5. The Bloody Transit

Xia Mo did not cry. She held the photograph of her younger self between her fingers as if it were a relic from someone else's life, a ghost preserved in emulsion and paper. The gag in the image was white, the same sterile white as the sheets she now slept on every night in Room 304. The room where Su Wan had slept. The room where Su Ruo now sat, staring at her roommate with a mixture of horror and something that felt dangerously close to hope.

"I need to understand," Su Ruo said, her voice barely above a whisper. "From the beginning."

Xia Mo nodded slowly, tucking the photograph back into the envelope and sliding it into her drawer. "The beginning was a party, just like the one you're being invited to. I was fifteen. My family had just lost everything—the shipping business my grandfather built, the houses, the reputation. The academy kept me on as a charity case. I was grateful. That was my first mistake."

She stood up and walked to the window, her silhouette sharp against the dimming evening light. "Zhou Jizhong was a year older than me. He was charming, attentive, everything a lonely girl could have wanted. He told me I was special. He told me he could introduce me to people who would help me rebuild my family's fortune. And I believed him, because I wanted to believe, because the alternative was admitting that I was alone and powerless and invisible."

"The party was at the chairman's estate," Su Ruo said. It was not a question.

"Yes. A mansion in the hills outside the city. There were drinks and music and a dozen other girls, all scholarship students, all wide-eyed and desperate to belong. And there were men. Older men. Alumni, business partners, foreign investors. Zhou Jizhong introduced me to a man from Dubai who said he was looking for a personal assistant. He offered me a contract. A salary. A future." Xia Mo's voice was flat, reciting the facts like a witness giving testimony. "I signed the contract that night. I didn't read the fine print. By the time I realized what I had actually agreed to, I was already in a van heading toward the border."

Su Ruo felt the floor drop out from under her stomach. "How did you get back?"

"I didn't. Not for six months." Xia Mo turned from the window, and her dark eyes were like pools of ink, depthless and opaque. "They took me to a compound in Myanmar, near a town called Muse. It's a processing center. Girls are held there, documented, medically evaluated, and sorted. Some are sold to brothels in Thailand and Malaysia. Some are shipped to the Middle East as domestic slaves. And some—the ones with the right blood types, the right organ matches—are sent to a ship in the Andaman Sea. The ship is called the Harvest Moon. It's a floating surgical ward. The patients are the donors, and they never leave the operating table alive."

The name hit Su Ruo like a punch to the chest. The Harvest Moon. She had seen it in the emails on Dean Chen's flash drive, a code name that had seemed almost poetic in its cruelty. "Su Wan. Was she there?"

"I don't know." Xia Mo's voice cracked for the first time. "When I was at the compound, I saw hundreds of girls come and go. I tried to keep track of the faces, the names, but it was impossible. Su Wan arrived at Greenleaf after I came back. She was assigned to this room, and we became friends. She reminded me of myself before everything, before I learned what the world really was. I tried to warn her. I told her to stay away from the Hunter Society, to never accept their invitations, to never trust anyone with a wolf on their letterhead. But I didn't tell her why. I was too ashamed."

"And then she disappeared."

"And then she disappeared." Xia Mo sat down heavily on the edge of her bed, her shoulders slumping. "The night it happened, she called me. She was at the estate. She said she had made a mistake, that she needed help, that she was locked in a room and couldn't get out. I told her I would come for her. But by the time I got there, she was gone. The room was empty. There was nothing but an overturned chair and a single shoe on the floor. Her shoe. I still have it."

She reached under her bed and pulled out a small cardboard box. Inside, wrapped in a silk scarf, was a black patent leather flat with a worn sole and a small scuff mark on the toe. It was the shoe of a sixteen-year-old girl who had dressed up for a party and never come home.

Su Ruo took the shoe and held it in her hands. It was so small. So ordinary. So utterly inadequate as a memorial for a life that had been stolen. "Why are you telling me this now?"

"Because you're going to the party on Friday, and you need to know what you're walking into." Xia Mo met her eyes, and her gaze was steady now, steel beneath the sorrow. "I've been a coward for a year. I've let them use me as a recruiter because the alternative was being sent back to the compound or worse. I've told myself that I was surviving, that I had no choice. But I did have a choice. I just made the wrong one, over and over again. And when your sister called me for help, I was too late."

