Chapter 9
He set the sack down.
Just for a moment — to rest his shoulder, he told himself. Just to catch his breath before the walk back.
He crouched beside it and began taking things out one by one, laying them on the cave floor in the pale grey dark. The fabric. The socks. The oil. The jackets, still folded the way the vendor had stacked them. The hair pins wrapped carefully in cloth. He set each thing down and looked at what he had assembled and felt something close to satisfaction moving through him.
Then his hand found the dumpling box.
He held it for a moment without opening it. The oil had soaked through slightly at one corner, leaving a dark stain on the cardboard. It was still faintly warm.
Uncle Wei had been standing outside talking to the other workers when Guowei had finished cleaning that morning. He hadn't made anything of it, hadn't called attention to it. Just left the box on the counter where it would be found. Eat something before the truck arrives.
Guowei looked at the box in his hands.
And then, without meaning to, he looked up.
At the cave wall. At the dark. At nothing in particular.
His mind had drifted back to the shop that morning without asking permission — the smell of it, the particular weight of the air inside, the way the grain sacks lined the walls in their rows. He had swept that floor himself. He knew exactly where everything was. He knew which sacks sat furthest back, which ones had been there longest, which ones were unlikely to be counted against any recent inventory.
The thought arrived fully formed before he'd realized he was thinking it.
His forehead met the cave wall with a dull thud.
Not an accident. Deliberate. He pressed it there for a moment, eyes shut, and then pulled back and did it again.
What is wrong with you.
The sting spread across his forehead and he welcomed it. He pressed his back against the wall and slid down until he was sitting on the cave floor with his knees up and the dumpling box still in his hands and the goods spread out around him like an accusation.
This man called you nephew. He knocked you on the head for not eating fast enough. He gave you rice and eggs to take home to people he's never met.
He knew that. He knew all of that.
And yet.
The thoughts came anyway, the way bad thoughts do — not loudly, not dramatically, but quietly and reasonably, dressed up in the language of necessity.
It's not like I truly know him. A few days. That's all it's been.
What if the stone stops working completely? What if today was the last time?
When the rice at home runs out — and it will run out — what then? Can I guarantee a fish? Can I guarantee anything?
He thought about yesterday. The stone cold and silent under his foot no matter what he did. He thought about the morning after, waking up with nothing changed, nothing solved, the money in his pocket useless and the family still hungry.
What if that happens again and this time it doesn't come back?
He thought about Lihua's wrists. About the way his mother set aside two eggs for him without a second thought. About the laughter that had filled the house after dinner, real laughter, the kind that costs nothing and means everything — and how easily it could disappear again.
He sat with all of it.
He didn't know what made him stand up.
He didn't know what made him start walking.
He was back on the path toward town before he'd made any conscious decision to be there, his feet moving with a certainty his mind hadn't signed off on yet. The night had settled fully over everything while he'd been sitting in the cave, and the town wore it differently than the mountain did. Lights in windows. The smell of evening meals drifting from behind closed doors. Shops pulling their shutters down for the night, vendors packing up their remaining stock with the efficient tiredness of people at the end of a long day.
His feet knew where they were going.
He slowed as Uncle Wei's shop came into view.
The front was dark. The door was shut, the heavy latch dropped into place, the shutters pulled across the window facing the street. No light from inside. No sound.
He stood across the way and looked at it for a long moment.
His heart was doing something complicated in his chest. He couldn't have named the feeling precisely — it wasn't fear exactly, or not only fear. It sat somewhere between shame and desperation with something worse underneath both of them, something that felt like a decision already being made without his full consent.
He looked up and down the street.
Nobody.
He crossed.
The side of the shop was narrow, the gap between Uncle Wei's wall and the next building barely wide enough to move through sideways. He pressed along it until he reached the window — smaller than the front ones, the glass cold under his fingers when he touched it. He felt the smoothness of it. Pulled his hand back.
Put it back.
