The test results on the glass shard came back. DNA comparison confirmed that the trace amount of blood remaining on it belonged to Lou Xiaoguo.
“Now he can’t deny it.” Cheng Cu let out a long breath and looked at Chen Zheng with open admiration. “Bro Chen really does have experience. The rest of us had run out of roads to take, and only Bro Chen was convinced there had to be a reason Lou Xiaoguo chose the stationery factory. Ren Jie is still too naive, though. Lou Xiaoguo didn’t kill anyone for her sake. Bro Chen, want to go interrogate Lou Xiaoguo together?”
Chen Zheng stood and picked up his notebook. “Let’s go.”
“Wait.” Ming Han cut in. “Does Nanshan City have nobody left? Why are you always grabbing my bro for everything?”
Caught off guard by the jab, Cheng Cu shot back, “You’re talking like you weren’t born and raised here yourself. Bro Chen is willing to help. What’s wrong with that?”
“I’ll interrogate him. You come with me.” Ming Han turned to Chen Zheng. “Bro, rest here. Watch the surveillance feed if you feel like it. If not, play on your phone.”
Chen Zheng laughed. “At a time like this, what would I be playing on my phone for?”
Ming Han’s expression turned serious. “Lou Xiaoguo and I went to the same school. Better to let me handle it.”
Chen Zheng understood what he meant and nodded. “Then I’ll watch the surveillance feed while playing on my phone.”
When Lou Xiaoguo saw the glass shard sealed inside the evidence bag, he went blank for a moment, then actually started laughing. He laughed for a long time, his shoulders shaking so hard that Cheng Cu finally had to remind him, “Lou Xiaoguo, have you lost your mind?”
Lou Xiaoguo wiped the tears of laughter from his eyes with the back of his hand. “I never should’ve counted on getting lucky.”
Ming Han supplied the next line for him. “And you never should’ve stuck your nose into other people’s business, right?”
Lou Xiaoguo stopped laughing. His brown eyes shifted to Ming Han, then silently to the evidence bag and the forensic report beside it. “That day, I actually knew I seemed to have left something on the wall. I even risked going back the next night to check, but I couldn’t find any glass shard with a problem. So… she hid all of them.”
Ming Han said, “So Kong Chunxiang and Zhong Lishan were killed by you?”
Instead of answering, Lou Xiaoguo asked, “If I hadn’t dumped their bodies at the stationery factory, would you have any evidence now?”
“Yes.”
“What?” Lou Xiaoguo’s expression changed.
“You left behind your own unique ‘signature,’” Ming Han said. “That was the most important clue.”
Lou Xiaoguo froze for a moment, then nodded. “Right. Right.”
Ming Han asked, “Why did you kill those two? They were ordinary migrant workers.”
Lou Xiaoguo raised his chin and stared at Ming Han for a long while. “You’re different from before.”
Ming Han said, “We can talk about personal matters later.”
“Later?” Lou Xiaoguo said. “I probably don’t have much of a later left. And don’t misunderstand. I’m not interested in your private life. I just suddenly remembered what you were like when you attended Nanxi Middle School. You and the person sitting here now are nothing alike.”
Chen Zheng looked up from his phone and frowned at the monitor.
“Trying to dig into my identity?” Ming Han smiled. “Doesn’t seem like you’re qualified.”
Lou Xiaoguo smiled too. “Full of yourself. Back then you were pretty lonely, and stubborn too. Once you sank your teeth into Teacher Xue, you couldn’t see anyone else. If you’d been the person you are now, you probably would’ve realized long ago that Teacher Xue was protecting someone else. Me.”
“Too bad this world doesn’t have time machines.” Ming Han said calmly, “What could a middle-school kid do? Realizing something was wrong with Xue Chenwen was already pretty good. I’ve never set the bar very high for myself.”
Ming Han’s attitude left Lou Xiaoguo feeling as though he had punched cotton and could find no purchase.
“But you managed to do a lot more as a middle-school kid than I did,” Ming Han went on. “For example, arranging for Ping Yiyi and Li Shuxing to die, then getting a teacher to shield you.”
Lou Xiaoguo frowned. “If anyone could get through middle school and high school peacefully, who wouldn’t want to?”
Ming Han asked, “What did they do to you?”
Lou Xiaoguo lowered his head. It was as though invisible seawater had poured into the interrogation room and was quietly drowning him.
