That evening, Ba Yunye made up an excuse about going for a walk and sent the other drivers away, then went to a supermarket and bought a good number of supplies. In the dead of night, she slipped out of the hotel where they were staying and drove off alone, arriving at the border town guesthouse where Long Ge had last been seen just as the sky was beginning to lighten.

Once she got there and started asking around, she found there was plenty of rumor circulating about the matter, but no one could give a coherent account of the discovery of He Zhengren’s body. The locals didn’t even have a reliable sense of which family the person who found the body belonged to — Ba Yunye found that strange. What she did manage to learn was that the previous day, a villager had found a knife at the edge of the primeval forest upstream along the Dulong River, with some kind of pendant wrapped around it. After the police were notified, they began asking among the elders of the nearby ethnic villages about who had ever ventured into the forest and knew the way — and from there, word had spread that the “killer” had fled into the forest in a panic, seeking refuge without knowing where to turn. The villagers all said it amounted to the same as seeking one’s own death.

A knife with a pendant wrapped around it — wasn’t that exactly the supposed murder weapon and the sandalwood dragon carving from Long Ge’s prayer beads that the police had shown them the night before? So Long Ge had thrown them there deliberately. He really had fled into the primeval forest along the Dulong River — the very one that even the local villagers dared not enter, the one said to hold the remains of forty thousand Japanese invaders.

Ba Yunye stood beside her vehicle drinking water, the back of her shirt drenched in cold sweat. Just then, the club drivers finally discovered she had “made a run for it.” Calls flooded in one after another — some cursing her for having no loyalty, some for looking down on her own companions, some for her reckless one-woman heroism. Every variety of outrage was represented.

“You all have elderly parents at home and children to raise. How many lives do you have to follow me into the mountains? If something goes wrong, how do I answer for it?” Ba Yunye wore her earpiece as she talked, simultaneously rummaging through the car boot and organizing her pack. “Honestly, I have no guarantee I can find Long Ge. But one person going is better than a whole crowd marching in together…”

“Master Ba! Your life is not worth that little! You didn’t spring from a rock!” They shouted in a panic. “We’re your blood brothers — your own fathers, every last one of us!!”

“Ha — whoever just said they were my father, wait till I get back and I’ll give you a good beating.” Ba Yunye laughed and, without another word, ended the calls.

She finished organizing her pack, closed the boot, and had just turned to walk around to the front of the vehicle when she saw a tall, broad-shouldered silhouette leaning against the bonnet with his back to her, as if in the middle of lighting a cigarette. The expedition jacket he wore was stretched taut across a wide, powerfully built back.

Something about it felt simultaneously unfamiliar and deeply known. She shook her head and rubbed her eyes.

He turned around. His gaze was cold and fixed on her. He crumpled the unlit cigarette tightly in his fist, pointed at her, and said through gritted teeth: “Ba Yunye — you’ve got some nerve.”

“You…” Ba Yunye’s throat felt as though a duck’s egg had been shoved into it. For a moment she couldn’t find words. She hadn’t expected Diao Zhuo to appear here. He still had several months left in his current project — and he didn’t even know she had come to Nujiang Prefecture. Even if yesterday’s police officers had let something slip, there was no way he could have tracked her down here this quickly.

She thought again of the dream she’d had more than once — the two of them crossing paths at some intersection, driving briefly in each other’s sight before going their separate ways. In the dream he was distant and cold, wearing an expression that made him feel utterly out of reach — nothing like he was now, like a lion that had been holding back its fury and might spring at any moment.

He glared at her, and she looked back at him with a face of complete innocence. After a long moment, she raised a finger at him and said: “Why are you wearing a Beidou Rescue jacket?”

Diao Zhuo didn’t answer. He simply scowled at her for another long, fierce moment. He could see her clearly now — she wore a short leather jacket, camouflage military trousers on her lower half, and a pair of black waterproof boots that made her already lean, compact legs look even longer. That kind of sharp, feral beauty stirred admiration in him and, at the same time, an irritation with no clear cause. His natural features were far from gentle or kind, and with the imposing bulk of his physique, even when he wasn’t angry there was an effortless air of authority about him. When he was holding back rage, as he was now, that quality intensified into something not to be provoked.

