The light in Lu Yuzhu’s eyes flickered slightly.
“Your wait ended, Lu Yuzhu. I’ve waited for almost twenty years, yet there’s no end in sight.”
Lu Yuzhu looked at him, still silent.
“You can’t see the people who’ve spilled blood and sacrificed themselves to refute your false accusations,” Xie Qingcheng continued. “You don’t even know their names, but for the dead and the living, they’re always seeking the truth, pursuing justice for blunders they didn’t commit… Do you think that’s meaningless?
“For more than ten years, even as your husband betrayed you and your child forgot you, even when you yourself had forgotten what the Lu Yuzhu who had once been the secretary of Qingli County’s party committee was like, these people you’ve never even met refused to put down your case file. Do you think they did all that just to get you an apology? At the very least, my parents didn’t. As police officers, they worked to support their family, treating it as just a career. But even though that’s what they would’ve said, in the end, they died for their careers. They didn’t leave behind much money, and they didn’t get to see their children grow up. When they died, I was only thirteen.
“Lu Yuzhu, you’re a mother too. Can you imagine what my mother was thinking the moment she died?”
Lu Yuzhu had been listening in silence, but at these words, she suddenly shivered. It felt as though a pair of tear-filled eyes, eyes belonging to a woman who had been forced to leave her children just as she had, was gazing silently down at her from above.
“I saw it myself. Half of her body was crushed to pulp. By your people.”
Lu Yuzhu couldn’t say anything.
“What did she do wrong, Lu Yuzhu? She didn’t say many extraordinary things throughout her life, but I still remember the one sentence she spoke with gravitas. She said that even when they are exhausted, every ordinary person longs for the truth; the people in this world must believe in something bright to strive for survival. She hoped that the police badge on her shoulder shone brightly, that it was something that the helpless could trust. But your comrades, your organization, and your people killed her. Her epaulettes were ground to pieces.”
Lu Yuzhu’s fingertips trembled faintly.
“The people you should hate are not the police but rather the criminals who framed and slandered you,” Xie Qingcheng said. “Come back, Lu Yuzhu. Some things shouldn’t have happened this way.”
Lu Yuzhu looked like a wandering ghost with more than a decade of her complicated life twisting and tearing through her body. Finally, she raised her head and said to Xie Qingcheng in an unexpectedly raspy voice, “I regret it.”
Now, it was Xie Qingcheng’s turn to be stunned.
“I regret it…” she murmured. “Did you know…that when the prosecutor found me, this was the sentence that he repeated the most.”
Lu Yuzhu said softly, “At the time, I wondered what he was actually trying to say with those words. He meant ‘you lived miserably, but it has nothing to do with me.’”
She looked at Xie Qingcheng with a complicated expression.
After a few seconds, she continued, “But right now, I’m telling you that I regret it. I do feel it now, so I’m thinking that maybe…maybe he didn’t mean ‘it has nothing to do with me.’ Maybe he truly felt distraught on my behalf. But—”
Lu Yuzhu changed the topic. Under the cold gray basement light, she said slowly, “There are some things that you can’t come back from. Maybe our people had no choice but to involve the innocent. And maybe it was wrong, maybe it was a sin, but in my most desperate and unbearable moment, it was our people who saved me and gave me a place to belong.”
Xie Qingcheng remained silent.
“Without them, I might have already killed myself during this long, slow search for the truth. It was too painful; I wouldn’t have been able to wait until the truth came to light. I can’t say that you’re wrong,” Lu Yuzhu said gently to Xie Qingcheng. “And I know that I’m wrong. But I belong completely to the darkness now. The light is unfamiliar to me. Right or wrong, he gave me my life. I won’t betray him, even if I die.”
“You don’t think that he saved you just to use you?” asked Xie Qingcheng. “That he saved you for this day, so he’d have someone who would keep their mouth shut even if their life was on the line? There’s a five-minute countdown on the detonator and it can be remotely controlled, so why didn’t they take you with them? They want you to die in the explosion along with the things they want to destroy.”
Lu Yuzhu smiled. “You’re giving him too little credit.”
Xie Qingcheng stared at her.
“He said that he’d take me away, that he didn’t intend to leave me behind. But I was the one who wanted to stay. This case has kicked up too big of a fuss, and it’s given a clear enough warning to the others; he always needed to have a few people in the country to give the police a way to close the case,” Lu Yuzhu said. “If I wanted to stay alive, I could very well escape after pressing the button; he even gave me time to change my mind.
“But I don’t want to,” she concluded. “I don’t want to fall into the hands of the police, and I don’t want to return to the place where I was locked up for so long. I’m not willing to be interrogated in any way, and I don’t want to cooperate. Death doesn’t frighten me at all. It’s only living that causes me endless despair.”
As she spoke, Lu Yuzhu slowly retreated into the depths of the basement, out of the light and into the darkness.
She didn’t want to step forward. She couldn’t step forward anymore.
She reached a hand behind her—at the small of her back, she was carrying a handgun.
She had never fired a gun before. This was the last thing the organization had given to her, in the unlikely situation that it would come in handy. She wasn’t sure if she could aim it accurately, but at least it was worth a try…
Her gaze fell on that young man in black who hadn’t said a word from beginning to end, who was still tapping away on his phone screen at top speed.
It was true. She could no longer remember the Lu Yuzhu who had once been Qingli County’s party secretary.
Her heart lurched as she soundlessly gritted her teeth and disengaged the gun’s safety with a trembling hand…
Ding. The notification of an incoming message sounded suddenly.
He Yu paused in the middle of his coding battle.
He had set up a firewall to block any incoming messages, but this one had been sent by the other technician after breaking through his barrier. During their ongoing confrontation, his opponent had managed to send him an anonymous message.
It contained a video.
The message’s text said, Edward, I’ve identified both of you. Take a look at this first, then think about whether you really want to go to such lengths for him.