He woke up on the floor of his own apartment.
The ceiling was the first thing he registered: the familiar water stain in the corner above the window, shaped vaguely like the outline of a running dog, which he had looked at every morning for two years without ever deciding whether it bothered him. The thin winter light coming through the imperfectly sealed window was grey and flat. A pigeon was somewhere outside. He could hear traffic.
He was alive.
He lay with that thought for a moment. Alive. His chest rose. His chest fell. Everything was present and operational, and
He was not breathing.
He stayed very still. Brought his attention to his chest. Watched it. Waited.
It did not rise again.
The ceiling stain stared back at him.
Zhao Wei sat up slowly, with the careful movements of someone who suspects that the world has reorganized itself while he wasn't looking and does not yet know the new rules. His hands were in front of him. They looked like his hands. Same ink stain on the right index finger. Same callus from the bicycle handlebars. He turned them over and back and understood nothing.
Then he became aware that there were two other people in his apartment.
The girl was sitting cross-legged on the floor near the door, occupying the cramped space with the same quality of composed self-possession with which she apparently occupied all spaces. She was looking at the wall with an expression of mild assessment, as if cataloguing the room's deficiencies with professional interest.
Beside her, or rather, slightly above her, in a way that the physics of the situation did not support a small creature, was conducting what appeared to be a quiet emergency.
"Miss," it was saying, its voice low and rapid, urgent in the way of someone who has been having this conversation for several hours in their head and is finally saying it out loud. "Why would you do such a thing? If he finds out, if he realizes what you've
"Don't worry," she said, without inflection, without looking at it. "I'll take responsibility for it."
"But the implications of the rules, Miss, you can't simply …"
"**SHUT UP.**"
Not loud. Not angry. Simply final, the way a door being closed is. The creature fell silent immediately. She glanced sideways at Zhao Wei with the particular lack of surprise of someone who had been aware of him waking up before he was aware of it himself.
"Ah," she said. "He's up."
Zhao Wei looked at them.
He looked at his hands.
He looked at the ceiling.
He looked back at them.
"You..." he started. His voice sounded strange to him, present, functional, emerging from a chest that was not moving. "You're from last night. The park. The thing in the park."
"Anyway," said the girl, looking around the apartment with genuine assessment, "this is a really cramped space. I didn't think a person could actually live in somewhere like this. Even my dressing room has more—"
"**AH! THAT WASN'T A DREAM?!**"
He was on his feet without remembering standing up. His voice had gone about three registers higher than intended. The small creature lurched backward. The girl did not move at all and did not flinch; she simply turned to face him with the patient expression of a person who had anticipated this response and had prepared accordingly.
"You insolent fool!" the creature snapped. "Who do you think this is?! To raise your voice at …"
"Quiet."
One word. The creature went silent again.
Xue Lian looked at Zhao Wei across the small apartment. In the grey morning light she was exactly what she had been at the school gate, in the park, kneeling above him in the dark, composed and direct and entirely uninterested in managing his reaction for him.
She raised one hand, palm outward.
"First of all," she said, "I would like to apologize."
A pause. Zhao Wei, still processing the previous ten seconds, made a sound that was not quite a word.
"Sorry," said Xue Lian. "I killed you."
Something happened in the room. The quality of the air changed the particular quality that comes when something that was being held at a manageable distance suddenly becomes immediate. Zhao Wei looked at her face. At the absolute absence of anything joking or theatrical in it. At the level, dark eyes that had looked down at him from above the cold park ground asked if he wanted to live.
A laugh came out of him.
It was the wrong kind of laugh, too fast, too high, the laugh of a person whose mind is running several calculations simultaneously and finding all of them impossible. Is she serious? She looks serious. No one looks serious like this while joking. But what she's saying is
"Hahaha, what are you talking about?!" He spread his hands. "My brother, where is my what kind of joke?"
She moved.
It was fast enough that he registered the motion after the fact: a hand, the flash of something thin and bright, and a line of cold across his forearm that was there and gone in the same breath. He grabbed his arm. Braced for blood, for pain, for the sting.
He felt none of it.
He looked down.