Lou Xiaoguo had almost no concept of his father. That weak, despicable man faded out of his life when he was very young. His strong mother raised him alone. When he was in elementary school, she borrowed money wherever she could and combined it with years of savings to open an internet café near the most prestigious middle school in the city.
His mother often took him by the hand to the entrance of Nanxi Middle School, pointed at the gates, and said, “Mom will find a way to send you in there. Other people’s children can study here, and mine can too!”
He wanted to tell her that he did not want to attend Nanxi Middle School. Not a single classmate of his was going there. Even though he was young, he already understood money and class well enough to know that a place like that was not something a family like theirs should aspire to. If his mother had extra money, he would rather she sent him to art classes. But under her burning gaze, he swallowed the words.
His mother was a superhero. By the year he graduated from elementary school, she really had saved enough money to send him to Nanxi Middle School. He spent the entire summer anxious and uneasy, while his mother became a little neurotic, repeating whenever she had the chance, “Mom emptied everything we had to send you to Nanxi and owes a lot of people favors. You absolutely cannot disappoint me.”
Walking on eggshells, he entered Nanxi Middle School and was placed in a regular-track class. Regular-track though it was, most of the students still came from very well-off families. He resolved to keep his head down for all three years and never cause trouble for his mother.
But during PE class, he suddenly became the center of attention. His classmates stared at him enviously. “Lou Xiaoguo, are you a speedster or something?”
A speedster? In elementary school, he had always run the anchor leg in relay races at sports meets. He knew he was fairly fast, but he had never thought of it as talent. He had shot up a lot over the summer and his legs were longer. Was that why he was faster now?
The PE teacher was even more surprised than his classmates. After class, the teacher kept him behind and said he wanted to take him to meet Teacher You from the athletic-specialty program. Lou Xiaoguo was not very willing, but he obediently went along.
The moment Teacher You arrived, he squeezed Lou Xiaoguo’s shoulders, hands, and feet, then told him to run. At the whistle, Lou Xiaoguo shot forward like an arrow loosed from the string. At the finish line, he saw an expression of overwhelming delight on Teacher You’s face.
This athletic-specialty coach, someone whose life should never have intersected with his, began appearing frequently around him, trying to persuade him to become a track athlete. His homeroom teacher joined in too, explaining that athletic-specialty students received admissions advantages and scholarships, could gain direct admission into the high-school division, and essentially earned money simply by studying. If he performed well in high school too, he might even compete at the national level someday.
Lou Xiaoguo was never very interested. The Chinese term for “specialty student” contained the character for being “outstanding,” and to him, being outstanding meant sticking your head above the crowd. Ever since entering Nanxi Middle School, he had wanted as little attention as possible. It was the inferiority complex carved into the bones of a child who had grown up at the bottom of society.
But Teacher You clearly had no intention of giving up on him. If Lou Xiaoguo could not be persuaded, then he would persuade his mother. Teacher You had already learned about their family situation and listed benefit after benefit of becoming an athletic-specialty student. The important points were simple: worry-free advancement to the next school level, and earning money while studying.
His mother was obviously convinced. Lou Xiaoguo could refuse Teacher You and his homeroom teacher, but looking at his mother’s exhausted eyes after years of hard work, he could not say no.
And so he became an athletic-specialty student, Teacher You’s most valued pupil. At the time, he had no idea that when students advanced from ninth grade, athletic-specialty and arts-specialty students were assessed together. He knew even less that as a late recruit, he should never have been able to get an athletic-specialty slot at all. Li Shuxing had used the “power of money” to secure one, only for that slot to end up in the hands of Lou Xiaoguo, who had no such “power of money.”
Lou Xiaoguo had never had anything to do with Li Shuxing. Some boys from families not much better off than his liked sucking up to Li Shuxing, while Lou Xiaoguo went out of his way to avoid him. As for Ping Yiyi, he had never spoken a single word to her. He only knew that she was an arts-specialty student who painted, had barely made it into Nanxi Middle School, and apparently was not very good.
He was a little envious of Ping Yiyi. He liked drawing too. If only he had talent for art and an arts-specialty teacher had noticed him. At least drawing was not so exhausting.
Being an athletic-specialty student was simply too tiring. Every day was nothing but monotonous running and conditioning. Teacher You was strict, and after every training session Lou Xiaoguo felt as though he were dying. He saw teammates slacking off. He could have done the same, but then he would have felt he was letting his mother down.
Other people thought his days on the track team were glorious. Lou Xiaoguo only felt tired and empty.