She reached out and took Su Ruo's hand, her fingers cold but firm. "I can't bring Su Wan back. But I can help you survive that party, and I can help you find her if she's still out there. I know the layout of the estate. I know the security protocols. I know where they keep the girls before they're shipped. And I know a way to get the evidence out to someone who can actually do something about it."

"Who?"

"There's a forensic doctor in Jiangcheng. His name is Qin Ming. He's been investigating the trafficking network for months. He's the one who found the body in the river. If we can get him the data from Dean Chen's drive and whatever we find at the party, he might be able to mobilize a task force before the Friday shipment leaves." Xia Mo pulled out her phone and showed Su Ruo a news article from a local paper: "Forensic Expert Leads Breakthrough in Trafficking Investigation." The byline mentioned a body discovered near the river, an autopsy that had uncovered evidence of organ harvesting, and a police task force that was quietly being assembled with cooperation from international agencies.

Su Ruo read the article twice, her mind racing. Qin Ming. The name was familiar. Her anonymous contact had mentioned him once, a brief note in a longer message: "There's a doctor in Jiangcheng who might be useful. He's honest, which makes him rare." She had filed the name away and forgotten about it. Now it resurfaced like a buoy in a storm.

"Can you get a message to him?" she asked.

"I can try. But we need to be careful. The network has eyes everywhere. The police, the school board, even the task force itself might have leaks. If they find out we're talking to Qin Ming, we're both dead." Xia Mo stood up and began pacing, her dancer's grace now channeled into nervous energy. "The party is in three days. That gives us seventy-two hours to prepare. We need to rig you with a recording device, map the estate, and establish a dead drop for the evidence. And we need a cover story for why you're at the party in the first place."

"I already have one," Su Ruo said. "Zhou Jizhong thinks I'm a scholarship student from Singapore with no family and no connections. He thinks I'm the perfect target."

"Good. Then we use that. You play the role of the eager recruit. You let him think he's seducing you. And while he's distracted, you document everything." Xia Mo stopped pacing and faced Su Ruo directly. "But there's something else you need to know. The party isn't just a recruitment event. It's an auction."

Su Ruo felt the word settle into her bones like ice. "An auction."

"The girls who are selected don't just get shipped off to some generic destination. They're sold to the highest bidder. The men at the party are buyers. They fly in from all over the world—businessmen, diplomats, criminals—and they bid on the girls like livestock. Zhou Jizhong runs the whole thing from a private room on the second floor. That room is the heart of the operation. If you can get inside and record what happens there, you'll have everything you need to bring them down."

"And if I get caught?"

Xia Mo's face was grim. "Then you'll end up on the Harvest Moon, just like all the others."

The next three days passed in a blur of preparation and paranoia. Su Ruo attended her classes with mechanical precision, her face a mask of academic diligence while her mind ran through escape routes and contingency plans. She memorized the layout of the estate from sketches Xia Mo had drawn on sheets of notebook paper. She practiced activating the miniature recording device—a button camera disguised as a brooch—until she could trigger it with a single, almost invisible motion. She studied the names and faces of the alumni who were known to attend the auctions, committing their biographies to memory like a detective building a case file.

Mei Xiang, who had become an unexpected ally, provided additional intelligence. Her network of scholarship students, the invisible girls who cleaned classrooms and organized files, functioned as a silent surveillance system. They reported on the comings and goings of the Hunter Society members, the delivery schedules for the catering trucks that would service the party, and the security rotations at the estate's perimeter gate.

"The guards change at ten and two," Mei Xiang said during a late-night meeting in the library basement. "There's a blind spot near the east wall, behind the rose garden. If you need to run, that's your best exit. But once you're outside the wall, you're in the hills. No lights, no roads. You'll need to navigate by the stars."

"I'm not planning to run," Su Ruo said.

"That's what Su Wan said too." Mei Xiang's voice was gentle but unflinching. "She planned to confront them. To demand her release. She thought that if she was brave enough, they would back down. She didn't understand that bravery is just another commodity to people like Zhou Jizhong. They don't fear it. They purchase it."

Su Ruo absorbed this in silence. Her sister's courage had been real, but it had been the courage of innocence, the belief that justice was a force that could be summoned by the sheer intensity of one's conviction. Su Ruo had shed that belief long ago, somewhere between the first unreturned phone call and the last closed case file. What she carried now was not courage. It was a colder, harder thing: the patience of a predator who had learned to wait.

