The Mu lab on Wednesday at four was mostly empty.
Two third-year graduate students were at the long bench at the back, working a separation column over a stained pan, talking quietly about a paper neither of them had finished. Doctor Mu was at his office on the fourth floor with the door shut. The fluorescent overheads buzzed at the soft pitch they had buzzed at every Wednesday afternoon since I had first walked into this lab three weeks ago in this body and seventeen years ago in another.
I came in at 3:55. I put my backpack on the bench at the second-from-the-window stool and signed the volunteer ledger and went to the apron hook by the door.
Bai Yueran was already at the eyewash station, washing the second of two beakers.
She had on the white lab coat over a rust-colored sweater. Her hair was tied back at the nape with a plain black band. She did not, when I walked in, turn. She rinsed the second beaker, set it on the drying rack, dried her hands on the small white towel, and said, without lifting her eyes from the towel:
"Three minutes early."
"Five."
"Three. The ledger clock runs two minutes fast. Doctor Mu has not, in his office, fixed it."
She turned. She looked at me at the apron hook. The look held for perhaps two seconds. Then it went back to lab — to the small task list she had pinned to the corkboard above the bench, to the bench itself, to the small line of glassware she had laid out before I came.
"Today," she said. "Two columns to run. The second one is mine. The first one is for the Liu group's Friday seminar — I owe them for the borrowed flask. You can run the Liu column. I will run mine."
"All right."
I tied the apron. I went to the bench. I started the Liu column.
Three weeks of Wednesday afternoons in the Mu lab had taught me the geometry of working beside her without being beside her. We worked on parallel benches, one meter apart, our hands occasionally crossing the airspace between two reagent shelves to retrieve the same brown bottle from the same shelf, our small cadenced silences interrupted by the small specific neutral lab questions — *is the Toluene at the back?* — *yes* — *the burette wants washing?* — *I washed it* — and our small specific neutral lab acknowledgments. We did not, in the lab, talk about anything that was not lab.
This was the first Wednesday since Friday night.
Friday night had been the western lower-city fountain in-game and the small bench by the western fountain and the long careful triangular conversation in which she had — as MoonShadow, in her own register, in the small careful in-game bench — provisionally accepted what I had offered her about the civic-historical context. The reflex-stabilization period she had named at the bench was several IRL weeks. The first private bonded DM, she had said, would arrive within seven IRL days.
It was day five.
I worked the Liu column. She worked her column. The columns ran. The two graduate students at the back finished their pan and packed up and left at 4:30 with the small wave the older ones gave.
At 4:51, with both columns running clean and the timer set, she sat down on the lab stool at the bench across from mine and said:
"I owe you a small piece of lab housekeeping I have been postponing."
"All right."
"On Friday in the cafeteria you saw me finish a small text exchange with my younger cousin and you did not, on Friday, ask. The exchange was that he had failed an entrance exam he had been preparing for since he was thirteen. He is sixteen now. He is at the Bai-family country house in Anhui. He will, by the small specific January matter, have a second attempt."
"All right."
"I tell you this because the small specific Friday text exchange was the small specific reason my register at the bench, that night, was the register it was. I have been carrying it. I should have told you. I am telling you now."
I considered the right answer to this. I gave her the one she would, of the available answers, most easily receive.
I said: "Thank you for telling me. The cousin's name."
"Bai Yueying."
"He will have the second attempt."
"He will."
She nodded once. She turned to her column and made one small adjustment to the dropper rate. She did not, after that, say anything for the next ten minutes.
We finished both columns at 5:42.
We washed glassware together at the eyewash station. I washed the Liu column's flask; she washed her own and the burette and the two stained beakers from the morning. We stacked everything on the drying rack. She unpinned her task list from the corkboard, folded it twice, put it in the inside pocket of the lab coat, hung the lab coat on the hook by the door, and walked with me out of the lab and down the four flights of stone stairs to the west-campus quad.
The west-campus quad in late-October dusk was the quad it was: students with backpacks in twos and threes, the bicycle racks half full, the small camphor at the south end yellowing two weeks behind its Suzhou cousins, the small kiosk by the gate selling chestnuts.
She stopped at the kiosk.
She bought a small paper cone of chestnuts. She paid in coins. She broke one open and ate it. She did not offer me one.
At the gate she stopped again.
She said, without looking at me: "Tomorrow night. After your in-game session. The first deposit. It will not be in the Liu lab; it will be on the bonded DM channel. Don't read it on the dorm wifi. Read it on the pod-encrypted channel. The pod is the only stable line."
"All right."
"It will not have everything. It will have what I have decided you can have."
"All right."
"I will not, on Wednesday afternoons, raise it again at the lab."
"All right."
She turned. She walked east toward the Mu campus residence with the small paper cone of chestnuts in her left hand, and the rust-colored sweater under the white lab coat she had not put back on, and the small black hair-band at the nape of her neck.
I walked west toward the dorm.
At the dorm I made dinner from the small electric kettle and the packet of instant noodles and the small pickled cucumber my mother had sent in the canister. I ate at the desk. I read for an hour from the small printed PDF of the volume Doctor Mu had given me on column-chromatography theory. At 8:00 I lay down on the bed with my eyes closed for the small fifteen-minute pre-pod settle.
