Sensing Zhou Xu's discomfort, Ning Zhe changed the subject on his own. "Thanks for getting me out of that mess today."
"I only found out by chance myself. My boy just got back and told me, he was out scavenging trash and heard some mercenaries were making a list of refugees who weren't home tonight. Those stronghold men said anyone who could give them a lead would get fifty yuan as a reward. They also said something about bandits showing up around here, and if anyone had solid information on the robbers, the reward would be five thousand. My boy said he saw Hu Zhida go find those mercenaries, and I just knew he was out to hurt you." Zhou Xu laid out everything he knew. "You know how it is, those men from inside the walls never once treat us refugees like people. If they'd set their sights on you, you'd have been in real danger."
"Without you, I really would've had a hard time explaining myself tonight." Ning Zhe nodded, then pulled out every last bit of cash he had on him. "Brother Zhou, keep this. Let your wife take it and start a small trade in the settlement. But don't go too big with it, or once someone notices, you won't be able to protect them if trouble comes."
"Xiao Zhe, where'd you even get this much money?" Zhou Xu's eyes twitched at the sight of the cash in Ning Zhe's hand. "Winter's coming, everyone's struggling right now. I can't take this."
"I've got hunting skills. I won't starve wherever I go. Take it." Ning Zhe pressed the money into Zhou Xu's hands without waiting for an answer, then turned and left.
Inside the drafty shack, Zhou Xu sat clutching the cash, still warm from Ning Zhe's hand, and two lines of tears fell onto his severed leg.
Zhou Xu had lost that leg years ago, crushed while saving Ning Zhe's adoptive father. After Old Man Lin passed, if Ning Zhe hadn't kept looking after the Zhou family, the three of them would probably have starved to death long ago.
Plenty of people in the settlement called Ning Zhe cold-blooded, but he understood one thing well enough: when someone had done right by you, you paid it back.
Otherwise, the next time trouble came, no one would lift a finger for you.
Out here on the wasteland, every favor came with strings attached. That was just how things were.
Back home, Ning Zhe held his urine-soaked trousers in both hands and roasted them over the coal brazier.
"Brother, now that we've made it past the mercenaries' check, are we in the clear?" Lin Xun asked, turning a potato skewered on a stick over the coals.
"We should be safe for now, but I really didn't expect all this to blow up so big without us even killing anyone, big enough that they'd send mercenaries out of the stronghold at night to search the place. If I'd known it would go this far, we shouldn't have left anyone alive back there." Ning Zhe muttered, a hint of regret in his voice.
"We only stole something, and it already caused this much of a stir. If we'd actually killed someone, things would definitely be even worse than they are now. If a city person had died, that excuse tonight might not have worked at all!" Lin Xun turned the stick with the roasting potato. "With Dongbao and the others all gone now, hunting's going to get a lot harder for us. Brother, do you think we'll actually make it through this winter?"
"Remember what your dad used to tell us? If you can't see any hope, then make your own." Ning Zhe ran a hand over the trousers, mostly dry by now. "Get some sleep. Didn't Dongbao say, right before he died, that he's got a little brother up in the north side of the city? We need to go find him tomorrow."
Early the next morning, just as a faint band of gold light was breaking over the horizon, Ning Zhe and Lin Xun had already made their way to the north side, asking around through the refugee villages there, but they couldn't turn up a single trace of Li Dongfa.
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Because the atmosphere had grown so thin these days, too much time under direct sunlight brought on an unbearable allergic reaction, so by midday the two of them didn't dare linger out on the open wasteland any longer. They pulled back to the nearest settlement to wait out the worst of the sun.
Lin Xun dug out the last twenty yuan he had and bought a skin of water and two bean cakes from a roadside stall, then crouched down with Ning Zhe in a patch of shade by the road. Prices in the settlement ran high, far beyond what most refugees could afford. Without factory work inside the walls, staying alive out here was brutally hard.
