diao Zhuo’s father, and from what I hear, Diao Zhuo doesn’t quite believe it either. Now here they are, and the two of them are both out to vindicate their parents in some sense.”

He Zhengren let out a cold laugh: “Whether they had anything going on — I know best of all. I say they did, so they did. As for those two ending up together, going to Qiang Tang together — I think that’s Renlong Duoji’s doing. That fat man has always been a formidable character. You must be very careful of him.”

“Ah — I’m in too deep to back out now. Whether Long Ge suspects me or not, I’ll just have to push through. Do this last job, then I’m done.”

He Zhengren didn’t respond — but in his mind he thought: this isn’t the sort of thing you can just decide to walk away from whenever you please. Once you’ve waded into muddy water, don’t think you can come out clean on your own.

Ba Yunye had barely landed in Chengdu when she felt the urge to fly straight back to Xi’an. Yunnan, Sichuan, Qinghai, Xinjiang, Tibet — she was wandering from place to place all year round, always traveling through the most beautiful scenery of each season, like a solitary eagle soaring above the snow-capped mountains, threading between white snow and vast wilderness — her body and mind never stopping for anyone.

But now there was a faint laziness and restlessness in her, a wish only to close her eyes and open them to find Diao Zhuo there. People say that longing is sharpest when something is just out of reach — but now that she had it, the ache was even stronger than before.

Diao Zhuo — ah, Diao Zhuo —

He seemed to be etched into her heart, surfacing in her mind’s eye at every turn, always managing to slip into her stream of consciousness at the smallest crack.

Setting out from Chengdu, Ba Yunye led her four clients on a slow and winding journey, stopping and starting along the way. Just before they reached Xinduqiao, the main peak of Gongga Snow Mountain rose in magnificent solitude ahead. In the distance, rolling brown ridges stretched one after another, every fold cradling a wisp of drifting cloud; scattered villages appeared and disappeared in the morning mist, and the village road wound upward from below, curling into the distance with a sense of profound meaning. The stunning scenery had drawn the observation platform at Xinduqiao full of photography enthusiasts from all over the country. Her clients jostled and squeezed for a good spot to take pictures, and she helped them shoot for a while before growing bored and picking up her phone to send a message to Diao Zhuo.

Diao Zhuo was in the gym with several of his friends. It was deep autumn, and they were all a little sweaty — that pleasingly balanced musculature wasn’t built from jogging a few kilometers now and then. After the weight training, he was jogging lightly on the treadmill to cool down. A few of his friends came over to tell him that several of their girlfriends — inspired a few days earlier by Ba Yunye’s sales pitch — had lost interest in the plan to wait in Golmud while the men summited Yuzhu Peak, and now wanted to change to the Qinghai-Tibet Highway after Golmud.

“After your woman left, she came back and started pestering me about wanting to do the pilgrimage journey…”

“Asking them to hang around Golmud for five or six days while we climb — they won’t. Say it’s boring.”

“How could you expect them to be as easygoing as Master Ba — nothing to be done, just keep them happy.”

Diao Zhuo pulled a towel from his bag and wiped the sweat from his temples, then took out his phone. On the screen there was nothing else — just two words sent by Ba Yunye:

“Bastard.”

For an iron-boned straightforward man, when a woman hits and scolds it’s a sign of affection — it either fills him with bewildered anxiety or leaves him utterly puzzled.

The corner of his mouth turned up, a faint smile surfacing. He tapped a quick reply, then turned back to his friends to discuss the revised route in detail.

On Ba Yunye’s end, she looked at his reply and rolled her eyes —

“You too.”

“Master Ba, that smile of yours is so…” her clients came racing over, thought about how to put it, and said: “Brazen?”

Ba Yunye wiped the expression off her face and switched to strict professionalism: “Since you can’t fight your way past all those ‘photography masters’ — let me get the drone out and shoot a segment for you.”

The clients cheered and immediately started arranging themselves into formation.

“Master Ba! Come in for one too!”

“No — you all go.”

Spend enough time with Master Ba and you’d realize she lived quite roughly. Not rough in the sense of being unhygienic or impolite — but in the sense of having almost no expectations of material comfort. The women on this trip discovered she owned exactly one lipstick, yet it looked great on her, and all of them immediately asked for the shade. She told them: just red. Gradually everyone worked out that this infuriating woman was simply coasting on heaven-given good looks.

The clients were wistful: “You’re so beautiful — how come you don’t like taking pictures?”

Ba Yunye operated the drone, grinning with her teeth on show: “I’m afraid people will be so dazzled by my looks that they’ll think I’m easy to mess with.”

“You must have so many people chasing after you! What type does Master Ba like?”

“Master Ba probably needs a man with three heads and six arms!”

Diao Zhuo flashed through her mind for a moment. She gave her head a small shake and answered with a quip: “No need for three heads and six arms — he just needs to have a gold mine.”

When they arrived in Litang for lunch at noon, Diao Zhuo called her to explain the change in their route — several of those with girlfriends had to give up on climbing Yuzhu Peak and switch to the Qinghai-Tibet Highway instead. He asked if she could help connect them with a guide.

“No problem. Tell them to meet up in Golmud. I’ll send you the guide’s contact number in advance.” Ba Yunye agreed without hesitation — they had their own car and provisions, all they needed was someone to plan the route, and there was nothing for her to worry about. She was happy to do it for Diao Zhuo’s sake.

Her clients called her to come sit down for lunch. Ba Yunye tilted her head, cradling the phone against her shoulder, and kept talking as she walked over: “And you and the single ones — still on the original plan?”

“We’re still going to Yuzhu Peak, as planned.”

“South face or north?”

“South face.”

“South face is easier.”

“I’m not going for easy.”

She smiled. “I know.”

He wanted to walk the route Zhang Chenguang had once walked, and at the same time search for the location where the Yuzhu Peak group photograph left behind by Ba Xiye had been taken.

“Leave it much later and there’ll be no one going up — you’d have to wait until April or May next year.” Ba Yunye thought back to the time she’d come out of Qiang Tang looking like a mud figure — these places were governed by their seasons. Out of season, they became an abyss, danger lurking at every step.

“Will we run into each other in Golmud?”

“Not necessarily.”

Diao Zhuo gave a low laugh, then abruptly changed the subject: “Do you miss me?”

Ba Yunye gave a light snort: “Clearly it’s you who misses me.”

And with that, she hung up — giving Diao Zhuo no chance to argue back.

Diao Zhuo muttered a quiet “damn it,” thinking to himself — this means you miss me.

Ba Yunye held her chopsticks but didn’t eat. She flipped open her itinerary notebook, thought quietly to herself for a while, and then a smile spread quietly across her face.