On the morning of the party, Xia Mo presented her with a final gift. It was a thin silver chain with a small pendant shaped like a crescent moon. "This belonged to my mother," she said, fastening it around Su Ruo's neck. "It's also a tool. The pendant unscrews to reveal a small compartment. Inside is a single dose of a sedative, strong enough to incapacitate a grown man for about twenty minutes. If you find yourself in a situation where you can't escape, use it. It won't save your life, but it might buy you enough time to find another way out."

Su Ruo touched the pendant, feeling the tiny seam where it could be twisted open. "Why are you giving me this?"

"Because Su Wan didn't have one." Xia Mo stepped back and surveyed her handiwork. Su Ruo was dressed in a simple black cocktail dress that Xia Mo had borrowed from a closet full of clothes left behind by girls who had never returned. Her hair was pinned back with a clip that contained a secondary audio recorder, and the brooch with the button camera was fastened to her collar. She looked elegant and vulnerable and dangerous, like a knife wrapped in silk. "The van will pick you up at eight. Zhou Jizhong will be inside. He'll offer you a drink. Don't take it. He'll offer you a tour of the estate. Accept it. The tour is when he evaluates the merchandise. He'll ask you questions about your family, your background, your medical history. Give him answers that make you sound isolated and healthy. No living relatives. No chronic conditions. O negative blood type if he asks."

"Why O negative?"

"Because it's the universal donor. It makes you more valuable on the surgical market." Xia Mo's voice was clinical, detached. "The sick thing is that he'll see it as a selling point. He'll tell the bidders that you're a premium asset. And if something goes wrong and you end up on the ship, they'll harvest every organ you have before your body is cold."

Su Ruo nodded slowly, filing the information away. "And if I get into the auction room?"

"Then you record everything. The faces, the voices, the amounts of money changing hands. And when you have enough, you find a way to transmit it to me. I'll be waiting at a secure location outside the estate with a laptop and a satellite uplink. The moment I receive the data, I'll forward it to Qin Ming and to every news outlet that hasn't been compromised. Once the evidence is out, the network can't cover it up. They'll be too busy running."

"And if the transmission fails?"

Xia Mo was silent for a long moment. "Then I'll know you're not coming back. And I'll spend the rest of my life trying to finish what you started."

The van arrived at exactly eight o'clock, a sleek black Mercedes with tinted windows and a uniformed driver who did not speak. Su Ruo climbed into the back seat and found Zhou Jizhong already there, dressed in a dark blazer and an open-collared shirt, a glass of champagne in his hand.

"Lin Wei," he said, his smile glittering in the dim light. "I was hoping you'd come."

"Wouldn't miss it," Su Ruo said, sliding into the seat beside him. She kept her hands relaxed in her lap, her posture open and unguarded. The brooch was recording.

The van pulled away from the campus and wound through the city streets, the lights of Jiangcheng blurring past the windows like streaks of neon paint. Zhou Jizhong made small talk—questions about her classes, her impressions of the school, her plans for the future. Su Ruo answered each one with the careful lies she had prepared, painting a portrait of a lonely orphan with no attachments and no one to miss her.

"You're different from the other scholarship students," Zhou Jizhong said, refilling his champagne. "Most of them are so eager to please. You seem... composed. Like you've already figured out how the world works."

"Maybe I have," Su Ruo said, meeting his eyes with a steady gaze. "The world is a marketplace. Everything is for sale. The only question is whether you're a buyer or a seller."

Zhou Jizhong laughed, a genuine sound that held a note of surprise. "I like you, Lin Wei. I think tonight is going to be very interesting."

The van turned off the main road and began climbing into the hills, the city lights receding in the distance. Through the windshield, Su Ruo could see the outline of a massive estate perched on the crest of a ridge, its windows blazing with light. It looked like a castle from a fairy tale, the kind of place where princesses were rescued and villains were vanquished and everyone lived happily ever after. But Su Ruo knew better. She had stopped believing in fairy tales the day her sister disappeared.

The van passed through a wrought-iron gate emblazoned with the same wolf's head that had been on the invitation, and pulled up to the front entrance. A valet opened the door, and Su Ruo stepped out into the cool night air, the gravel crunching under her heels. Music drifted from the open doors of the mansion, a low, pulsing beat that vibrated through the soles of her shoes.

Zhou Jizhong offered her his arm. "Shall we?"

Su Ruo took it, and together they walked into the mouth of the beast.