4: Wanqing

I logged out at twelve-thirty and went looking for her at the engineering building, because that was where the noodle stand was, and because in old timeline she had eaten lunch at the engineering noodle stand every day from the second week of freshman year until the day she left for Shanghai, and because I wanted to test whether the small change in her uncle's gift had also changed the small ritual of where she sat at noon.

It hadn't.

She was at the second table from the corner, with her back to the wall, with a yellow plastic bowl of beef noodles in front of her and a textbook propped open on her knee. She was wearing the black hoodie she had worn most days of the year freshman year — the one with a faded gold logo of a band she had liked in middle school and had outgrown without admitting it. Her hair was in a low ponytail that had slipped to one side. She was eating the noodles at a speed that suggested she had not eaten since the launch night.

I stopped at the edge of the courtyard for one heartbeat too long.

There was nothing dramatic about her. There was nothing about her that would have made a stranger walking past glance twice. She was an eighteen-year-old computer-science freshman eating noodles in a hoodie, and the hoodie was a size too large because she had bought it for next winter and the sleeves came down past her wrists, and a strand of hair had fallen loose along the line of her cheek, and a crumb of noodle was on her lower lip and she was about to lick it off without noticing, and she was alive, and she did not yet know that she was supposed to be dead.

She licked the crumb off her lip without noticing. She turned a page in the textbook with the back of her chopsticks, two-handed, the way she had always done.

I made my face a working face and crossed the courtyard.

She looked up at four meters and grinned around the chopsticks. The grin did not bother to hide that it had been waiting for me.

"Sit, ghost," she said. "I ordered you noodles. They're on the way."

"You ordered me noodles before you knew I was coming."

"I texted Wei Lin about whether you were back in the dorm. He said you had logged out a minute ago. I made a calculation. It is twelve-thirty-three. The walk from A-7 to here is six minutes. You are eight minutes late, by the way, but I forgive you because you brought me back from death-by-elite-rabbit this morning."

"You brought yourself back from death-by-elite-rabbit. You shot the leg."

"Mmm. I did do that, didn't I." She set the textbook down and leaned an elbow on the table and looked at me. The pass-through I had been sharing with her ninety minutes ago in a holographic gully was not running here in the noodle courtyard, but I had the small sensation, watching her, that it was — that the air around her had the same fine grain of attention to itself, the same small clarities. The avatar had been a faithful build. Or my eyes had been hungry. Both, probably.

I sat down opposite her. She pushed the cup of cold tea on the table over toward me. It was the cup the auntie at the noodle stand always poured first for whoever was sitting alone. Wanqing had been pretending it was hers and saving it for me.

"Eat," she said. "Then walk. I have to be at calculus at one-thirty. I have questions."

"Eat first."

The noodles came. I ate. She ate. We did not talk for a few minutes. The auntie at the noodle stand shouted at a delivery driver across the courtyard. A boy in a blue track jacket two tables over was on the phone with his mother in a small voice trying to ask for money. The midday sun came down through a torn awning in narrow stripes. Wanqing reached over once and took a piece of beef out of my bowl with her chopsticks because she had finished hers, and ate it, and did not apologize, and I did not protest, and the small unguarded thing that happened between us in that gesture was, I knew, the first proper marker of whatever the new timeline was going to be — not a recognition, not a confession, just one chopstick move that meant *we are still us.*

She put her chopsticks down. She wiped her mouth with a paper napkin from the dispenser. She leaned both elbows on the table.

"Question one," she said.

"Mn."

"How long have you known me."

I had expected a different first question. I set my own chopsticks down on the rim of the bowl.

"Since we were eight," I said. "Pingjiang Road Primary, second-grade math, the windowsill seat next to mine."

"Right answer, but not the right question. How long have you been *paying attention* to me."

"Since we were eight."

"Bullshit."

"All right. Since we were ten. You cried over the dead pigeon on the playground for an hour, and I was the only one who would sit with you."

"That is a more honest answer." Her eyes did not move off mine. "Why are you suddenly behaving like someone who has been paying attention to me for fifteen years."

"I am someone who has been paying attention to you for fifteen years."

"Yes," she said. "But this morning you were behaving like that *to my face*. There is a difference. We have been the kind of friends for ten years where you do not put your attention on me visibly. You have moved a setting. I am asking why."

