Everyone present only half believed what A Yun said — after all, he had been separated from his mother at the age of six, and no matter how good a six-year-old's memory is, some drift is unavoidable.
"No, I'm certain I wasn't mistaken. She spotted me in the crowd at a single glance. And I remember clearly — Mom had a birthmark on her left breast. That can't lie."
A child's memory of his mother is a powerful thing, and the way she looked while nursing him is harder still to forget. A Yun had actually found his long-lost mother through a birthmark; in a case like that, the odds were good he had not mistaken her.
Wiping his tears, A Yun sobbed, "Mom still remembers what I looked like as a little kid. She knows I hate fish. She knows I talk in my sleep. She even knows I love kicking off my blanket..."
In A Yun's telling, the image of a kind mother took shape, and little by little everyone began to feel the grievances the boy had been carrying. He was only thirteen now, and the longing for one's own mother was something no adult could imagine.
"So how is she now?" Eileen asked with concern.
"Mom looks haggard, and old. All these years she must have suffered terribly... She's hooked on drugs, and she's one of the prostitutes under Blood Rose. She smokes three canisters of Yellow Mist every day, she takes at least ten clients a day, and if she does anything wrong she gets beaten..."
"I hate what Mom has turned into too. But what am I supposed to do? She's my mom. Even if she's a prostitute, even if she's on drugs every day, even if she's always coming to me for money to buy the stuff, even if she always beats me bloody once she's high..."
"But she's still my mom. The moment I see her, I know I still have a home..." A Yun could not go on; the tears poured down like a spring.
There was no need to ask about what came after — Coyote Seven and Blood Rose must have learned of this and used A Yun's mother to threaten him into becoming their spy. In all of this, A Yun was a victim too.
A Yun's weeping silenced everyone. Wild Bull sheepishly put his pistol away and sat in the corner, sighing. Wuchang thought for a while, then asked,
"So then — the tip about me digging out the crystals came from you as well?" This was what Wuchang cared about most.
Over that stretch of time Wuchang had mined a great many crystals, all of them high grade. To avoid drawing attention, and to make a little more money, he had asked Boss Pan to work the Governor's connections. In half a month he had put away more than ninety rainbow coins — his future living expenses, every one of them.
Old Lane had talked with Wuchang many times: Huang'e was no place to stay for long. With Wuchang's skills, he absolutely should not be mired forever on this degenerate planet. But to live on another planet, at the very least he would need a sizable relocation fee.
To say nothing of the far ones: from Huang'e to the capital, Three Seas Star, the space-flight fare alone cost fifteen rainbow coins, to say nothing of the sky-high prices inside the capital star ring. Food, clothing, shelter, transport — which of them came free?
Ninety-odd rainbow coins sounded like a great deal, but if you really did the sums, it probably would not cover a single week's expenses.
And now, never mind a week — even that meager income had been left behind in the Ration Center to become Seven's spoils.
A Yun could not answer Wuchang's question, because the money left in the Ration Center had not been Wuchang's alone. Everyone sitting here, and the dead miners as well, had money on deposit there.
Eileen was an old resident of the B1313 pit. Before Boss Pan ever arrived, she had taken on the contract to run the Ration Center. In the miners' eyes, kind Eileen was worth trusting: better to leave your money in her keeping than carry it on you and gamble it away, spend it, or lose it.
But today, everyone's hard-earned savings lay in the ruins. Eileen's little strongbox had been no obstacle at all to Seven's long-laid plans.
"There were six hundred and twenty rainbow coins in cash in the Ration Center. Two of them were precious liquid-mithril coins — those are Boss Pan's property. The rest belongs to all of you. Of course, a lot of that money no longer has an owner..."
Eileen's voice was utterly dispirited. Perhaps A Yun had realized how serious what he had done was; he kept shrinking behind Eileen, not daring to meet anyone's eyes.
Lane sighed. "There's no point in blaming anyone now. Let's look ahead. Wuchang, our minds are all in a tangle — what we should do next, I hope you'll make the call..."
Wuchang said through gritted teeth, "What do we do? Whatever they took from me, they spit it back out; whatever they took, they bring it back. Blood for blood, life for life. But we don't have the strength to fight them head-on yet. We go south, to some place where nobody goes, and heal up first. Once we've scouted out the situation clearly, then we decide."
At that, Wuchang looked at A Yun and said, "In the next tunnel there's an abandoned shaft that leads up to the surface. Go back up through there. Go back to your mother..."
"No, I'm not going back," A Yun cried, leaping to his feet. "I know I was wrong. I shouldn't have hurt you all, and especially not Aunt Eileen. I want to stay and make up for it..."
"Bullshit," Eileen said, turning and slapping him across the face. "Get back there right now. There's no part for you to play in this. Not holding you to account is already a mercy beyond the law — and you still want to hurt us?"
A Yun had never seen Aunt Eileen speak so fiercely to him. He was dumbstruck for a moment, squatting on the ground without a word for a long while.
The tunnel fell silent again. After a short rest, Wuchang, his wounds now dressed, stood up and led the group south. In a few moments they reached the mouth of the abandoned shaft.
