6: The Forum Tip

I called Su Wanqing's father at six-fifty in the morning of the second day, with my back against the door of the dorm bathroom and the shower running on the other side of the wall to muffle my voice from Fatty Chen, who had a habit of asking who I was talking to whenever he overheard a phone call he had not been invited to overhear.

The bathroom tile was cold under my bare heels. I had not slept well. I had slept three hours and woken at five-forty, and lain on the lumpy pillow for an hour staring at the cracked-egg stain on the ceiling and arranging the three sentences I needed to deliver in the order I needed to deliver them. I had not been able to write the sentences down. The sentences had to come out sounding like a freshman at university repeating something he had read on a forum, and a freshman at university who had read something on a forum did not, before delivering the news, sit at his desk and outline the news in pencil. The news had to sound like it had just occurred to him.

The phone rang four times before Wanqing's father picked up. His voice was the voice I remembered. He had been a smaller man than my father, both physically and in the room — a thin wiry shopkeeper from the same Pingjiang Road neighborhood, mild, prone to over-apology, a man who had failed in old timeline by being too polite to refuse a loan officer who told him with a kind smile that signing was the responsible thing to do. He had been a good father. He had been the kind of good father who could not save his daughter from a bad year, because being good was not the same as being able to refuse a kind smile.

"Hello?"

"Uncle Su," I said. My voice came out younger and a little rough; I had not made it perfect; perfect would have alarmed him. "It's Cangtian. Ye Cangtian."

"Cangtian!" He was startled, and then warm. "Wah, it's been — when did we last talk? You should come see your auntie when you're next in Suzhou. She made you a jar of pickled cabbage last month and Wanqing keeps eating it before you can come fetch it."

"I'll come this weekend, I promise." I shifted my back against the door. "Uncle, I'm sorry to call so early. I — I read something on a university forum last night, and I couldn't get it out of my head. About a finance company in Suzhou."

"Mn?"

"Huayuan Capital. They've been opening new branches. Aggressive lending, especially to small business owners. Predatory rates structured to look benign in the first six months — the contracts have a clause that triples the interest after the first major missed payment, even by a day, and the missed-payment definition is buried in a side schedule. The forum thread is — there's a thread, Uncle, with three pages of small business owners in Hangzhou who got caught. The interest snowballs. Within a year you can be paying ten times the original loan in interest alone. Then they push you to refinance with one of their other arms. And the arms are all the same parent."

There was a silence on the other end.

"Cangtian," Wanqing's father said, slowly, "where did you read this."

"A finance forum. A lawyer was posting case studies. I thought — I thought of you. I thought of the shop. I know you've been — Auntie said last summer that things have been hard." I let my voice catch a fraction — not too much, the catch of a young man embarrassed to ask a thing that was rude to ask. "I know you may have a loan with them already. Or be considering one. I just — I wanted you to know about the schedule. The — the Schedule B, in the back, with the fine print. It's the one to read first."

The silence on the other end held.

I waited.

I waited some more.

"Cangtian," Wanqing's father said, finally, "I have a meeting with their loan officer this afternoon."

I closed my eyes. The bathroom tile pressed into my heels.

"Uncle Su."

"Mn."

"Don't sign."

"Cangtian, the shop — we are very thin this quarter. The stock—"

"I know. Don't sign. There is a smaller bank — Hangzhou People's Mutual, the credit union that the engineering department recommends to faculty for small bridging — Wanqing can get you the contact. Their interest is half. Their schedule is on the front page. They will not lend you as much as Huayuan, but you do not need as much as Huayuan as offering. Schedule B is built to make you take more than you need."

A longer silence.

"Wanqing told me you were behaving strangely yesterday," Wanqing's father said.

