It felt like she was submerged in fire, her body burning piece by piece.
Just then!
A pair of hands suddenly grasped her waist with tremendous force, squeezing until her ribs shook with agony, then hauled her straight out of the water.
The water sloshed unsteadily, surging to her chin again, choking her nose and mouth. The salty wetness flooded her lungs, leaving Fu Tingli in misery.
The person pulling her out was trembling too, clearly in excruciating pain.
This woman, who hadn’t so much as flinched at her own wounds, was now doubled over in agony—who knew how badly hurt she was.
Yet she still dragged Fu Tingli through the briny sea toward the shore.
Fu Tingli’s eyelids grew heavy, drooping. In the churning, shallowing waves, she forced her eyes open to look.
She saw the woman’s clothes torn to rags, her body crisscrossed with wounds no fewer than Fu Tingli’s own, the surrounding seawater stained red.
Fu Tingli clung to her desperately, as if they were wading together down a blood-soaked final path, leaving crimson in their wake.
At last, they staggered onto the shore.
Only then did the woman cough up several mouthfuls of water, collapsing onto her back on the shore, gasping for air. Her soaked hair dripped continuously, mingled with translucent blood.
Fu Tingli gasped for breath too, feeling drenched to the bone, her eyelids heavier, her vision blurring.
But lying there on the cold, salty rocks, in her daze, she still managed to ask,
“You don’t… cough… can’t… cough cough… swim?”
She knew the water wasn’t deep where they’d fallen, but the waves kept pounding. For a nonswimmer to dive in after her would have been a death sentence.
The woman didn’t answer. She just kept coughing, hunched over in evident distress, as if she might retch up her insides.
“What’s… wrong?” Fu Tingli spoke slowly, struggling to sit up from the rocks, intending to help the woman.
In the dim night, thick waves crashed with immense, roaring power. The woman lifted her pale eyelids to meet Fu Tingli’s gaze, staring fixedly for a moment.
Fu Tingli felt more liquid trickle down from her eyelids and lowered them.
The woman coughed several more times, her voice hoarse as if she’d swallowed a lungful of water to pull Fu Tingli out. Fu Tingli saw translucent blood water pooling beneath her on the rocks, and watched as the woman laboriously straightened up, shuffled over, slung Fu Tingli over her shoulder, and wrapped an arm around her waist.
She supported Fu Tingli as they navigated the jagged rocks for a few steps. Fu Tingli struggled to keep pace.
Everything around her seemed to sway and spin; she collapsed onto the woman’s shoulder, utterly spent.
“Once we’re out, I’ll call the cops for sure. We’ll get those blond thugs!”
She coughed as she spoke, feeling deeply wronged. Qiao Lipan might not have spoiled her rotten, but she’d lived smoothly to twenty without running into truly vile people or enduring suffering like this.
Hearing this, the woman actually smiled, her face growing even paler, like a sheet of paper.
But the smile didn’t last; she choked up more water. Once the coughing subsided, she took a few more ragged breaths, then bent down and hoisted Fu Tingli onto her back.
“Don’t worry. They won’t get off easy,” the woman said softly, her voice laced with something wild and unhinged.
“You… just leave me here. Put me down.”
Fu Tingli could barely process the words anymore. Her eyelids weighed her down; everything in her vision bled into a hazy crimson, like a film of life-or-death combat.
She slumped limply on the woman’s back, her voice faint and drifting. “You go find a car or someone first, then come back for me.”
Their clothes were sodden, and with the night wind blowing, their feverish, blood-warmed bodies pressed together in shared heat.
Phones or any means of contact had been lost in the crash and plunge.
Fu Tingli felt her body growing light with pain, as if closing her eyes would send her floating away.
“I can’t find the phone.”
In her haze, she heard the woman carrying her murmur indistinctly, fragments like “not sure,” “not safe,” “can climb up here,” “find a car”…
She clenched her teeth, forcing her eyelids open to see fresh red blood dripping onto the woman’s shoulder, then trailing slowly along the path they’d taken.
“You’re bleeding,” she said weakly.
The woman took a few labored steps, her voice trembling. “No, that’s your blood.”
“Is it?”
Fu Tingli felt the world lurching, jolting her into dizziness.
So she shut her eyes, and just before consciousness slipped away, she tightened her grip around the woman’s neck.
Her eyes ached and burned, swollen from the seawater. She managed only two words:
“You’re lying.”
Then, it seemed the woman laughed again—or perhaps murmured something faint and foggy.
She could no longer make out the words clearly. They simply drifted around her ears, refusing to sink in.
Irritation and dizziness washed over her.
She had no idea how much time had passed, nor whether she had truly fainted along the way. All she knew was the relentless crashing of waves echoing in her ears, wave after punishing wave battering her eardrums and her heart, never quite settling.
At some point, the sounds grew louder—murmurs of a crowd, the shrill wail of an ambulance siren, the woman’s breathing growing heavier and heavier.
With great effort, she pried open her eyelids. Flashing red and yellow lights assaulted her vision, painfully bright. Amid the glare, a frantic group of people rushed toward them.
The commotion was deafening, the whole world spinning around her. Yet she heard nothing. Everything felt slow, as if these people and scenes were bypassing her mind altogether, reduced to silent, cinematic cuts with no sound, just images.
In her ears lingered only the wind, her own breath, and the woman’s.
Then their heartbeats merged—thump-thump, thump-thump—enveloping the entire world, as if the whole Northern Hemisphere held just the two of them.
The woman’s back was soaked, torn open, filthy, streaked with red… Her hair clung wetly to her nape, translucent blood trickling slowly down. Her neck glistened with moisture, and the arms holding her were slipping.
