Chapter 14: Blizzards Aftermath

 

"What do we do?" Xiao Ling whispered.

An'an wanted to sink through the floor. "How would I know? I told you to stop talking."

"She's calculating. She sat there listening to everything without making a single sound. Any normal person would have coughed or knocked on the wall or something before now."

An'an gave her a look that communicated, with precision: stop. talking.

Next door, Cheng Jia took her medicine. The door closed. After a moment, the sounds of someone settling into bed. Then silence.

Xiao Ling waited, counting seconds, until she judged it safe. She leaned toward An'an and whispered: "Did you notice the tall one? The one with the good build?"

"He doesn't say much."

"Exactly. But there's something about him. Real presence. Men like that are rare."

"Mm."

Xiao Ling sighed. "What a shame."

"What is?"

"Working at some remote conservation station in the middle of nowhere. Low pay. No prospects." She settled back against her pillow. "Nothing to look forward to."

An'an considered this. "Is grinding overtime in the city and eating instant noodles to pay a mortgage really better? Different lives for different people. They clearly love what they do."

Xiao Ling made a face. "Anyway, I've had enough. We find the phone tomorrow and leave."

They had a restless night.

Cheng Jia slept extremely well.

She had heard every word through the wall and felt almost nothing — except a mild observation that people were occasionally very stupid. She found a comfortable position, closed her eyes, and drifted into a dream that was proceeding quite nicely when someone knocked.

She opened her eyes with an expression of profound disappointment.

"Cheng Jia."

Peng Ye's voice.

She lay still and covered her face with one hand. Exhaled slowly.

"Cheng Jia."

"What." Her voice came out flat and unwelcoming. After last night's corridor conversation, a certain sharpness between them still hadn't quite settled — or perhaps had settled, but into something that felt charged rather than resolved.

Her tone carried through the door. The person outside went quiet.

In that small pause, she finished waking up.

"Snow stopped," he said.

She already knew. The room was bright with reflected light, and the world outside had gone completely still — no wind, no ice crystals against the window. The particular silence of a landscape buried in fresh snow.

Something in his voice had shifted from last night. Not quite softer. More like a door held open.

She let it be.

The warmth under the blankets was significant. The voice was on the other side of a door. There were worse ways to start a morning.

"We're heading out this afternoon. Get some rest."

Cheng Jia stared at the ceiling. "You woke me up to tell me to rest."

A pause. "...Don't wander off. The snow's deep. Snow blindness will turn you around."

"Mm." She rolled onto her side. "Where are you going?"

"Helping the woman at the post station with firewood."

"Okay." She pulled the blanket higher. "You go."

He took a few steps. She heard him turn back.

"Don't go near that thing Grandma mentioned." His tone had taken on the patient edge of someone addressing someone likely to ignore them. "I mean it."

The old innkeeper's story about something lurking in the snowfields — she had recognized immediately that it was intended for the two nervous university girls, not for her. She hadn't said so.

She smiled at the ceiling. "I won't wander."

The footsteps moved away down the corridor and faded.

Cheng Jia lay still. The world was quiet enough that she could hear her own heartbeat. She shifted to a better position and went back to sleep.

---

She woke again when the light had changed — dimmer, the flat grey of midmorning. Sleep wouldn't come back. She got up, went to the window, and pushed it open.

The mountains and the fields had been erased. Everything was white — not the patchy, compromised white of a city snowfall but a total, seamless white, as if someone had tipped a jug of milk across the entire landscape and left no edge untouched.

She put on her down jacket and snow boots and went downstairs.

The kitchen smelled of millet porridge and cornbread. She lifted the steamer lid — three bowls, six buns. She took one bowl and two buns, found a spot in the straw pile, and sat cross-legged to eat. One bite of bread, one sip of porridge. The bowl on the ground between her feet.

The kitchen was dim and quiet. She ate slowly, without hurrying.

---

After breakfast she opened the gate and stood in the doorway.

The wind had stopped. Beyond the gate was a clean, still world of white that went in all directions without interruption. She had not actually planned to wander anywhere. She moved a stool to the threshold, sat down, and looked at it.

She stayed there for more than half an hour. Then she took out a cigarette.

She was halfway through it when she heard footsteps — a soft, rapid crunch in the snow — and An'an came rushing into the courtyard, coat covered in powder, hat askew, face pinched with anxiety.

She saw Cheng Jia immediately and visibly deflated with relief, then remembered last night and went awkward again. She ran past her into the house. Ran up and down the stairs. Came back.

"There's porridge in the pot," Cheng Jia said, without looking at her. "Stone left it."

An'an thanked her and didn't eat. She stood behind Cheng Jia, staring at her back.

A few seconds of this. Then Cheng Jia turned, expression flat: "What."

A thread of smoke rose from the cigarette between her fingers.

"You smoke a lot," An'an said. The first thing that came out, which happened to be something Xiao Ling had said about Cheng Jia the night before. She realized it immediately.

Cheng Jia looked at her for a moment, then turned back to the view.

An'an's stomach dropped.

