Chapter 20 — Getting Mugged (off)

Unit 4 was as empty as ever, which Lin Che supposed was a given, given that it was a private gym and he had booked a solo booking on the way over.

He’d come here directly from the office, changed, and spent the first half an hour on warm ups and fundamental movements, testing his strength compared with the first time he’d come to the gym and comparing the effects of both Liuhe Breathing and the Hollow Bell Technique.

He then moved onto the Swallow Returns pdf, which had described the early stages as a process of erosion — of wearing down the gap between perception and response the way water wears down stone. That is to say, a lot of flowery language which summed up to: repeat, repeat, repeat.

Lin Che ran the Liuhe circulation and threw a medicine ball against the far wall, harder and harder until it bounced closer to where he was. He then turned his back to the wall and threw it over his shoulder.

His arm extended on its own and fingers closed around the ball at roughly chest height on the return. He spent the next hour with his eyes closed, catching the weighted ball at all sorts of strange angles, twisting and contorting his body via instinct whilst sensing its location from sound and air pressure alone.

By the time he’d finished and packed up, the sky was a deep and featureless navy. The artificial lighting in the city made it nearly impossible to see the stars, and, despite the supposed lighting, it was still rather dark near the warehouses.

He was halfway down the side street that connected Unit 4 to the main road when he heard it.

A girl’s voice, sharp and frightened. “—let go!”

He stopped.

At the end of the street, partially obscured by a parked van, a man had a teenage girl by the strap of her bag. She was pulling back, and he was not letting go.

He said something to her in a low voice, which Lin Che normally would have been able to hear, but it was obscured by the surrounding city noises coming off the main road.

She was in a school uniform, bag half off her shoulder, half in the man’s grasp. Her phone was on the ground.

Lin Che walked forwards.

Very slowly.

He made sure not to announce himself, and the man didn’t notice him until he was close enough to be a problem. By that point, the man had registered that the girl was looking at something behind him and turned around.

He was in his thirties, built broadly, and had the stereotypical grin and scar down his face one would expect of a thug.

“Keep walking,” he warned.

Lin Che stopped about two metres away.

The man reached into his jacket and a small folding blade found itself in his right hand. The left remained fixed on the schoolgirl’s bag.

He held the knife low, pointed towards Lin Che. “I said keep walking.”

The girl made a small sound.

Lin Che’s eyes were on the knife hand. “You can keep the phone,” he said. “Let her go and keep the phone.”

The man’s expression didn’t change. He took a step forwards.

What happened next was difficult to reconstruct in the seconds immediately afterwards. The man’s knife hand came up and across in a short arc. Lin Che’s body moved — stepped left and inwards, arm coming up to redirect the blade’s trajectory.

His hand caught the man’s wrist and turned it outwards and the knife fell to the ground.

Lin Che only processed what happened after the matter.

The man looked at his own hand with an expression of slight confusion, as though he wasn’t sure how the angle had gone wrong.

“She doesn’t have anything worth this,” said Lin Che.

There was a pause before the man released the bag strap and gave Lin Che one more pass over with his eyes. He turned and grabbed his knife before walking away quickly in the direction of the main road.

Lin Che watched him go until he turned the corner.

The girl had not moved, instead staring at Lin Che.

“Are you hurt?” he asked.

“No,” her voice was small. She bent down to retrieve her phone, checking the screen with automatic instinct. “He— he grabbed me when I came out of the station. I don’t — I didn’t know what to—”

“It’s okay.” He held up a hand. “You weren’t going to get that out of him by pulling. You did the right thing by making noise.”

She was shaking slightly, the adrenaline working its way through her now that the immediate danger had passed.

“Do you want to call someone?” he asked.

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She looked at the phone in her hand and nodded, but didn’t dial anything.

He waited.

“We should file a report,” he said. “I can go with you if you want. The police station’s not far from the train station.” He paused. “I’ll stay at the counter with you if it would help.”

She looked at him for a moment and nodded again.

***

The report took far longer than Lin Che would have expected.

The officer at the counter had been professionally unhurried about it, which had irritated Lin Che slightly as he had dinner waiting for him, but it seemed to help calm down the girl — Nie Yilin, sixteen, on her way home from tuition. Lin Che gave his account separately, describing the man’s approximate age, build, and predominant facial feature of a scar, before describing the knife.

He did not mention the redirection, noting only that the man had left after he’d intervened verbally.