She gave Li a kiss on the cheek and told him to look after her man. Then she embraced Margaret in a long, desperate hug. When they broke apart she said simply, “Good luck.” She bit her lip as she watched them climb aboard. Yongli leaned down and kissed her again. A whistle sounded, and reluctantly she turned and hurried away into the station before the gate clanged shut. Yongli watched her go with moist eyes. He turned at last, and the three of them made their way into the crowded Hard Class compartment to find their seats among the damp travellers who squeezed into every corner, opening baskets of food and flasks of tea, making themselves comfortable and preparing for the long journey ahead. Margaret heard someone noisily dragging phlegm up from their throat and gobbing it on to the floor. She shivered with disgust, but didn’t dare look, keeping her head down, face shielded by the black hair of her wig. She prayed no one would speak to her and was startled when Li whispered, “If you can sleep, lean against my shoulder.” She nodded and he put an arm around her. He touched his whiskers self-consciously to make certain they were still there, and glanced at Yongli. But Yongli was lost in a world of his own, pressed up against the window, wiping a hole in the condensation to try to see out. There was little to be seen, though, in the dim lights of the empty platform.

Another whistle sounded, somewhere up ahead a light flashed, and the train jerked and then moaned, and started pulling painfully out of the station, creaking and groaning as it gathered speed. As they emerged from the station, trundling and rattling across a great conjunction of lines, Margaret inclined her head a little to see out of the clear patch Yongli had rubbed in the window. Raindrops spattered hard against the glass, running city lights down the pane in wavering, jagged streaks. A flash of lightning threw the skyline into sharp relief for a brief moment. Less than a week ago she had driven into Beijing in the heat of a Monday afternoon, with the hope of an escape for six weeks from a life that had barely seemed worth living. Now, just five days later, she was leaving in the dark and the rain, a fugitive, guarding a life that seemed all the more valuable for the sentence of death that had been placed upon it. She clung tightly to Li. She wasn’t even going to try to analyse her feelings for him. All that mattered was that she wanted to be with him. For all that she might have lost, still she had found something precious. Something worth living for—even if that life had only a short time left to run.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I

Saturday