After half a semester, he had finally grown accustomed to life as an athletic-specialty student when misfortune began to show itself around him. He sensitively noticed that there always seemed to be a malicious gaze fixed on his back. Whenever he turned, all he saw was a group of giggling girls. He could not understand it. He barely spoke to girls. Who would look at him that way?
One day after training, he left school alone as usual. At that hour, almost all students who were not athletic- or arts-specialty students were in their classrooms for evening self-study, and hardly any students could be seen outside the campus. Someone wearing a heavy cloud of perfume appeared in front of him. Only after looking carefully did he realize it was Ping Yiyi. She wore a baseball jacket of a style that had been fashionable back then and a baseball cap, smiling at him. “Xiaoguo, finished training?”
He asked, “Did you need something?”
Ping Yiyi put on a troubled expression. “There’s something I want to discuss with you. Do you know there’s an assessment next month?”
Teacher You had never mentioned any assessment. Lou Xiaoguo shook his head. “What assessment?”
“You don’t know?” Ping Yiyi said. “It affects our future school placement. Why don’t we go somewhere else to talk?”
He did not want to go, but back then it never occurred to him that Ping Yiyi intended to set him up, so he followed her. Ping Yiyi led him through an alley, saying her family lived nearby. Beyond it was a workers’ sports court that had been abandoned long ago. Nanshan City was an industrial city, once home to many huge factories. Though those factories had moved away, quite a few old workers’ courts like this remained. Retired factory workers often came there to play cards during the day, but at night the place was as desolate as a prison.
He stopped at the entrance and did not go inside. “What exactly is it you wanted to—”
Before he could finish, a kick slammed into his back with enough force to send him sprawling hard onto the dusty ground. His teeth split his lip. He hurriedly turned around and saw Li Shuxing standing behind him, while Ping Yiyi, who had been smiling sweetly moments before, now stood beside Li Shuxing with her hands in her pockets, looking down at him arrogantly.
“You…”
“Enjoying my slot?” Li Shuxing kicked him in the face. “Get up. What are you lying there for?”
Lou Xiaoguo was dazed from the beating. “What slot?”
Li Shuxing hauled him up. “Still playing dumb with me? I paid for that athletic-specialty slot, and you stole it!”
“I didn’t…” Lou Xiaoguo suddenly realized Teacher You had not told him the truth. Back when Teacher You had been trying every possible way to recruit him, Lou Xiaoguo had looked into the athletic-specialty intake system and knew there were no slots left for their cohort. But Teacher You had told him not to worry about the quota.
“You bought it?” he asked.
“You only figured that out now?” Li Shuxing discarded the polite, gentlemanly persona he normally wore in class, revealing the full arrogance of a spoiled rich kid. “So tell me, how are we settling this? You can’t just take my stuff for free.”
Lou Xiaoguo instinctively wanted to say, I’ll give it back, but stopped himself. Give it back? How? Pay back the money for the athletic-specialty slot? Impossible. His family had no spare money. Give the slot itself back to Li Shuxing? Even more impossible. If Li Shuxing could have taken it back, why would he be here causing trouble now?
Lou Xiaoguo asked, “What do you want?”
Li Shuxing gave a vicious grin and drove a knee hard into his stomach. The pain left Lou Xiaoguo speechless and he immediately vomited sour fluid. Li Shuxing stepped closer and planted a foot on him, grinding the sole against his body. “I can’t make the school team, and it’s all your fault. Now you even want to compete with Yiyi for a direct-admission slot. How can someone like you be so fucking shameless?”
What direct-admission slot? Lou Xiaoguo knew nothing about it.
Ping Yiyi crouched and yanked him up by the hair. “Why are you so lucky? You say you don’t want to be an athletic-specialty student, so quit. People like you are the fucking worst!”
Lou Xiaoguo wanted to quit too, but his family needed the stipend he received as an athletic-specialty student. He could not simply walk away!
Li Shuxing said, “Made up your mind yet? Still want to stay an athletic-specialty student?”
Lou Xiaoguo struggled to his feet and wiped his mouth. “If I quit, can you get in?”
Li Shuxing was furious and kicked him in the chest. Lou Xiaoguo might have been considered athletically gifted while Li Shuxing was not, but Li Shuxing had the build of a soccer player, whereas Lou Xiaoguo only knew how to run. Teacher You had told him countless times that he lacked muscle mass. In a fight, he was no match for Li Shuxing. All he could do was dodge uselessly.