At 8:15 I logged in.
In-game I did not, this evening, take Wanqing's session. Wanqing was at her own dorm in Suzhou, working a single-player archer mastery node in the Cinnabar Marsh — she had bonded-DM'd at 7:50 to say so, and to say *don't come, I am working it cold, you make it noisier than it should be*. I had said all right. I went to the south-gate marshal stone. I sat on the bench. I worked, for an hour, a small set of solo-clear runs through the Withered Hollow extension chambers MoonShadow and I had cleared together two months ago in the launch-week Public scope — runs I could now do half-attention while I waited.
At 9:18 PM IRL the bonded DM icon brightened.
It was MoonShadow's silver-and-blue marker, the small private channel.
I logged out of the Withered Hollow extension and walked to the small alcove on the western side of the south-gate gatehouse — an alcove with three meters of stone wall on three sides and only one line of approach — and sat down on the small stone shelf and opened the DM.
The text rendered.
> *The first deposit, as agreed. Read once, do not save, do not paste forward.* > > *Bai Tianyu Technology Holdings (TT) — Tianxia Coalition sub-board composition, current as of last week's quarterly:* > > *Sub-board chair: Wang Jingxun, eldest son of the founder. Holds the chair since two years ago. Operating philosophy is acquisitions-first. The Hangzhou outer-recruit cell was his project. Its dissolution was, internally, his loss.* > > *Sub-board members: Lin Quan (logistics), Mao Pingfang (recruitment), Su Liang (legal — no relation to Wanqing), Hu Xiaodu (intelligence). Hu is the one who keeps the file on you. The file is forty-seven line items. I do not have access to its contents. I have access to its line-item count and the date of its last edit (yesterday).* > > *Wang Jingxun's elder cousin, Wang Jian, is not on the TT sub-board. Wang Jian is the in-game commander of the Tianxia Coalition's Jianghai-server flagship guild and reports to the Coalition's continental committee, not to TT. The two are not the same line of authority. Tianxia Coalition is the in-game arm; TT is the IRL conglomerate that funds it. The funding is structural, not directive. Wang Jian does not take operational orders from Wang Jingxun. He listens.* > > *My father, Bai Tianyu, holds 12.4% of TT equity through the Bai Tianyu Tech holding company. This makes him the second-largest single-shareholder. The largest is Wang Jingxun's father, the founder, at 31%. The remaining 56.6% is distributed across forty-three small institutional and family holders. My father does not, at present, vote his block against Wang Jingxun's policy. He has, at the last two quarterlies, abstained on the Hangzhou cell question.* > > *I am willing to keep delivering at this resolution every two IRL weeks. The next deposit will cover the Coalition continental committee's quarterly war-budget allocation for the upcoming Continental One.* > > *I will not give you anything that touches my father's IRL person. Anything else: ask.* > > *— M.*
I read it once.
I held the channel open the full ninety seconds the *do not save* protocol asked.
I composed one reply.
> *Acknowledged. Two questions, neither operational. One: does Hu Xiaodu have a daughter at HZUT. Two: is your father's abstention pattern read inside TT as ambivalence or as preparation.* > > *— B.*
I sent it.
The channel sat quiet for forty-one seconds.
Then her reply came.
> *One: yes. Hu Xiaodu's daughter Hu Liansheng — first-year HZUT communications. The DMs you have been receiving from her in-game are her father's instrument; she is not, however, knowingly her father's instrument. She believes the silence-break DMs are her own initiative. The third one she sent you on October fifteenth she drafted herself.* > > *Two: ambivalence at present. By the next quarterly the read will, if Wang Jingxun's read of you continues to escalate, shift. My father reads slowly. He has, however, started.* > > *— M.*
I read it once.
I closed the channel.
I sat in the alcove for a long minute with my back against the stone wall and my eyes closed and the bond aura between Wanqing — at her Cinnabar Marsh archer node — and me — at the south-gate alcove — at the small steady gold of the long ordinary distance.
I logged out at 9:46 PM IRL.
In the dorm room A-7 the cracked-egg ceiling stain was not over me — I had, at 6:30 PM, lain down on my left side with my right shoulder uppermost and turned the small desk lamp away from the bed before going to the pod. The room was almost dark. The small late-October cool through the open window was the cool it had been in the old timeline at this same hour on this same Wednesday in 2014.
I did not, before I slept, write the deposit down. I did not need to. I had read it once, and once was enough. The thirteen pieces of the deposit — the chair's name, the four sub-board members, the file count, the last-edit date, the cousin distinction, the funding-not-directive line, the equity numbers, the two abstentions, the Hu Liansheng paternity, the *believing-her-own-initiative* qualification, the cadence offer, the budget preview, the IRL-person line — sat in the same drawer at the back of the same shelf where I kept the small set of pieces from the old timeline I had never written down either.
In my chest the second voice — *three months* — was quiet. The first voice — the old counter — said:
*She gave you the cousin distinction. That is the piece you did not have in the old timeline.*
I closed my eyes.
I slept.
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