She Has Never Forgotten the Hate, Either

Xie Xue's bedroom had a laptop. She was that rare breed in the modern world — the kind of person who never set a password.

He Yu opened the laptop, his hands flying across the keyboard, almond-shaped eyes locked on the screen as lines of code streaked past in the depths of his dark irises.

A few minutes later, He Yu's long fingers pressed Enter. A decrypted message popped up, reflected on his retinas.

'L isn't even a search range anymore.' He Yu stared at the line in the dialog box, his voice quiet. 'So the Police Force has known all along exactly who WZL are.'

Xie Qingcheng had been fighting to steady himself, but whether it was the force of the emotion from before or something else, he was drenched in sweat. He stood rigid beside He Yu, spine stiff, leaning over to read the code on the screen.

Three intercepted internal communications. Part of each was written in cipher, but for two people who already knew as much as they did, the meaning wasn't hard to read.

'Wang Jiankang and Zhang Yong have been killed.'

'There's a mole. Switch channels.'

'Track the last known signal location of Lu Yuzhu. Move fast.'

Even He Yu went still — not just Xie Qingcheng.

The last one was... Lu Yuzhu?

Lu Yuzhu was the kind of person who seemed, at first glance, the most ordinary and uncomplicated of anyone.

She was somewhere in her forties, worked in the campus clinic — a cheerful, chatty woman who talked to everyone. Both He Yu and Xie Qingcheng had been to the Huzhou University clinic at some point, and both had exchanged a few words with her.

How could it be her...?

At the same moment. Beside the Huzhou University teaching block, near the scene of Zhang Yong's murder.

Superintendent Zheng sat frozen in the command vehicle, his sharp predator's eyes shot through with red, the officers behind him all silent.

They had all heard it — Zheng Jingfeng, just moments ago, being screamed at over the phone by a man. The veteran officers knew exactly who that man was. The young ones, even without the full picture, had pieced together enough.

But what had truly silenced them was the two murders they had failed, twice, to prevent.

The fire was still burning. A group of officers was photographing the scene, cordoning it off, combing for evidence.

Zheng Jingfeng unscrewed his thermos, took a sip of water, and made a rough attempt to settle himself.

'Can we still reach the informant?'

His subordinate shook his head. 'Once the Utopia Guestbook was found and brought to our station, the informant went dark. He said things were already too dangerous for him by then. WZL was the last piece of intelligence he could give us.'

Zheng Jingfeng pressed back hard against his seat, fingers pinching the pressure point at the inner corner of his eye. A long, heavy exhale.

That the WZL targets at Huzhou University would be killed — the informant had given them this warning in advance.

Jiang Lan Pei: the name written as a mark, a signature agreed upon between the informant and the Police Force.

But The Mysterious Organization ran too deep. Even communications between its senior members weren't always shared. Much of it traveled in cipher — so when the informant passed the clue to his Police Force handler, he himself didn't know what WZL actually meant. He had simply relayed the encrypted message exactly as he received it.

Zheng Jingfeng had spent considerable time working through it — cross-referencing every investigative method, triangulating leads from every angle — before finally decoding it: WZL was not one person. It was three. A deliberately misleading encryption, designed by The Mysterious Organization to obfuscate.

The three names, once decoded, were Wang Jiankang, Zhang Yong, and Lu Yuzhu.

All three were implicated in the case, and all three were to be 'cleaned up' in the coming days.

Once the leads were cracked, the Police Force faced two tasks at once: protect the informant, and make contact with three targets who were entirely on the wrong side of the law. Neither was easy. They couldn't tell Wang, Zhang, or Lu the truth — that would spook them — so the only option was round-the-clock surveillance, ready to move the instant anything happened.

Round-the-clock in theory. In practice, no one can maintain perfect concentration every minute of every hour. And the informant had only been able to give a rough window for when the killings might happen — nothing more precise than that.

Wang Jiankang was a womanizer, with a long-standing habit of cheating behind his wife's back. That habit had, over the years, given him a certain instinct for counter-surveillance.