“You got one thing right. I can’t get in. I’ve already given up on joining the school team.” Li Shuxing’s voice turned vicious. “But I’m not going to sit back and watch you comfortably occupy my slot.”
The taste of blood surged into Lou Xiaoguo’s mouth. “That’s why I’m asking what you want!”
Ping Yiyi came over and slapped him twice. “Getting cocky now?”
Li Shuxing pulled Ping Yiyi back. “Don’t hit his face. People will notice.”
Ping Yiyi did exactly as Li Shuxing said and stepped back. Li Shuxing grabbed Lou Xiaoguo by the throat. “How about you become our toy?”
A toy? Lou Xiaoguo immediately imagined something disgusting. Li Shuxing gave a sinister laugh. “Hey, what kind of not-safe-for-kids crap are you imagining? You’re disgusting. Aren’t you fast? Everyone calls you the Speedster, don’t they? Then run for me. If I’m satisfied, I’ll forgive you and let you off. How about it?”
Lou Xiaoguo’s first reaction was: That’s all?
Running was something he had to do every day anyway. A little extra running did not seem like a problem. He did not want to provoke these rich kids. If running could settle the matter, he was willing.
“You can go home today. Wash your face properly and don’t let your mom notice. From now on, whenever I need you to run, I’ll give you a signal. You do what you’re told.” Li Shuxing threatened him, “And by the way, you know what my family does, right?”
Lou Xiaoguo knew the Li family and had heard rumors that they had underworld connections. Li Shuxing’s grandfather’s generation was said to have once been involved in the criminal world before washing their hands of it and moving into legitimate business. How could someone like Lou Xiaoguo afford to cross people like that?
When he got home, his mother was still working herself ragged at the internet café. Lou Xiaoguo washed his clothes and put medicine on his injuries. The next day, when his mother saw the bruises and asked what had happened, he said he had fallen during training. She felt both heartbroken and proud, repeatedly praising him for working hard and being sensible, saying that having a son like him made her whole life worthwhile.
Li Shuxing and Ping Yiyi did not summon him immediately. Half a month later, Ping Yiyi handed him an exercise book with a note tucked inside, telling him to come to the workers’ basketball court after training.
Lou Xiaoguo took a deep breath. What had to come had finally come.
He was already panting after training, but Li Shuxing gave him a task: race alongside a car. It did not sound especially difficult because Li Shuxing was not asking him to outrun it.
They chose a road that had plenty of cars but few pedestrians at night. Li Shuxing sat inside the car. At his command, Lou Xiaoguo began sprinting. The road seemed endless, as if there were no way to reach its end. Gradually, Lou Xiaoguo felt as though a hole had torn open in his lungs, air roaring through it with stabbing pain. Li Shuxing would not let him stop. Lou Xiaoguo collapsed onto the ground, his head starved of oxygen from running.
Li Shuxing poured icy water over his head. “What’s wrong with you? Aren’t you an athletic-specialty student? Aren’t you the Speedster? You can’t even finish this? Get up. We’re moving on to the next exercise. I’m doing this for your own good.”
He was forced to run without rest. On ordinary weeknights, Li Shuxing held back somewhat, but on weekends he took Lou Xiaoguo out to the suburbs and chased him from behind in a car. Lou Xiaoguo became prey pursued by a predator, often running until his vision went black and the last thing he heard before losing consciousness was Li Shuxing and Ping Yiyi laughing arrogantly.
They wanted to cripple him. Running was his gift, and they meant to take that gift away. Yet he could not resist them. He had promised his mother he would persevere, and she was still dreaming of him becoming an athlete and moving into a big villa. He could not give up now.
Li Shuxing gradually grew dissatisfied with merely making him run and escalated to worse methods. Parkour was very popular abroad at the time, though few people in China practiced it. Li Shuxing found it fascinating but had no desire to try it himself, so he ordered Lou Xiaoguo to do it for him.
“With your build and speed, it’d be a waste if you didn’t do parkour, right? Run. Do it well and you’ll get a reward. Do it badly… you know what happens.”
The deserted workers’ court at night became Lou Xiaoguo’s first parkour ground. He had to vault railings and jump down from walls, bruising himself all over. Whenever he showed the slightest thought of resisting, Li Shuxing threatened his mother’s safety.