I held her eyes. I had a number of options open to me. I could deflect again. I could deflect with humor. I could escalate into the half-truth I had given her in the gully — *I had a dream and you were dead in it.* I could give her the entire truth, and I could watch her face do whatever it was going to do when she heard the entire truth, and I could see whether the entire truth was a thing she could carry at eighteen, in the courtyard of the engineering building, in a hoodie a size too large.

She was not ready for the entire truth. I was not ready to give her the entire truth. The entire truth, given today, would draw her into a grief that was mine and would teach her at eighteen what grief at twenty-four felt like, and one of the best things I had been given on waking up this morning was the privilege of not doing that to her.

I said, "I had a long bad summer."

"Did something happen this summer," she said immediately. "Are you in trouble. Is your father okay."

"My father is — about the same."

"Cangtian."

"He is fine for now. He will not be fine in October. I am preparing for October."

She blinked, slowly. The skepticism in her face shifted into something else, with no fanfare and no announcement; that was Wanqing, that was always Wanqing, the swift rearrangement when she heard the sentence she had been waiting to confirm. She did not look surprised. She looked like a person who had suspected something for some time and had just been handed the confirmation.

"Did the doctor tell you he won't be fine in October."

"I have a sense."

"You have a sense." She watched me.

"I have a sense," I said, "that I need to make money very quickly. I have a sense that I cannot do that on the schedule a part-time café shift will allow. I have a sense that if I am very lucky and very careful, the game will let me make that money in time. I have decided to be very lucky and very careful, and you are part of the plan, because there is nobody else on the planet I trust enough to share the pieces of the plan with that need sharing."

She looked at me for a long beat. Her face did not move much. The strand of loose hair stirred in the courtyard breeze. The boy in the blue track jacket two tables over had stopped trying to ask his mother for money and was leaving with his head down.

"Is that the dream."

"Some of it."

"Some of it."

"Some of it."

She drew a long slow breath in through her nose.

"All right," she said.

"All right."

"This is the conversation we are not going to have a second time, is it."

"I would prefer not to have it a second time."

"You will tell me what you need to tell me when you can tell me. You will not lie to me about what you cannot tell me; you will tell me you cannot tell me, and I will let it be."

"Yes."

"You will not patronize me by deciding what I can handle on my behalf."

"I will try."

"Cangtian. I will *find out*. About your father, about your weird game knowledge, about the dream. I am going to find out. I am giving you the head start. I expect you to use it."

"Thank you," I said.

"Mn." She picked up her chopsticks and took the last piece of beef out of my bowl and ate it without looking at me. "Fine. Game tonight, then. Eight o'clock. I want to grind the gully variant before the wiki kids find it. We will split the loot. I will not ask you questions you do not want to answer. I will, however, eat your noodles when you are slow."

"That was already happening."

"Now it will happen with my eyes open." She stood up, slung her bag, tugged the textbook into the crook of her arm. The hoodie sleeve fell over the back of her hand. "Walk me to the math building."

I walked her to the math building.

The campus was thick with first-week freshmen — clusters at the bulletin boards, queues at the student services hut, three different campus-tour groups crossing each other in a slow-motion choreography that would take the rest of the afternoon to untangle. We walked through it at a steady pace. She did not take my arm, which was correct; we were ten-year friends, and at ten-year-friend distance her shoulder was four inches from my shoulder and her elbow occasionally bumped mine and that was the geometry we knew. She did not comment on the closeness either. She did not need to. I was grateful for the geometry, the way I had been grateful at six in the morning for the panda mug.

At the door of the math building she stopped, two steps below me, the textbook hugged to her chest like a small armored shield. She tipped her chin up.

"Cangtian."

"Mn?"

"You looked at me a few seconds longer than you should have, in the courtyard, when you came in. Don't think I missed it."

"I won't."

"Don't do it in front of other people, either. I will make a face." She paused. The grin came back, smaller this time, the corners of her mouth turning in a way that was not for the rest of the courtyard to see. "But you can do it once a day in front of me. You're allowed. As a treat."

I felt my face do something I had not entirely meant it to do. She watched the something, made no comment about it, turned, and went up the steps two at a time. The hoodie sleeve flicked behind her like a banner.

I stood at the bottom of the steps for a second. Then I turned and walked across campus toward the dormitories, with the small new weight on my chest of a thing that had been said openly between us that had not been said in old timeline before our second year, and not quite this directly even then.