She patted the woman’s back and murmured indistinctly, “Put me down.”
The woman didn’t. She stubbornly kept carrying her, step by stubborn step.
She managed a faint smile, struck by how bullheaded the woman was—though even that small expression sent pain lancing through her entire body.
Still, summoning every ounce of strength, she wrapped one arm around the woman’s neck. With her other hand, she awkwardly crooked her index finger around the object clutched in her palm, the one that belonged to the woman.
The thing had tumbled with her through the chaos, soaked in seawater, then in bright red blood. It was slick now, hard to hold.
It took considerable effort, but she finally maneuvered her hand in front of the woman and slowly uncurled her fingers, pain drawing beads of cold sweat from her brow.
A faint clink.
In that instant, the woman’s breath hitched. For one fleeting second, the world fell utterly silent.
The gash at her finger’s knuckle was deep, flesh torn open, bits of gravel embedded inside. She forced her curled fingers straight, and a necklace slipped from her palm, swaying limply in the air.
The blaring ambulance noise faded to background hum. Fresh, slick blood mixed with grime dripped steadily from the chain.
From the moment she realized the car was veering off the road—through the endless rolling crashes down the slope, to the final plunge into the water—Fu Tingli had gripped that necklace with all her might.
She couldn’t explain why. When she sensed they were falling, her first instinct wasn’t to grab any other valuable or precious item, but only this necklace tucked inside her jacket.
She hadn’t even glimpsed its appearance before instinctively seizing it.
Perhaps it was that offhand remark the woman had once made: “Without it, I wouldn’t last three days.” Ridiculous, she’d thought—no such logic existed in the world—yet she’d clung to it fiercely.
She held on until the dust settled and she spotted the ambulance, until she made out the letters on it: L.A.
Those stark letters glowed amid the pallid lights, stark amid the swarm of shadows and streaming blood.
A piercing premonition sliced through the chaos, overwhelming her. Fu Tingli could almost hear the coin flip, landing heads or tails on the table, sealing everything’s fate.
The feeling was more tangible than any past farewell. She knew that when she opened her eyes again, they’d be in Los Angeles. She knew that when she awoke, there might be no “see you later” between them.
That realization kept her gritting her teeth, holding on. She’d even pressed the necklace into her sharp wound repeatedly.
Only when she confirmed they were both alive, both pulled through to this point, did she finally relax. Then exhaustion crashed over her, and she let out a weary breath.
Her face buried in the woman’s neck—reeking of blood, slick and sticky—her hand clenched tight around the necklace.
Just before blacking out completely.
She felt hands lifting her from the woman’s back, felt others clumsily loading the injured woman, hunched and straining, onto a stretcher.
She pushed away the hands pressing on her and, with effort, shoved the necklace into the woman’s grasp. Finally, weak and broken, she was lifted onto her own stretcher.
Prying open her eyelids, she met those eyes, growing ever more distant.
Her lips parted amid the blood-scent enveloping her life. Her voice, whatever it was, seemed swallowed by the night’s wind.
“Here, safe travels.”
Even she didn’t know why those words surfaced in her mind. That very morning, Zhu Muzi had straddled the motorcycle and said to her, “See you later.”
She’d thought it so cool, those two on bikes delivering it like a vow from some epic romance film, grand and lingering, worth savoring endlessly.
Yet she’d wished her safe travels instead.
Later, she’d mull over that farewell, realizing it was because, more than “see you later,” she wanted her to have smooth sailing.
She remembered nothing after that. She passed out for real.
But she did remember.
The last of California’s three summer nights had bled into dawn. The longest day crept in, a sliver of light piercing the window. Grimacing, she woke on the hospital bed.
She saw a pair of breathtakingly beautiful eyes, filled with emotions she couldn’t read, their dark pupils edged with hazy light.
She couldn’t fathom why the woman gazed at her like that, so she laboriously raised a finger, trying to trace those eyes more clearly.
The woman’s silky long hair cascaded down, the wounds on her face still vivid.
Strands brushed her cheek, tickling the edge of her bandages.
She watched those eyes shift from blur to sharp focus. She watched the woman draw closer.
Her strength gave out. The eyes blurred again.
At last, a faint sigh, one that would drift through her dreams many times after.
She woke again at dusk. The vast room stood empty, a bouquet of California lupine and stacks of cash at the bedside.
If this were a movie, it had reached the end. The audience faced the most desolate freeze-frame of those three days and nights.
That birthday was her first spent in the dead of night. Eyes vacant, under Qiao Lipan’s worried gaze, she turned twenty.
Listlessly sipping bitter water, she leaned weakly against Qiao Lipan’s waist and blew out the candles on the belated birthday cake.
Her hospital gown felt cool against her chest, like something was missing. Idly, she reached into the neckline and touched a necklace.
No blood stained it now, no trace of the crash—as if it had never been steeped in their mingled blood, as if it had always been just a pristine chain with a single letter pendant:
Zoe.
Night fell heavy and cold. She didn’t understand why summer in Los Angeles felt so frigid, the wind biting at her skin. Clutching the necklace tightly, she wondered in her heart: Was this her name?
Its meaning truly was “life.” She’d said, “Without it, I wouldn’t last three days.” They’d already parted ways… Why had she left this necklace to her?
Los Angeles nights stretched long as days. That cliffside crash into the sea left Fu Tingli only a scar on her finger’s knuckle.
Later, that scar would chap in Shanghai’s winters. Straining to recall traces of her twenty-odd summers, she’d find them all hazy.
Only that one in California felt earth-shattering. How could it have been so impossibly brief?
As if it had lasted only three days.