In his mind he saw his mother's face the way it looked when she thought no one was watching. He saw Lihua sitting in the dirt outside the house, thin arms wrapped around her knees.
He gritted his teeth.
His fingers found the edge of the frame. The latch was simple — old and slightly loose, the kind that had been opened and closed ten thousand times and had some give in it now. He worked it carefully, millimeter by millimeter, his breath held, the cold of the glass against his palm and the cold of the night against his back.
It gave.
He pushed the window inward slowly, an inch, two inches, wincing at a faint resistance in the hinge that he was certain was going to become a sound and didn't. He got it open just wide enough. Gripped the sill. Pulled himself up and through in one motion and dropped down into the dark on the other side.
He landed in silence.
The back of the shop swallowed him completely. No light reached here from the street, none at all. He stood completely still and let his eyes adjust and listened to the darkness around him. The smell of the place was the same as the morning — dry grain and wood and the faint ghost of oil — but at night it was different. Closer. Like the smell had been concentrated by the dark.
He didn't move for a long moment.
Outside, somewhere down the street, a motorcycle engine rose and fell and rose again, coming closer. He pressed himself against the wall without thinking, every muscle locked, his heartbeat suddenly very loud and very close to his ears.
The engine passed.
Faded.
Gone.
His body sagged. Something released in his gut that he had not been aware of holding and he became very suddenly aware of how close he'd come to a very different kind of disaster. He pressed a hand flat against the wall and breathed through it.
Then he moved.
He couldn't see what he was grabbing. He didn't try to. His hands found sacks in the dark — the ones furthest back, the ones he'd noted that morning without knowing why he was noting them, the ones that had been here longest and were unlikely to be missed soon. He grabbed and lifted and moved, one after another, working by feel in the thick dark.
Five sacks. He got five through the window, shoving them out one at a time, hearing them land softly in the narrow gap outside.
He closed the window.
He didn't look back.
Outside he gathered them all. Five sacks, various sizes, unknown contents — he hadn't been able to see and he hadn't stopped to check. He tried to arrange them across his body the way you arrange things when you have too many hands worth of load and not enough hands — two in each hand, the fifth gripped in his teeth by the corner of the cloth, the weight distributed badly, pulling at him from every direction.
He started walking.
He made it perhaps twenty steps before his foot caught on something — a raised edge in the road, a stone, nothing — and he went down.
Face first. No time to get his hands up. The ground came up fast and the impact scattered everything — sacks dropping, sliding, the one in his teeth torn free — and he lay there for a moment with his cheek against the cold road and his nose on fire.
He pushed himself up slowly.
His nose was bleeding. He could feel it before he touched it — the warm wet spreading across his upper lip, the metallic taste already in his mouth. He pressed his sleeve against it and held it there and looked at the sacks spread across the road around him.
Someone nearby took a step toward him.
"Hey — are you alright?"
"I'm fine." He was already gathering the sacks, not looking up. "I'm fine, thank you."
"You're bleeding, let me—"
"I'm fine."
He got them all back into his arms somehow. Stood up. Kept his face angled away from the light and started walking again, slower this time, more careful, his nose still bleeding into his sleeve.
Some people watched him go. He felt their eyes but he didn't stop.
He didn't look back at the shop.
He didn't let himself.
The cave entrance was dark by the time he reached it, the vines just visible against the slightly lighter dark of the sky beyond them. He pushed through and stood inside and set the sacks down and finally — finally — stopped moving.
His nose had slowed to a trickle. His hands were shaking slightly, he noticed, now that they didn't have anything to grip. The cave was cold and quiet and smelled of wet earth and it asked nothing of him.
He stood in it and felt his eyes begin to sting.
He blinked once.
Then again.
He looked at the five sacks on the cave floor. He didn't know what was in them. He hadn't looked. He realized he still hadn't looked and he found he didn't want to. Not yet. Not tonight.
He picked them up, one by one, and stepped onto the stone.