At last, one day, the pain inside him became unbearable. After school, he quietly cried in an empty corridor. Someone approached from behind, and he hurriedly wiped away his tears. It was Xue Chenwen, Li Shuxing’s Chinese-language teacher, said to be the best young teacher at Nanxi Middle School.
“What’s wrong?” Xue Chenwen handed him a tissue. “Did you do badly on a test?”
Lou Xiaoguo shook his head and said nothing.
Rain was falling outside, its soft patter seeming to seal the rest of the world away. Xue Chenwen sat beside him on the stairs. Lou Xiaoguo said nothing, and neither did Xue Chenwen. At that moment, Lou Xiaoguo desperately wanted to confide in him. But would Xue Chenwen take his side? Would he dare offend the Li family?
They sat that way for an unknown amount of time. When the rain weakened, Xue Chenwen stood and extended a hand to him. “Go home. Whatever difficulty you’re facing will pass.”
Lou Xiaoguo nodded. “Mm.”
That encounter did not change his predicament. Li Shuxing and Ping Yiyi continued finding new ways to torment him. His performance on the track team began to decline, and Teacher You put even more pressure on him.
Basic parkour no longer satisfied Li Shuxing. He took Lou Xiaoguo to construction sites and abandoned factories and made him jump from walls and bridges several meters high. No matter how light or agile Lou Xiaoguo was, he still got hurt. Li Shuxing had no choice but to let him rest for a while.
Lou Xiaoguo ran into Xue Chenwen at school again, but this time Xue Chenwen was the one crying. It was an evening after track practice. Lou Xiaoguo saw Xue Chenwen leaning against a railing in a daze. Only after approaching did he realize Xue Chenwen was crying.
“Teacher Xue, what’s wrong?” he could not help asking.
Xue Chenwen hurriedly wiped his tears, but perhaps he was too upset; he could not wipe them away fast enough.
“Did someone bully you?” Lou Xiaoguo asked.
Xue Chenwen was choking too hard on his sobs to speak. Lou Xiaoguo searched himself and found no clean tissues, so he ran to the school shop to buy a pack, hoping Xue Chenwen would still be there when he returned. Xue Chenwen had not left. When he took the tissues, he softly said, “Thank you.”
“You told me that difficulties always pass.” Lou Xiaoguo was not good at comforting people, and the words came out haltingly. “I don’t know what happened to you, or whether someone upset you, but you’re a good person. So whoever made you sad must be the one in the wrong.”
Xue Chenwen looked at him with a complicated expression. Lou Xiaoguo hurriedly turned his face away, thinking he had said something wrong.
A little later, Xue Chenwen thanked him again and seemed considerably calmer. Lou Xiaoguo did not rush to leave. He saw Xue Chenwen pick up a small stone and draw something on the ground. Curious, he crouched down too. “Teacher Xue, are you drawing… a dragonfly?”
“Mm.” Xue Chenwen drew a cicada beside it.
Lou Xiaoguo’s fingers itched, so he drew a dragonfly and a cicada too.
Xue Chenwen said, “You draw well. Do you like drawing too?”
Lou Xiaoguo instinctively wanted to say yes, but shook his head instead. “Not that much.”
“You’re so contrary,” Xue Chenwen said. “If you like it, why not admit it?”
Because I don’t have the right. Lou Xiaoguo thought this, then asked, “Why do you draw insects?”
“I really like insects.”
“Insects?” Lou Xiaoguo was surprised.
“Because their vitality is so strong,” Xue Chenwen explained. “Even if nobody understands them, even if their lives are short, they still go on reproducing generation after generation.”
Lou Xiaoguo only half understood. Xue Chenwen dropped the little stone, smiled at him, thanked him once more, and said he was all right now.
His injuries had not fully healed when Li Shuxing found him a new task: parkour at an abandoned factory’s table-tennis court, while still continuing the races against cars. Lou Xiaoguo endured and endured, but his state of mind had already changed. Hatred grew inside him without pause. He no longer hoped Li Shuxing would let him go. He wanted Li Shuxing dead, and Ping Yiyi too.
While practicing parkour, he happened to notice something peculiar about the table-tennis court. Its roof looked sturdy but was actually extremely fragile; one careless step could send someone falling through. The roof was also level with a long sloping stairway beside it, making it easy to climb onto without much effort. The space below had been unused for years and was piled with rebar and chunks of stone.
If he could find a way to make Li Shuxing and Ping Yiyi fall through, they would certainly be badly injured. Best of all, they might die from the fall. If they did not, he would go down and “finish them off.”