"Zhao Ming, I'm home."
Silence.
Zhao Wei looked around the apartment. The bowls from the morning were still on the table, rinsed and stacked. Zhao Ming's shoes were gone from by the door.
"Seems like he left somewhere."
He set his bag down, sat against the wall under the window, and let the quiet settle over him. Outside, the Beijing evening continued with the sounds of traffic, a dog barking somewhere, and the muffled television from below. He could hear all of it with a clarity that had been growing over the past three days, sounds reaching him from further away than they should have, details resolving where before there had been noise.
Another different thing. Another thing he was filing away without examining.
He put his head back against the wall.
Undead. I'm dead. He pressed one hand flat against his chest. There was something there, a faint mechanical rhythm, not quite a heartbeat, more like the tick of a clock. Xue Lian's doing. She had said so herself. I am the one manipulating your heart.
He sat with that for a while.
Xue Lian's other words came back unbidden: The dead shouldn't be with the living. The fox-woman at the restaurant had said the same thing in different words. The dead shouldn't mingle with the living. Two separate sources. The same rule.
Zhao Wei stared at the ceiling.
Even if all that is true, he thought, I can't leave Zhao Ming all alone.
The thought was not complicated. It did not require justification or examination. It was simply the most solid thing in the room.
The door opened.
Zhao Ming came in carrying a small paper bag and wearing the expression of someone who was trying to look like they had not been worrying. He spotted Zhao Wei against the wall and crossed over immediately.
"Brother! Brother, are you asleep?"
"No."
"What about that dried drool?"
"I WASN'T SLEEPING."
Zhao Ming crouched beside him and held out the paper bag, then seemed to remember something else first. "Look at this." He pulled out a small, rectangular container, a pot with a wilted cabbage plant, its leaves drooping, and soil that was dry. "It was completely healthy yesterday. What happened to it?"
Zhao Wei looked at the plant. The leaves were grey at the edges, and the stems collapsed. Something about it felt familiar, the same wrong quality he had noticed in people on the street that afternoon, that shadowlike overlay. He looked away.
"We'll plant another one later," he said.
Zhao Ming put the pot down carefully. "Bro, are you going to your part-time job again today?"
"Yeah." Zhao Wei got to his feet and stretched. "I got introduced to a good new place. I'll earn a lot and buy you meat."
Zhao Ming's face did the thing it did when he was happy but was trying not to be too obvious about it. "Ok," he paused. "But don't overdo it. You look tired lately."
Zhao Wei looked at his little brother with wide eyes, the too-careful expression, and the way he was holding himself very still in the way he did when he was trying not to ask the questions he was actually thinking. Twelve years old and already so careful about what he showed.
"Yeah," Zhao Wei said.
He crossed the room and put both hands on Zhao Ming's head, ruffling his hair until the careful expression dissolved into protest.
"Hey, don't worry about me." He steered his brother toward the futon. "Go lie down. Rest until I get back, ok?"
"Ok, ok."
"And don't use the gas."
"I know …"
"And eat the rice in the pot. Don't skip it."
"*I KNOW…*"
Zhao Wei grinned, grabbed his bag, and was out the door before Zhao Ming could say anything else.
The PC cafe on the corner of Dongfang Road was a narrow building wedged between a printing shop and a convenience store, its sign lit in yellow against the evening dark. Zhao Wei pushed through the glass door into the warmth and the smell of instant noodles and electronics.
A heavyset man in his forties looked up from behind the counter.
"Were you referred to here by Sang Bin?"
"Yes. My name's Zhao Wei."
The man studied him briefly. "You know how to deal with computers?"
"Yes," Zhao Wei said. "Learned at school."
The man nodded, apparently satisfied, and slid an apron across the counter.
Zhao Wei tied it on, took his position at the service desk, and looked out at the rows of screens and the people bent over them in the blue-white glow. Normal people, in a normal cafe, doing normal things.
He was not normal anymore. He knew that. He was beginning to understand, in the way you understand something when enough separate things have confirmed it, that the fox-woman in the restaurant had been entirely serious, that Xue Lian had been entirely serious, and that the shadow-shapes on ordinary people and the thing that had thrown him sideways in the classroom and the dying plant in Zhao Ming's pot were all connected to the same truth.
He was undead.
He was a target.
And something was already moving toward him.
But right now, in this moment, he needed to earn enough to pay Zhao Ming's hospital bill by Friday, and so he straightened up behind the counter and waited for the first customer to need help and tried to keep the rest of it for just a few more hours at a manageable distance.