He had been killed at the campus hotel. On the way there, he'd stopped by the dormitory building and swapped vehicles with a colleague. There was a university-wide meeting that day — faculty and staff were all in uniform — and after Wang Jiankang switched cars, the plainclothes officer mistook his colleague for him, leaving a window of over an hour during which no one had eyes on the actual target.

An hour later, Wang Jiankang was strangled to death in the hotel. The killer had dressed him in women's shoes.

Zhang Yong was cautious by nature. Timid. He wanted the money; he was terrified of the consequences.

He had likely sensed the organization's growing distrust of him. The Police Force had tried to approach him, offering him protection in exchange for whatever intelligence he had.

But a man like that was sharp and suspicious, trusting no one — and when the plainclothes officer made his overture, this spectacular fool's first instinct was that the officer was a plant: someone the organization had sent to test his loyalty.

He stonewalled completely, said nothing, and then — to prove his devotion — went and told his superiors about the approach afterward.

From that point on, tracking Zhang Yong became dangerously complicated. The mantis stalks the cicada, unaware of the oriole behind it: while the Police Force had their eyes on Zhang Yong, The Mysterious Organization had their eyes on the Police Force, watching from somewhere darker still.

The surveillance on Zhang Yong had to keep its distance, leaving gaps in time and space. In the final hours before he was run down, he had called the Police Force once — but after he saw the photographs of Wang Jiankang's murder, he began to fear that his phone's GPS could lead not only police to him but the organization as well, and he threw it away.

Right up until he came face to face with Jiang Liping, he had still been telling himself he had a chance — hiding in an empty office, stripped of every electronic device he could think of, convinced he was finally safe.

What Zhang Yong hadn't anticipated was that the Buddhist amulet he always carried had long since been fitted with a tracking device by the organization.

The last known survivor was Lu Yuzhu.

Of the three, Lu Yuzhu was the most difficult.

Because she was nothing like the others — those greasy, money-hungry, lecherous men who had killed for profit. She wasn't in it for gain. She had come to despise the law, the courts, the police, society itself — not out of calculation, but out of what had been done to her.

The road that brought Lu Yuzhu to where she was now was unusual. She had been the first woman from her county to earn a graduate degree. She went back after graduation, gave it all back to the place that raised her, and became the county Party secretary.

Then one year, a young intern reporter arrived from the provincial capital — new to the job, burning with uncomplicated righteousness, determined to go undercover and expose the illegal goings-on in the villages below, hungry for a story that would make his name.

Lu Yuzhu had always been a little slapdash. Small-town politics meant that fighting corruption had to be threaded through local custom and guanxi, and while she kept her head straight on the big things, there were small ones she hadn't been careful enough about. Someone in her family had accepted a few gifts tied to a project — not much, the kind of token amount that passed between people in villages as a matter of course, barely enough to buy a pig.

The reporter put his pen to paper and added a string of zeros after that pig.

That was all it took. A corrupt official of that magnitude, in a county that small — of course she had to be suspended and investigated.

The investigation itself would have gone nowhere. Anyone looking would have seen that the whole thing was the invention of a reporter with eighteen generations of rotten luck behind him. But Lu Yuzhu's timing was catastrophic: the county Party secretary seat was up for election that year, and the rival who had fought her tooth and nail for the position happened to have a close friend who had been assigned to handle her case.

Closed-off, insular county politics — often darker than anything in the big cities. They set her up from multiple angles, the frame tightening around her until the charges of corruption and bribery somehow stuck.

She was young then. Her child was two years old. When they took her away in handcuffs, her daughter had only just learned to call out 'Mama' in a small, uncertain voice.

By the time she got out, her husband had found someone new. Her daughter had no memory of ever having a mother like her — she was cradled in her stepmother's arms, watching the overwrought woman in front of her with frightened eyes.

Lu Yuzhu left. She left everything — her hometown, the county, all of it. There was nothing left in her chest by then but ash.

A reporter who believed he was serving justice, filing a story dressed up with borrowed outrage. The dark dealings inside a small county's low-level offices, the kind that never reached anyone above. A husband's weakness and his betrayal. All of it landed on this one woman with barely a murmur — a few words, a little money, a chair behind the county Party secretary's desk — and an ordinary person's entire life was destroyed.