"Brother, I was just talking to the guy selling the bean cakes. He said a plague hit one of the villages around here a while back, and a lot of people got exiled because of it, so the makeup of a lot of the refugee villages has shifted since then. Finding Li Dongfa in all this is going to be like finding a needle in a haystack." Lin Xun handed the waterskin over to Ning Zhe, a little dejected. "And if he got exiled too, that'll make things even worse."
"If we don't find him in a day, we look for two. I made a promise to Dongbao, and I'm going to keep it." Ning Zhe had already braced himself for this, and took a slow sip from the waterskin.
While the two of them were talking, a thin, frail little girl came and stood in front of them, staring at the black bean cakes in their hands, swallowing hard. "Mister! Give me something to eat, please!"
Lin Xun's hand moved on instinct, already starting to break off a piece of the cake.
"Smack!"
Ning Zhe grabbed his arm. "Eat your own food. Stay out of this."
"Brother, she's just a kid..." Lin Xun started to explain.
"Get lost!" Ning Zhe barked, shooing the little girl away, and went back to eating. "A kid her age has managed to survive in this settlement. She might well have more food coming her way each day than you do. It's already hard enough for the two of us to keep hunting. If you can't take care of yourself yet, you need to learn to save yourself first, not go handing out your pity. Otherwise, once you run out of food and have to start begging, you'll have a far harder time of it than she does. Nobody feels sorry for a grown man."
In the refugee zone, plenty of kind people who gave alms to beggars ended up robbed and killed for showing they had something worth taking. In this age, doing wrong didn't always bring ruin, and doing right didn't always bring reward.
Hearing this, Lin Xun broke his bean cake in half, tucked one half into his pocket, and ate the other in two or three bites.
"I already asked around too. People say most of the ones left after the plague moved out to the new village to the east. Let's go, we'll ask around there." Ning Zhe finished off half of his own bean cake, then pushed out into the crowd under the blazing sun.
Half an hour later, the two of them had reached the edge of the settlement, the border zone between the town and the open wasteland, a lawless stretch crawling with every kind of unsavory type.
Lin Xun stood at a crossroads, spotting a shack in the distance with a sign hanging out front that read "Dongfa's Roast Meats." He slapped Ning Zhe on the arm. "Brother! That sign's got the same name as Dongbao's little brother. You think that could be the guy we're looking for?"
Ning Zhe glanced at the sign and nodded. "Let's go take a look."
As they rounded the shack, they came upon a chubby young man standing behind a stall built out of packed yellow clay. In the coal pit on the stall sat several skinned rats, skewered on sticks, but the man's attention wasn't on the rats at all. He was looking at the girl standing in front of him.
"A-Fa, I'm getting married... I'm sorry." The girl choked back tears as she looked at him. "I really can't wait for you any longer. You always kept telling me you'd make something of yourself, but neither me nor my family can see any hope in you. The man I'm marrying is a warden's son. Once we're wed, his father's going to get my dad and my little brother work at the water plant. Don't keep running this stall selling roasted rats anymore. A business like this, your life's never going anywhere with it. You'll never climb out of being a refugee, not like this."
"Xiaomei, I'm the one who should be sorry. I'm the one who wasted all these years of your life. Thank you for staying with me as long as you did, and I hope you go on to somewhere far better than this. I'll always wish you well, wish you nothing but good things ahead." The chubby young man fought back tears, his hand curling into a fist, hidden beneath the stall.
The girl pressed her lips together, her eyes full of sorrow. "Is there... anything else you want to say to me?"
"...Are you planning to serve rat meat at the wedding? I'll give you the wholesale price on a batch, get you all a real bargain." The chubby young man's eyes brimmed with tears as he said it.
The girl: "???"
Standing a short distance off, Lin Xun heard the words, froze for a second, then slapped his own thigh. "Holy shit, this guy's a straight-up business genius! Look at that vision! His girl's walking out on him and he still hasn't forgotten to move his rat meat!"