Chapter 16: That's Enough

Peng Ye couldn't see clearly from where he stood. He reached for Cheng Jia's hat to get a better look.

She was already moving — ducking behind someone, putting a body between herself and his hands.

She shook him off and crossed the room to where Xiao Ling had pulled herself into the corner of the bed. She grabbed Xiao Ling's wrist. Xiao Ling cried out and grabbed the bed frame with her free hand, but Cheng Jia dragged her off regardless. The sheets and blankets went with her.

No one had expected that kind of strength from her.

Cheng Jia said one word. "Lighter."

There were other people in the room. Xiao Ling's face crumpled — she couldn't let them know what had happened between her and Cheng Jia during those hours. She sobbed, "What do you mean? I don't—"

Cheng Jia's grip on her wrist didn't ease. She said it again, one word at a time: "Light. The. Lighter."

"I don't have—"

"Last time. Light it."

Xiao Ling looked desperately toward Peng Ye. He didn't move to stop Cheng Jia. His eyes were on Xiao Ling, dark and still. She broke.

"An'an took it. An'an has it."

At that moment An'an came through the door at a run. "You're back — are you alright—"

Cheng Jia's hat was pulled low. An'an couldn't see her face and assumed the best. "That's great, I was so worried—"

"Lighter."

An'an reached into her pocket and held it out.

Cheng Jia took it, released Xiao Ling's wrist, and walked out of the room.

Peng Ye saw the bloodstains again, clearly this time. He was through the door behind her in two strides. "Cheng Jia."

She kept walking.

"Cheng Jia."

He caught her in the corridor, took her by both shoulders, and turned her around.

She tucked her head down and fought him — genuinely, with her whole body — but he had the weight and leverage and simply pressed her back against the wall and held her there.

She kept her face down. He could feel her resistance in every line of her. He got a hand on her collar.

The fabric gave with a sharp tearing sound, and her clothes pulled partially away.

---

Her hair was filthy, matted against her face. The skin beneath was split between deep red and a pallor that meant shock — her cheek swollen badly, her lip torn and still bleeding. Worse were the wounds on her neck: several of them, blood dried black at the edges, covering the skin below her jaw.

Peng Ye's hands stayed where they were. His voice came out flat.

"Who did this."

Cheng Jia: "Seen enough?"

"I'm asking you who—"

"Let go of me."

He didn't.

Her eyes when they finally met his were shot through with red. "Let go."

Sixteen and Nima had followed them into the corridor. They had both gone very still.

Peng Ye released her.

Cheng Jia straightened what remained of her collar, turned, went back to her room, and closed the door behind her. Not a slam — just closed, firmly, final.

Peng Ye stood in the corridor and watched the door for a moment. Then he went back to where Xiao Ling was sitting and looked at her.

"What happened."

Xiao Ling kept her head down and cried without sound.

"You're sitting there without a mark on you," Peng Ye said. "What is there to cry about."

His voice was steady. That was almost worse than if it hadn't been.

Xiao Ling sobbed and said nothing.

Shi Tou's patience ran out before Peng Ye's did. "Answer him. Cheng Jia comes back like that and you're sitting here with her lighter — say something!"

Silence.

Peng Ye said, "If you won't talk, you don't get a ride out when we leave."

Xiao Ling's head came up.

The man before her was clearly in charge of everyone in this building. Not getting a ride meant the snowfield alone. It meant the village alone, tonight, in the dark.

Her eyes filled again. "Please don't."

"I mean it."

---

An'an told the whole story. Peng Ye listened without speaking.

As he listened, something kept returning to him — the image of Cheng Jia sitting on the small stool by the door, saying in that careful voice, Peng Ye said not to let me wander. He hadn't known, then, what she was staying behind for. Now he did, and it sat in his chest like something swallowed wrong.

Cheng Jia was the kind of person who would threaten your life if you were cold to her. Give her the smallest warmth and she'd hand you back twice as much.

An'an said: she went out to find Xiao Ling.