"There's a bird's nest in that tree," Cheng Jia said, in a different tone. "Frozen yellow leaf in the icicles under the eaves. Snow rabbit hole at the base of the courtyard wall — those are its ears, see them? It's looking out."

An'an followed the directions. The nest, the leaf, the small rounded tips of fur barely visible at the wall's corner. She wouldn't have found any of it on her own.

"I see the rabbit," Cheng Jia said, eyes on the middle distance. "You saw smoke. Who's the unhealthy one."

An'an had no answer.

A silence.

"Something happened to your friend," Cheng Jia said. Not a question.

An'an blinked. "How did you—"

"Because she deserves it."

"She went to look for her phone," An'an said quickly. "In the snowfield. I had to go with her. We couldn't keep holding hands and staring at the ground — I looked up for a moment and she was gone. She won't stay put. She'll keep going and then we won't be able to find her even if we try, and if she goes into a snowdrift she'll—" She stopped. "I need someone who knows the area. Please."

Cheng Jia considered the cigarette in her hand. "You're looking for it wrong."

"What?"

"After that snowfall. The phone is under half a meter of fresh powder. You'd need excavation equipment."

An'an opened her mouth. Closed it.

"She's walking into something stupid," Cheng Jia said, "and so are you."

An'an flushed. "Could we just — please. Would you come?"

Cheng Jia said nothing and didn't move.

An'an tried again. "She didn't mean anything by last night. Please don't hold it against her."

"I don't have that kind of investment in what she meant."

"Then help because she needs it. I'm asking you." An'an's voice went smaller. "Peng Ye said not to wander."

"Peng Ye said—" An'an hesitated. "Who is Peng Ye?"

"A man who's going to fall into my hands."

An'an stared at her, baffled, then pressed on: "I have no sense of direction. I'd go alone but I'd get lost myself. I know it's asking a lot, but I don't have anyone else to ask."

"You'd actually go alone."

"Yes."

Cheng Jia looked at her properly for the first time. "I respect that," she said, in a tone that made it unclear whether she meant it as a compliment or a medical diagnosis.

"Please," An'an said.

Cheng Jia didn't answer. An'an took a breath and started for the gate.

"Can you stop walking toward your own death for thirty seconds?" Cheng Jia said.

An'an stopped.

"Snow blindness means you'll walk in circles. No reference points out there, no signal. You think you're going straight but you're not. If you go out alone you will get lost. That is not a metaphor."

An'an swallowed. "Then come with me."

Cheng Jia stood, stubbed out the cigarette on the edge of the stool, and pointed to the hillside in the distance. "That far. We turn around there whether we find her or not."

An'an exhaled. "Yes. Okay. Yes."

She followed Cheng Jia back inside to get her things, turning something over. "But you just said snow blindness makes people walk in circles. How are we going to navigate?"

Cheng Jia looked at her. "Compass. On the phone."

An'an stopped.

"I was trying to stop you from going alone."

They went in silence for a moment. An'an watched the back of Cheng Jia's head, the long dark hair moving in the cold air.

"I just realized," An'an said carefully. "I have a compass on my phone too."

"Yes."

"So I could have—"

"I'm bored," Cheng Jia said. "I'm going for a walk."

An'an smiled at the back of her head. She kept it to herself.

---

They walked single file through snow that reached their calves with every step, Cheng Jia ahead, An'an working to keep up with her longer stride.

"Have you traveled a lot?" An'an asked.

"Don't try to get close to me." Cheng Jia said it without heat. "We're not the same kind of people. We won't be friends."

An'an pulled her neck in and went quiet.

The snow was everywhere. The world had reduced itself to two colors and absolute silence, and they were two small dark shapes moving through the middle of it.

---

An'an came back into the yard at almost noon, snow in her hair, on her collar, crusted along her sleeves. She'd been running.

"Cheng Jia!" The word carried up the staircase and into the rooms.

Footsteps on the stairs. An'an spun around — and stopped.

"Xiao Ling. You're back."

"Just now." Xiao Ling touched her own hair, not quite meeting her eyes.

An'an grabbed her arm. "That girl is missing. We have to go back out—" She was already pulling her toward the door.

Xiao Ling shook her off. "Which girl?"

"Next door. She went out to help look for you. We stepped into a snowdrift and got separated — she was faster than me, but she should have been back already, and if something happened—"

"She'll find her way."

"Xiao Ling—"

"I can't walk anymore. I'm exhausted. And even if I go I can't pull her out of anything by myself. You just wait." She sat down. "If you're so worried, wait for the others to get back and tell them."

"What if she can't wait that long—"

"An'an." Xiao Ling's voice had sharpened. "There are too many what ifs. Stop."

An'an stared at her for a long moment.

Then she turned and went for the door.

"An'an, don't!" Xiao Ling caught her arm. "It's too dangerous."

An'an looked at the hand on her arm. Then at Xiao Ling's face. Something in the look made Xiao Ling let go and step back.

An'an turned toward the hillside. The white slope sat quiet in the distance, unhurried and enormous.

She thought of Cheng Jia's voice that morning, flat and matter-of-fact:

Take a step back when you reach that hillside.

She hadn't understood it at the time. She understood it now. And her eyes, without warning or permission, filled with tears.