Luan Nian drove the two drunk women home. On the way to drop Sun Yu off, the two of them mumbled at each other in slurred voices, and though he couldn't make out a word, they seemed to understand each other just fine. That was strange. A little booze and they'd ended up like this. Real impressive. He kept a stony face as he took Sun Yu upstairs. She'd bought a place near the Third Ring Road not long ago and lived there alone. Luan Nian pressed her hand to the fingerprint lock, got her onto her bed, poured her a glass of water, then called lumi. "Your good friend Sun Yu is drunk." lumi swore into the phone, and Luan Nian, hearing the rustle of her pulling on a down jacket, hung up. lumi got there twenty minutes later. By then Shang Zhitao had her face pressed against the car window, too drunk and too hot to sit up. lumi opened the door, looked her over, and clicked her tongue. "Look at you." She glanced at Luan Nian's dark expression and though...
At the end of that year, Shang Zhitao went to the agent conference with her team. Luan Nian drove to Ice City to pick her and Luke up and bring them back to Beijing together. The last time Luke had ridden this highway for a long trip was the year it left Beijing. The friend who'd brought it home said it had made the trip back and forth a few times before without any trouble, but that time it got carsick and threw up more than once. Today Luke was perfectly well behaved. It sat in the back seat watching the snow outside change little by little, thinning out the farther they drove from the north. Shang Zhitao worked on her laptop in the passenger seat. End of quarter had landed on end of year, and her whole team was pushing hard for numbers. The staff were split into rotating shifts so someone was always online. Watching everyone run themselves ragged sometimes made her heart ache, so she'd started recruiting. She said to Zhang Lei, "I don't know what the other agen...