Under the weight of everyone looking at her, Xiao Ling finally came apart.

"I slipped. Down a slope — the snow was too packed, I couldn't get purchase to climb back up. I was so cold I couldn't even call out. But she found me. She tried to pull me up, except I outweigh her, and I pulled her down instead." A breath. "She said she was lighter, and taller. She said to step on her shoulders and climb up, and then she'd pull herself out after. So I did."

The room went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with calm.

Peng Ye's expression didn't move.

Sixteen's jaw worked. "And then you just left her there."

"I didn't want to — I was going to pull her up, but I could barely feel my hands. I'd been in the cold so long. And then those men came over the ridge. They saw me on the slope. They were pointing in this direction. They didn't look like good people."

An'an stared at her. "So you ran."

"I was minimizing damage. I can't afford to get hurt. If something happened to me — Guo Li would leave me."

"Why didn't you tell anyone the truth when you got back? Why didn't you try to bring someone to help her?"

"Two women going back there? That's not help, that's two casualties. That's why I told you to stay."

"You didn't say a word even after the others came back."

"By then it was already—" Xiao Ling stopped. "It was too late."

Sixteen surged forward. Nima caught him with both arms.

An'an's voice had gone very quiet. "When she saved you and dropped the lighter — you picked it up and took it with you. You were that certain she wasn't coming back."

Xiao Ling had no answer for that one. The lighter had been in her hand and she had kept it, and the reason she had kept it was something she couldn't say out loud without it becoming real.

Peng Ye said nothing throughout.

He was turning it over. Cheng Jia hadn't run on impulse or out of recklessness. She had looked at the situation — Xiao Ling alone, the cold, the time before anyone returned — and made a calculation. She'd brought a compass. She'd planned a route and stayed to the hillside. She hadn't searched blind. She had been methodical, disciplined, careful.

And she had run into Xiao Ling.

He stood up and left the room. Behind him, Xiao Ling called out, her voice high and desperate: "I told you everything. You said you'd take me out of this place."

---

In the next room, Cheng Jia had made it as far as the floor.

She sat with her back against the side of the kang, knees drawn up, the lighter in her hand. The engraving on the bottom caught the light:

jk&cj

She sat there and let an old argument come back whether she wanted it to or not.

Cheng Jia, she's dead. Your friend is dead.

What does that have to do with me? Even if her whole family goes, it's none of my business.

The corner of her mouth moved in something that wasn't a smile.

Whatever happened, she didn't ask anyone to take responsibility for it. She had never once expected that. So the logic that she should absorb consequences whenever something went wrong for someone else — she had never understood that logic, and she didn't now.

---

The kitchen had the atmosphere of a room where something has happened that no one knows how to address. The men sat without talking much. Peng Ye stood against the wall and smoked.

Nima was on his feet before long. "I'm going to find whoever did this."

"Sit down," Peng Ye said. "Could you even find them?"

Nima stopped.

Xiao Ling's description had been: ethnic minority men, didn't look like good people. That was the whole description.

Peng Ye said, "The situation hasn't been fully established."

"What is there that isn't established?"

"We know every family in this village. There's no one matching what was described." He paused. "And Cheng Jia's reaction is off."

The room went back through it. Cheng Jia's reaction upon returning. Her one demand. The single word, repeated.

Lighter.

Nima's voice came out unsteady. "Are you saying she wasn't—? Then where did the wounds come from? Those neck wounds aren't from an animal."

Peng Ye looked at Shi Tou. "Is it ready?"

---

He carried the bowl upstairs himself.

The door to Cheng Jia's room was unlocked. He pushed it open.

The room was quiet. She had made it to the floor beside the kang and gone no further — lying on her side, still in the same clothes, hair unwashed, the dried blood still on her neck. Her eyes were closed. Her breathing was slow and even. She had the particular exhaustion of someone whose body decided the matter without consulting them.

He set the bowl down and looked at her.