The cut was closing. He watched it happen, the edges of the wound drawing together with a faint, warm shimmer, the skin re-knitting itself with the calm efficiency of something that did not consider this remarkable, erasing the evidence of the blade as completely as if it had never been there. In the time it took him to exhale, his arm was unmarked.
The apartment was completely quiet.
Zhao Wei stared at his arm for a long time. He pressed the place where the cut had been. Smooth. Warm. Nothing.
"Does it look like I'm joking to you?" Xue Lian said.
He did not answer immediately. He turned his arm over. Back. He pressed the skin again, harder, as if pressure could reveal something, as if examining it long enough would produce a different result.
All healed. I could have sworn I was cut. I felt the blade; I felt the cold of it.
"This doesn't make any sense," he said, very quietly.
"I know." Xue Lian sat down cross-legged again. Not dismissive, simply unhurried, the way people are unhurried when they have already arrived at the understanding that the other person needs time to reach it. "I resurrected you as an undead."
The word sat in the middle of the room.
Zhao Wei looked at her. "Undead," he repeated.
"Yes."
He looked at his hands again. Same hands. Ink stain. Callus. But not breathing. No heartbeat, he realized now, checking for it with the inside of his wrist; nothing, no pulse, just the same warm stillness he had woken to.
The full weight of it began to settle. Not all at once in layers, the way cold settles into a building when the heating fails, working inward from the edges.
He pushed it aside. Later. He would think about it later. There was something more immediate.
"What about Zhao Ming?" he said. "Where is he? Is he…"
Something shifted in Xue Lian's expression. So small it almost wasn't there, a slight change in the quality of her attention, like a surface registering the addition of weight.
"The child is unharmed," she said. "That's a relief..."
The breath Zhao Wei had not taken came out of him anyway, a reflex of relief so strong it moved through him without needing lungs to carry it. He closed his eyes for one second.
"But—"
He opened them.
"He'll die soon."
Four words.
Zhao Wei looked at her. She looked back, steady and direct and entirely without cruelty, simply delivering a truth because it was a truth, because dressing it otherwise would be a different kind of wrong.
The sound that came out of him was not words.
He was standing. He had not decided to stand. "What kind of talk is that?" His voice was shaking now, not with fear but with something that had nowhere to go, a feeling too large and too sudden for the small apartment that contained it. "My brother will what? What are you even saying to me right now?! I don't want to hear that I don't want"
He grabbed the small creature by its collar. Pointed at the door. "Leave. Go back now. Both of you. Get out of my house—"
"Stop lying and get—" He reached for Xue Lian's wrist. The intention was to make her move, to make something move, to make the words stop being true by refusing to let them be said again in this room.
She turned. He let go.
She crossed to the door and opened it. The grey morning light fell through from the landing, and for a moment she stood in it, half in the apartment, half in the hallway, with dark hair and dark clothes, the shape of someone who exists on the border between two different worlds and has long since stopped being troubled by it.
She looked back at him over her shoulder.
Zhao Wei stood in the center of his apartment, undead, not breathing, alive in some new sense that he did not yet have a name for, and waited. Behind him on the thin futon, Zhao Ming slept with the shallow, careful sleep of a sick child. The city moved outside the window. Somewhere on the landing, the landlady's television was audible through the floor, a morning news program, the world continuing.
"That," said Xue Lian.
Her voice was quiet. Each word placed with complete deliberateness.
"You have to leave also."
He stared at her.
"...is the rule of this world."
The door clicked shut. Her footsteps moved away down the landing and were gone.
Zhao Wei stood alone in the quiet for a long time.
He looked at his hands. He looked at the closed door. He looked at his brother sleeping on the futon, chest rising and falling with the thin, imperfect rhythm that had been the sound Zhao Wei measured his days against for the past three years, the sound that meant "still here, still okay, we have more time."
He'll die soon.
That is the rule of this world.
You have to leave also.
He sat down slowly on the floor beside his brother's futon and put his head in his hands and remained there while the grey Beijing morning continued outside, indifferent and ordinary and entirely unaware that in a small apartment in Tongzhou, something had changed that could not be changed back.
The ordinary day was over.
Something else was beginning.