With a criminal record, Lu Yuzhu couldn't find decent work after her release. She washed dishes, worked as a care attendant, did domestic cleaning. None of it lasted long. Once employers learned about her past, they let her go — some apologetically, some without the pretense of tact.

At her lowest, Lu Yuzhu sold herself.

Among the men who came to use her, she saw far too many professionals — including people who had absolutely no business being in a place like that.

Later, one client noticed she moved with a certain competence, and her manner of speaking wasn't that of someone without an education. Out of curiosity, he asked about her. Lu Yuzhu hadn't intended to say much, but people have their fragile moments — that night she didn't hold back, and there in the amber-lit private room she told him everything, until by the end she couldn't speak through the crying.

The client smoked a cigarette, thought it over, and wrote down an address. If she was willing, she could go there and find a friend of his — that friend would arrange a stable, respectable job for her.

And that was how Lu Yuzhu came to work as a medical aide in the Huzhou University clinic.

She had been there a good while when, roughly two or three years ago, a senior prosecutorial team came to reinvestigate a backlog of wrongful convictions. They reached Lu Yuzhu's case — the old bribery charge — and overturned it. The reporter was placed under double discipline; every public official who had been involved in orchestrating the frame-up was arrested.

A young prosecutor came to her door in person to apologize, compensation in hand, a group of newly-appointed county law enforcement personnel standing behind him.

Lu Yuzhu had just finished dispensing medicine to a few students. She looked at them, gave a small smile, and said, quite calmly: 'What's past is past. Keep the money yourselves. I won't take it.'

The prosecutor asked her why.

She looked at them with cool, flat eyes. 'Do you think this money buys back a person's life?'

'...'

'My life has already been destroyed. What use is any of this to me. Can you send me back to the year I was twenty-five?'

'...'

'Can you give me back my child? My husband? My family?'

'...'

'You can go.'

But the prosecutor pressed her to accept the compensation.

Lu Yuzhu said: 'Then take that money and set up some kind of foundation. Use it to educate the media — beg them, if you have to — to be careful when they put a person or an event on paper. A little more careful, a little more fair, a little more restrained. They get their thrill, they get their clicks and their money, they blow through like a swarm and move on. What do they leave the people they write about?'

She smiled faintly. The bold young county Party secretary who had once moved like a force of nature now had deep lines fanning out from the corners of her eyes.

'A lifetime of wreckage and pain.'

Lu Yuzhu would never go to the Police Force. That much was certain.

But here was the question: a woman this psychologically alienated from the law, yet so thoroughly loyal to and obedient within the organization — why would they want to clean house all the way to her?

'Lu Yuzhu has no electronic communication devices on her, or she may be using someone else's phone — we can't get a trace.' The officer handling signals intelligence typed steadily as he reported to Superintendent Zheng: 'There are currently 15,890 active mobile signals in this area. Running a full triangulation would be completely pointless.'

Another officer, a woman, finished a call and climbed into the command vehicle, her expression grave. She said to Superintendent Zheng: 'Chief, we've lost her trail. Lu Yuzhu's counter-surveillance capabilities are among the best we've encountered in years. She's definitely had formal training in this, and she's equipped with interference devices. Given the current situation, the only people who come close are the top-tier fugitives on the Grade-A wanted list.'

Zheng Jingfeng said nothing, his sharp eyes fixed on the broadcasting tower where the Drop the Handkerchief figure was still spinning.

That glaring letter L — like a blood-smeared fishhook.

L...

The veteran detective had been turning it over in his mind: had they decoded it wrong? Maybe L didn't stand for Lu Yuzhu at all. What possible reason would the organization have to kill a woman with this level of loyalty?

Of the three, she was the only one he remained uncertain about. Because from the killer's standpoint, murdering Lu Yuzhu simply didn't make sense.

Even if, in truth, no other target had emerged.

Yet even now, Zheng Jingfeng kept returning to it — that letter L. Was there some deeper layer of meaning buried inside it that they had never found?