It was the first time he had seen her asleep. Without the cold precision her eyes usually carried, her face read differently — the swelling making her look younger, softer, almost childlike despite everything.

He crouched down and lifted her collar to check. Knife wounds. Fingernail marks, the grip deep and deliberate — the strength behind it was a man's. He registered this without reaction.

She had the lighter still in one hand. Her hands were covered in small cuts, the blood long dried and dark. He touched one hand, almost without deciding to. It was cold all the way through.

He thought of the moment she had walked back in — apparently unhurt, apparently unbothered — and the anger he'd felt. Looking at her now, that anger seemed like something that had happened to a stupider version of himself.

He picked her up and moved her onto the kang properly, then shook out the blanket and covered her with it.

When he looked up, her eyes were open. She was watching him without any particular expression.

He held her gaze for a moment, then picked up the bowl from the table. "Shi Tou made this. Ginger soup. Don't let yourself catch cold on top of everything else."

Cheng Jia sat up. She smoothed her hair back from her face with automatic tidiness, then reached out for the bowl with hands that were still marked with dried blood. She took it, looked at it, looked at him.

"My hands hurt," she said. "You feed me."

Peng Ye paused. He reached over to take the bowl.

"No need," she said. "I was joking."

---

She drank in silence for a while. She could feel him watching her face.

"What are you looking at."

Peng Ye asked, "What Xiao Ling said — is it true."

Cheng Jia looked back at him. "What would you do if it were."

"I would feel guilty."

"What would you have to feel guilty about."

"I should have kept you with me," he said. "Tied you to a rope if I had to."

Cheng Jia considered this image. "Tied to your waist?"

The afternoon light came in through the window at a low angle and softened everything it touched, including his face.

She noticed that his gaze was always the same — steady, without deflection. It didn't move around when he didn't want it to.

She held the bowl in her lap and said, "That's the prevention. What about after the fact?"

His eyes on her were dark. "Did it happen or not."

"Xiao Ling's imagination got away from her."

A pause.

"Those Tibetan men who passed by were decent people. They helped me and couldn't understand why Xiao Ling had run off." Her voice had gone rough, the words slightly effortful. "If you need to verify it, I'll take my pants off and you can check."

Peng Ye said nothing.

She can still joke. She's really alright.

"The people here are honest," he said. "The old woman was trying to frighten them off."

He'd known it rationally. He'd told himself so. But he hadn't been able to fully believe it until she said it herself, out loud, in this room.

"I know," Cheng Jia said. "You used the same line on me this morning when you left. You really do treat me like a child."

Peng Ye said nothing.

"You thought I went out on purpose," she said. "That I engineered the whole thing to make you come looking for me."

He was quiet.

"I could tell," she said. "From the way you acted when I came back."

Peng Ye met her eyes. "I'm sorry."

Something shifted in her chest before she had time to prepare for it.

She hadn't been blaming him. She hadn't come back with any intention of making him feel the weight of it. But the words, said simply and without qualification, moved through her defenses before she knew they were there.

She looked down at the bowl and stirred the soup once with the spoon.

"You searched for a long time," she said.

He made a sound of assent.

"Then that's enough," she said.

That was enough. That he had gone to look. That was the whole of what she needed from it.

The room was quiet. Neither of them moved to fill the silence.

After a while, Cheng Jia looked up at him again. "You really thought I did all that just to get your attention?" She let the corner of her mouth lift. "I didn't know you were so convinced of your own appeal."

The light through the window fell across his face and made him look warmer than he usually allowed.

He had thought his interpretation was the only reasonable one — given everything she'd done leading up to it. Now he understood that the interpretation itself had been the trap, and he had walked into it without noticing the ground change under him.

Cheng Jia said evenly, "Go ahead and think that I'm not the type to go out looking for someone."

"No," he said. "I don't think that about you."

"Oh?" The faint smile again. "What do you think about me, then?"

The afternoon warmth moved through the room like it had somewhere to be and wasn't in a hurry to get there.