Not that Ba Yunye had ever been afraid of anyone — yet under his gaze right now, she felt prickles of unease spreading across her skin. She shrugged it off and said dismissively: “I have important things to do. Whatever grievances you have with me, we can settle them later.” With that, she waved her hand to gesture him aside, pulled open the car door, and had just moved to step up into the driver’s seat.

“I resigned.”

She lost her footing, nearly pitching headlong into the driver’s seat. Catching herself on the car door, she turned to look at him. “Your job at the geological survey institute — you resigned from that?!”

His position was a good one — a stable, state-sector post. As long as you didn’t commit some major infraction, you wouldn’t get fired, and you’d never have to worry about running out of work or income. On top of the full social benefits package, there were even holiday gifts and welfare packages at Chinese New Year and national holidays. It was the kind of steady, secure employment that someone like Ba Yunye — a “freelancer” with no fixed income who lived off clients — could only privately admire from time to time.

Walking away from a job like that — what was he thinking?

She recalled something he’d said during their last call: “If I’d had even a shred of standards or demands when it came to you, I wouldn’t be where I am today.” Ba Yunye felt as though she half understood, and half didn’t.

He gave a nod and walked toward her. His expression seemed to have softened somewhat — no longer quite as furious as before.

Ba Yunye instinctively wanted to take a step back, but the vehicle was right behind her, and she had nowhere to retreat. “When did you resign? Why are you only telling me now?”

“You didn’t tell me you came here alone either. What did I say to you before? And what did you promise me?” He pressed closer — one more step — and simply braced a hand against the side of the vehicle, trapping her in the narrow space between the car door and his body with three questions in rapid succession.

At such close range, Ba Yunye could see him clearly — including the faint weathering of exhaustion on his face, and the red threading through the whites of his eyes. He had worn that same look on Yuzhu Peak, the whole time he’d been carrying Fu Yingtao down, forcing himself through with nothing but sheer will. Without quite thinking, Ba Yunye reached up and laid her hand against his face. Stubble had started to push through, slightly rough against her palm. He lowered himself toward her, bending until his face was almost against hers.

One kiss, and all grievances dissolved.

“Mm… gently…” Ba Yunye stirred with a faint resistance, but he paid it no mind, deliberately chasing after the tip of her tongue. His resentment and his love for her converged into something that carried a trace of pain — a tangle she could not escape. So she stopped trying and simply received it.

Even in the midst of that kiss, Ba Yunye was still turning her question over in her mind — “Why… did you resign?”

He still didn’t answer. He just kept kissing her.

He had loved her down to his bones. A word or two could never begin to explain it.

The two of them were always apart more than they were together — and whenever they quarreled or ran cold, unable to see each other in person, things were difficult to untangle. Add to that the fact that their lives moved in completely different circles, and in time the distance would only grow wider. One day the passion would cool, and reaching for each other’s hands would become impossible — the other person would become like the utility poles flashing past outside a car window: always there in some sense, but drifting further and further away. For something to last, someone always has to be the one to make a sacrifice.

After a long while, the two of them got into the vehicle and linked up with the other Beidou Rescue volunteers. Diao Zhuo filled Ba Yunye in on the police’s next moves — “They’ve already located the murder weapon. Apparently Long Ge’s fingerprints and some bloodstains were found on it, and the blood is currently being analyzed. They believe Long Ge fled into the primeval forest, but the reason remains unclear. The locals don’t dare enter the deep forest, and we at Beidou Rescue organized an expert expedition there some time ago — we have partial route maps and photographs. So while they’re deploying police to search, they’ve also asked us to assist.”

“We also suspected Long Ge had gone into the primeval forest.” Ba Yunye, very pleased with herself, outlined everything she and the others had pieced together over the past few days. Far from expressing any admiration, Diao Zhuo let out a cold scoff. “So not only did you come here yourself — you went ahead and rallied your club’s drivers exactly as I suspected.”

“We didn’t cause any trouble.” She defended herself. “Yesterday I even graciously received the police officers who came to ask questions, and to prove that Long Ge couldn’t possibly have given He Zhengren any chance to fight back, I personally demonstrated to one of the officers how a person can be dispatched with a single strike.”

“Which means you — assaulted a police officer?” Diao Zhuo pressed his hand to his forehead and sighed.

Ba Yunye brushed it off with a smile, patted his shoulder, and said: “One of our people mentioned that a veteran from a nearby village — someone who fought in the Sino-Vietnamese War — had heard gunshots coming from the forest. That’s precisely why I decided not to let them follow me in.”