The afternoon sun was warm. The cradle band, lying loose around my ribcage where I had not removed it after lunch, hummed once against my skin to remind me a helmet session was scheduled.

I was already grinning by the time I cleared the gate of A-block.

***

Eight o'clock. I had napped for two hours and pulled the helmet back on at seven-thirty. By eight I was at the Jianghai south gate again with the avatar's longsword across my shoulder and the gentle haze of the launch-evening sky over the city walls — the orange-pink of a particularly indulgent Tianyu sunset render, brushed pink at the cloud edges to encourage the kind of screenshots that did the company's marketing work for free.

Wanqing pinged me from inside the gate.

*WindSpirit: I'm by the fountain. Come east.*

I came east. The fountain plaza was already busy — launch-evening crowd, a few hundred Lv 1 to Lv 4 players milling, a handful of self-appointed criers shouting recruitment offers from the sides of the central fountain. The fountain itself was a tall stylized stone of a sword pointing skyward, water sheeting down its blade. Wanqing was perched on the rim of the fountain basin with one boot up on the stone, her bow across her thighs, her hood pushed back.

She had retuned the avatar in the four hours since lunch. The freckles were still on. She had pulled the ponytail tighter and trimmed the hair line a half-centimeter shorter at the side of the throat, the way she had cut her hair in the third year of university IRL, and the small visible line of her actual neck — the curve where the trapezius slipped down into the collarbone — was a more accurate copy of the IRL Wanqing than any other player on the server had bothered to produce of themselves. The boots she had switched to: the Iron-Soles, dyed black. The Beggar's Tunic she had reskinned in pale grey with a subtle wind-blown texture along the hem. *WindSpirit*, I thought. Of course. She had spent four hours on the silhouette.

She caught me looking and raised an eyebrow without looking away from the bowstring she was waxing.

"Have you finished memorizing the new build, ghost."

"Almost."

"You're staring at the throat. That's a flattering choice. You're allowed; once a day, as a treat."

"You said that this afternoon."

"I am repeating it because you used it up at lunch and you were trying to use it up again now and I wanted to head it off." She flicked her gaze up. "We're efficient about these things, you and I. Gully?"

"Gully."

She slid off the fountain rim and landed lightly on the cobblestones. The pass-through caught the give of her boots, the flutter of the grey hem at her thighs. I let my eyes go where they were already going for one full breath, marked the small unspoken question in her sidelong half-glance, marked her not-asking, and turned my own eyes back to the gate. She did not press. She did not need to.

Behind us, on the far side of the fountain plaza, a player in a long white robe stood very still with one hand on the rim of the central basin. She was looking at the fountain — not at us. Her hair was unbraided down her back, white-pale in the launch-evening light, the kind of pale that the Tianyu cosmetics build offered only as an opt-in premium tier on day one. The robe was a Mage starter robe in the highest available cosmetic tier, ankle-length, slim through the waist, a pale cold blue along the hem that suggested Frost-tree affiliation that the system had not yet allowed any player to actually pick.

I did not stop walking. I did not turn my head toward her. The corner of my eye held her shape against the fountain for the space of three steps and let it go, because in old timeline I had not seen Bai Yueran on day one — I had seen her three weeks in, at this same fountain, in a different robe — and what I was looking at, from forty meters away, in the orange-pink of the launch-evening sunset, was the impossibility of finding her here, now, on day one, by the fountain, alone.

Wanqing said, "What."

"Nothing."

"You went stiff."

"Old habit. Moving on."

She did not press that either. She let me walk, half a step behind me where she had to be to read the line of my shoulder. I kept my breathing even. I kept the longsword's hilt loose under my hand.

Forty meters behind us, the woman in the pale robe lifted her face from the fountain. The fading light caught the small line of a chin that was not the chin of a stranger to me. She looked, for one heartbeat across the plaza, in the direction of the gate I was walking toward.

She did not see me. She was not looking for me. She had no reason to be looking for me. She was a freshman finance major from Suzhou with a brand-new helmet and an opt-in white robe, on day one of a game her family had purchased her access to as a small distraction from negotiations she did not yet know about.

I walked through the gate. The chat scroll pinged. My hand tightened, very briefly, on the longsword's hilt.

"Cangtian," Wanqing said, very low, beside me. "You are not breathing right."

"I am breathing fine."

"All right," she said, and let it go again, and did not let it go.

The gate closed behind us. We walked toward the gully through the long dusk grass.