Ning Date smiled without rushing. It was the kind of smile that asked questions gently and then waited for answers. Their conversation began with something small and ordinary — the price of a hand-rolled cigarette, the unusual pattern on a vendor’s scarf — but it unspooled into something stranger, more personal. They traded names, then stories: Ning’s childhood summers spent on a canal, Ning Date’s habit of collecting words that smelled like rain. Each sentence revealed a little more of the map they were each carrying, and each secret felt like a country crossed together.