Diao Zhuo’s brow furrowed. “And you think going alone means you won’t face any danger?”

“Less danger.” Ba Yunye said it in the manner of someone well acquainted with the ways of the world. “Long Ge is in trouble. I owe Long Ge. I have to repay that.”

Diao Zhuo’s expression held a questioning look.

“Do you remember I once mentioned that when I’d just left the military, I was reckless and restless — and ended up accidentally getting mixed up with a gambling den that was also dealing drugs, working as a lookout for them?”

He gave a nod. “Long Ge pulled you out.”

“‘Pulled out’ sounds easy in a sentence — but do you have any idea how difficult it is to pull someone out of a place like that without a scratch? Especially once you know what they’re up to — how is anyone going to just let you walk away? At first I thought we could pay our way out. Only later did I learn that by the rules of that world, even if your connections went all the way to the top, money still had to be paid — but if you wanted to take the person with you: you had to ‘pass three gates.’ That meant both the person being retrieved and the one retrieving them would stand beneath a target with a diameter of ten centimeters, and each fire three shots at the bullseye — six shots total, one after the other. If both came through unharmed, you were free to go.”

Diao Zhuo was mildly astonished, and then a chill crept through him. He couldn’t help turning to look at her — this woman had truly lived through things most people could scarcely imagine.

He listened as Ba Yunye continued: “The ‘three gates’ at places like that drug-connected gambling den are utterly brutal and shameless — psychological warfare pushed to its absolute limit. Some people heard about the three gates and backed down before they even started. Some forced themselves to go through with it, and the people running the place would stand to the side pointing guns at you the whole time, piling on the pressure. A ten-centimeter target is about the same as balancing an apple on someone’s head and asking the other person to shoot it off — it tests your psychological steadiness, and the trust between the two of you. They say no two people have ever both made it through the three gates. Sometimes they shoot each other dead. Sometimes one kills the other and is allowed to leave. The one who walks out — whether it was the person being retrieved, or the one who failed to retrieve — will never breathe a word about what went on in that drug den afterward. Because talking means exposing the fact that you shot and killed someone. You see how viciously clever it is.”

“Did you both make it through?”

She still carried traces of the fear even now. Her right hand pressed to her chest, her voice wavering in a way that was rare for her. “Do you know what it feels like to have a gun pressed against the back of your head, being forced to fire at a target balanced on another person’s head? The moment you have even one selfish thought — the thought that if you kill the other person, you get to go free — that person is finished. That game isn’t actually about who has the better aim. It’s about who has the heart to kill the other person first. Some people, after shooting their companion, lost their minds on the spot.” She grew visibly moved recounting it. “Back then — Long Ge… he told me to fire all six shots at the target on his head. He had made up his mind to stake his life on getting me out. And at the same time, he trusted me. Even though I hit the target with every shot, when it came time for them to let us go, they were reluctant and thought about going back on their word — there was a long ordeal that followed before we were truly free… I’ve never told this to anyone. I just wanted you to know — when Long Ge is in trouble, I can’t simply sit back and wait for police updates while doing nothing.”

Diao Zhuo finally understood the source of Ba Yunye’s fury from before. That kind of bond forged through shared survival — staking one’s life for the other — was enough to make even someone like her throw caution to the wind for him.

“But…” Ba Yunye drew a slow, deep breath, and her voice gradually softened as she finally put into words the shame she had been carrying for a long time: “I’ve thought about it at length. The last time Long Ge wanted to kill He Zhengren — you went to every length to stop him. In truth… that was for his sake too. If I had stood aside and let him take his revenge and kill someone, and he ended up sentenced to death or life in prison, that would have been a far greater betrayal of the debt I owe him for saving me. So I… I wanted to tell you…”

“Don’t bring that up.” Diao Zhuo reached over and gently rested his hand on the top of her head. “I was too heavy-handed with you. At the time I didn’t properly explain the reasoning — I just kept expecting you to do exactly as I said. Whatever the case, I owe you an apology for how I treated you. Please forgive me.”

Ba Yunye’s breath caught. She reached out and gripped his right hand tightly. He held on in return — firm and unwavering — as if he intended to keep hold of her like that for the rest of their lives, never letting go again.