The Road Home

Chapter 14

"You really don't have any impression of it in your mind?"

Two hours later, Gui Xiao, sitting in the front passenger seat of his car, in the end still could not resist asking this.

"I have an impression of the time, place, and assignment, but nothing about the people." Lu Yanchen's left arm was against the car window, propping his head in that hand, while his right hand turned the steering wheel. "There were more than two thousand travellers there at the time. Can't remember the faces."

And moreover, terrorists were rampant during that period. Their squadron had been mobilized in at the last minute. The time had been tight and the mission urgent. They had had to avert any large-scale stampeding and also keep an eye out for lawbreakers attempting to seize the opportunity to cause trouble. His ears had been filled with shrieks and bellows, alarmed cries and angry curses. Before him, face after face had been covered with fear, and every person had been trying with all his or her might to squeeze out of there to a safe place. Every person had been afraid of being shoved down beneath the horde, yet at the same time, out of instinct, had shoved at every surrounding thing, searching for a way to escape from there alive.

In such a time, he had been in no mood to pay attention to the differences between people's facial features, or if they had long hair or curly hair...

Thinking about it, Gui Xiao felt that that did make a lot of sense.

She turned to look out her window. It was still a boundless sea of vehicles. Their car and her guy cousin's vehicle had originally driven out of that community compound one behind the other, heading to Jinbao Street near Gui Xiao's home to have dinner, but they had gotten separated because the road was cordoned off.

Her cousin had arrived at the destination already, but they were still waiting, along with hundreds of other cars, on Xidan[1], that thoroughfare lined with hanging, colorful lights.

"When I was in high school, I'd come here often to go shopping." Gui Xiao pointed to Lu Yanchen's left. "One place I'd go is right there. Another is the clothing wholesale market next to the zoo. I have a younger girl cousin who's especially good at bargaining, and every time I brought her, I could save a lot of money. The younger guy cousin of mine whom you saw today, when he was a kid, he was an annoying shadow that followed us everywhere. Neither of us wanted to take him along shopping, so we'd dump him at home. He even cried and tattled on us."

With his arm resting against the side of the window and the cold wind blowing into his face, Lu Yanchen examined the dense throngs of pedestrians and all the different lights, ones on the buildings, ones lining the edge of the street, as well as the ones on all those shop signs for which there was no end in sight.

This was the "peace and prosperity" he and his brothers had, on the frontiers, pledged their lives to guard and defend.

The atmosphere of the mundane, material world was thick here. To Lu Yanchen, though, it was unfamiliar.

In his days of youth, he had lived in the far outskirts of Beijing municipality and had not often gone into the urban areas. Later, the university he was accepted into was in Nanjing. In his second year of university, he had joined the armed forces, and with that departure, he was gone for more than ten years. Other than that one time when he had returned to Beijing after Gui Xiao broke up with him, he truly had never come back again. Thus, Lu Yanchen's familiarity with the famous commercial sights of this place where his hukou was registered was close to zero.

Why was it "close to"?

Because last night he had looked over the map and studied up on the route from the airport to that head teacher's house and then over to Gui Xiao's home.