"Off you go, kid. The grudges of the grown-ups' world aren't yours to meddle in. Go back north, back to your mom. Good life or bad, like you said, at least you've got a home."
With that, Wuchang led everyone back underground, leaving A Yun standing alone in the black snow.
The report of an explosion at the B1313 pit quickly became an official document and was delivered to the desks of Mine Supervisor Roda and Guard Captain Ye Tian. In it, the eyewitnesses and survivors, tears in their voices, denounced Smith Pan's crazed hoarding of weapons and ammunition in a criminal attempt to seize the mineral veins belonging to the surrounding pits.
But because of poor storage, the military button explosives had gone off in a violent blast before they could be used, and more than a hundred lives were lost in the accident, leaving only three wretched survivors.
The tragedy at the B1313 pit shocked the whole of Huang'e City. It was the worst accident since that conflict over a decade ago. Governor Ye Fei ordered his subordinates to punish the culprits severely — but unfortunately Boss Pan and his cronies had all died in the accident, and the Governor's order accomplished nothing at all.
Along with the situation report came two bulging leather bags, each stuffed with two hundred rainbow coins, delivered with the report to the desks of Mine Supervisor Roda and Guard Captain Ye Tian.
Nobody was a fool. Roda and Ye Tian both understood who had sent the money, and what the money was meant to buy. Roda happily accepted it — but, unexpectedly, Ye Tian returned the money to Seven.
Seven was dumbfounded. Try as he might, he could not work it out: the bribe had been offered behind closed doors, so why was Ye Tian putting on airs of incorruptibility? Is Ye Tian backing some other spokesman? Is he going to take my place? Seven's heart was in knots.
But Ye Tian's next moves set his mind at ease. In the events that followed, Ye Tian made no trouble for him at all; the Guard's investigative report was no different from what Seven had said — a thoroughly cooperative posture.
Seven had once probed Roda on the sly, but Roda did not know what Ye Tian was really up to either. One thing, though, was certain: in the matter of this explosion, Ye Tian definitely wanted to calm things down, not to stir up a fight.
Now Seven's mind was at rest. He began hopping up and down, pushing the auction of the B1313 pit along, and in less than a week the auction was convened, propelled by a pack of people each with his own ax to grind.
The businessmen who could contract a pit on Huang'e were all seasoned operators, with information networks second to none. Everyone knew this was a show put on jointly by Seven and Roda, and since the outcome was already settled in advance, all they could do was play along and do the favor.
Once Seven had successfully obtained the B1313 pit contract, Coyote's name was at its zenith, and not one pit owner for miles around failed to fawn on him. Murder, pit-grabbing, collusion with both the underworld and the authorities — Seven's bottomless morals had shown everyone what brazen, bare-faced greed really looked like.
The moment Seven had the contract in hand, before he could even make a speech, his woman Blood Rose had already charged into the B1313 pit with a crew of workers and a mountain of construction equipment. She meant to rebuild the Ration Center.
"Dumb broad. All she knows is making money. Can't even come over and give me a little reward — just wait till I get my hands on her." Seven leered at Blood Rose's backside, grinning wide enough to show his back teeth.
Seven did not know that outside the Huang'e City administrative center, a small figure was weaving through the crowd: A Yun, hard at work, earning today's drug money for his mother. Yet as his hands worked the crowd, the corner of his eye never once left Seven, and his gaze held a gleam of hatred.
A Yun knew he was no match for Seven at all, and he had no idea whether shadowing the man like this was any use. But for a boy as small as him, this was the only way he could think of to help Eileen and the others.
Just as Seven was riding high on his success, Wuchang and the others, deep underground, had run into a very serious crisis.
The story has to pick up from the moment A Yun had just left. After Wuchang's group saw A Yun off and headed back underground, Gopher Pike, to speed up the march, led them into Huang'e City's underground drainage system nearby.
Some people say you can judge a city's level of civilization by its drainage system. In Huang'e City that saying does not hold — because although Huang'e has a superb drainage system, the city has nothing whatsoever to do with civilization.
Wuchang's group walked through a circular sewer ten meters high. All around them, apart from black volcanic rock, there were only rust-covered alloy supports. Beneath the supports ran steaming wastewater; heated by the underground magma, the sewage gave off a strange stench. The wastewater formed a river flowing south, and its destination was the distant sea.
"This underground drainage system was built on the old abandoned mine shafts. Huang'e has the most geothermal resources of anywhere on the planet — all the hot water we use is pumped up from below, and three geothermal power stations supply the whole of Huang'e City with energy..." Even on the march, Lane did not forget to lecture his disciple.
"You know when it's most spectacular? Every six hours, when the wastewater is discharged. All three plants dump at once — hundreds of millions of tons of hot water come roaring down and fill this entire sewer of ours right to the top. The sight is truly magnificent..." Along with Lane's lecture came Gopher Pike's commentary; it looked as though he had already climbed out of the shadow of his financial loss.
Just as the two of them were running their mouths without pause, Wuchang, in the lead, suddenly stopped short and dropped flat onto the ground, listening with a look of horror on his face. Everyone present was at a loss.