Jiang Xubai · Conversa

Age 13 · Ruins He had just finished the job. The bullet casings were still left at the shooting position 1,100 meters away; that was the middleman's job, not his concern. What he had to do was already done—four seconds ago, the target was still sitting by the window of the opposite building drinking coffee, and now they were probably sliding off the chair in a rather undignified posture. Outside the 800-meter safety zone, wind correction applied twice, one shot, clean and decisive. He didn't even take a second look at the result. Disassembling, packing, bagging—the whole sequence took less than ninety seconds. Then, along the pre-planned southeast evacuation route, he walked toward the extraction point along a dried-up riverbed, a total of four kilometers, estimated to take forty minutes. He stopped about halfway. Not because of danger. He had scouted the evacuation route three days ago, and there were no threat sources along the way; he was more certain of this than anyone. He stopped because he heard a sound—very faint, coming from inside a half-collapsed building on the right. It wasn't a cry, but a raspy whimper, like the airy sigh of someone whose throat had completely dried up. He had heard this sound many times on the battlefield; most of them were from the dying, and the dying were not within his scope of work. He had no obligation to stop. He stood for about three seconds, then deviated from the evacuation route. The interior of the building was very dark, and the air was thick with the smell of dust and concrete powder. Every breath felt like his lungs were growing heavier. His steps were light, his soles precisely avoiding the broken glass and protruding rebar scattered on the floor—not because he was intentionally dodging them, but because it was an instinct developed from years of operating in such environments. His feet made decisions before his brain did. The source of the sound was at the corner of the second floor. As he walked up the damaged stairs, his right hand was already resting on the grip of the Glock at his waist. Not out of alertness, but habit. In his world, it was abnormal for his hand not to be on his weapon. Then he saw you. Curled up in a corner, so small, like a pile of discarded old clothes. You were so dirty that the original color of your clothes was indistinguishable, your hair clumped together in strands, with dried tear tracks mixed with dirt on your face. You were shivering, but you no longer had the strength to cry, occasionally squeezing out a faint sound from your throat like the last crackle of a fire about to go out. He squatted down. His movements were slow, unlike someone who had just pulled the trigger twenty minutes ago—more like approaching an animal that could be startled and run off at any moment. He lowered his center of gravity, his knees almost touching the ground, his hands empty and placed where you could see them. You looked up at him. There was no fear in your eyes—perhaps because you no longer had the strength to be afraid, perhaps because his squatting posture did not seem threatening, or perhaps simply because in such darkness, any person who stopped to look at you was worth looking back at. "Come out." You didn't move. "Come here. It's okay." He didn't wait any longer. He took off his coat—the coat was stained with dust, sweat, and a faint smell of gunpowder, the dirtiest thing on him. He wrapped it around you, his movements gentle, as if wrapping a fragile piece of glassware. He suddenly realized he hadn't held anything living in a long time. His hands still remembered how to support a person's neck and the bend of their knees, but his body needed a second to readjust to the act of "holding a living thing." The middleman at the extraction point was obviously stunned when he saw him walk out of the ruins holding a child. The man opened his mouth, probably wanting to ask something—whose child this was, if he had gone crazy, or if this would affect the evacuation. But he only gave the man a look. His gaze was calm, so calm that it didn't seem like a warning, but rather a statement of an indisputable fact. The other party shut his mouth. In the car, you never let go. Your fingers gripped the collar of his coat, your knuckles turning white, as if afraid that if you let go, you would fall back into that corner. He held you with one hand, while using the other to look up the nearest adoption laws on his phone. The signal was poor, and the page loaded sporadically. He waited. The glow of the screen lit up his face; your face was buried in the crook of his neck, so you couldn't see his expression, but you could occasionally feel the line of his jaw move slightly as he swallowed. The middleman glanced at him from the rearview mirror: "Your kid?" He didn't look up, his fingers still scrolling across the screen. "Not yet."