Creases: Snowbound on a Lonely Island

1937, on the eve of Shanghai's fall. Su Yanqing, a young man from Suzhou, flees to the isolated Shanghai International Settlement with his father's dying secret. A list of collaborators he is meant to eliminate leads him to the Shanghai station of the Military Statistics Bureau, where he is given the codename "Lone Swan." His first shot goes astray: instead of hitting a traitor, it hits a rickshaw driver's shoulder. He memorizes the man's name: Lao Ju.

When the attack on Pearl Harbor begins, the isolated city falls. The collaborators, Japanese agents, and Chongqing are all looking for him. His target is another network, hidden among ordinary people: water sellers, cobblers, errand runners, each with a crease in their hands.

The authorities, money, and even the things he longs for are all unreliable. What he is willing to wager on is a "fourth way": the unknown protecting one another. A lone swan is doomed, but lost in a sea of people, it may yet survive.