I had not anticipated that. I should have. Wanqing had been Wanqing in old timeline, and Wanqing was Wanqing in this timeline, and Wanqing did not, when she had been startled by her best friend at lunch, sit on the startle for an entire afternoon without telling at least one parent. The parent she would have told was her mother, and her mother would have told her father over dinner, and her father would have filed the data and brought it back out at six fifty-three the next morning when an early phone call from that same friend opened with finance advice and ended with *don't sign the loan papers you have not yet told me you are going to sign.*

"I'm sorry, Uncle Su."

"Sorry for what."

"For being — strange. I had a hard summer. I have not been entirely myself. I have been — paying attention to people I should have paid attention to before. I have been thinking about who is in my life that — I have been very lucky to have. The thinking is making me make calls I would not normally make. I'm sorry. If this is — if I am overstepping, please ignore me. Please at least read the Schedule B."

There was a pause, then a long slow sound that could have been a sigh and could have been the shifting of a man rolling his weight in an old armchair.

"Cangtian," Wanqing's father said. His voice had gone a degree quieter. The over-apology was gone out of it; he had, in the long pause, decided something, and the something he had decided was to take me seriously. "Has something happened to your father."

"Yes," I said.

"Is he—"

"He is alive. He is sick. We do not know the details yet."

"Ah." A long quiet.

"Uncle Su — please. The Schedule B."

"I will read the Schedule B. I will not sign today. I will call your auntie and we will look at the credit union together. Cangtian." His voice softened. "Look after your father."

"Yes, Uncle."

"Look after Wanqing too. She is — she carries a great deal more than she lets on."

"I know."

"Mn." Another small pause. "Be well."

He hung up first, the way the older generation of Pingjiang Road had always hung up first. I held the phone to my ear for a moment longer with my eyes closed, listening to the dial tone, listening to the shower on the other side of the wall, listening to Fatty Chen's roommate Wei Lin shouting through the dorm corridor about whose turn it was to fetch hot water.

I opened my eyes. I exhaled, long and slow.

I had taken Wanqing's father out of the predatory loan. I had not taken him out of every other risk that lay between this morning and the year her father died of a small commonplace stroke at fifty-four — there was the stock issue, there was the back rent on the shop, there was the older brother who had loaned a sum and was beginning to lean on it for repayment — but the predatory loan had been the load-bearing pillar of the Wanqing family collapse in old timeline, and the load-bearing pillar of the Wanqing family collapse in this timeline had just been removed by a six-thirty phone call from a freshman who had read something on a forum.

Wanqing did not yet know.

Wanqing would not know for years that I had done it, if I had any say in the matter. And I would have a say in the matter. I had not warned her father in order for her to thank me. I had warned her father so she would not, this winter, have to come back to the dorm one evening with red eyes and a phone call in her hand from her mother saying *the bank just—.* That was the calculus.

She would never owe me anything for the call. That was important. That was, for reasons I could not have explained at a deposition, important.

I unbolted the bathroom door. The corridor smelled of instant noodles and shampoo. Wei Lin shouted at me from the end of the hall — "Cangtian! Hot water boy! Your turn!" I took the kettle and went down the corridor, and as I went I heard, two steps behind me, a sound that did not belong to the dormitory corridor.

It was a cough.

I stopped at the doorway of the next room down. The door was open. Inside, in a small low chair, sat a thin older man holding a paper cup and waiting for someone — a parent, probably; someone else's parent visiting to drop off a packet. The cough had come from him. Dry, three short wracks of the chest, the small hitching kind that older men with healthy lungs did sometimes when they had walked up too many stairs.

The cough was not my father's cough.

It was close enough.

I stood in the doorway with the kettle in my hand for one heartbeat too many. The older man in the chair looked up at me politely.

"Yes, son?"

"Sorry," I said. "Wrong room."

I walked on.

Halfway down the corridor I had to set the kettle down on the windowsill and stand for thirty seconds with the heels of both hands pressed against the windowsill and look very steadily at the courtyard outside, which was full of pre-class freshmen in jackets a size too big with their backpacks slung at one shoulder, until the small thing in my chest that the cough had unhooked agreed to resettle.

Then I picked up the kettle and went and got the hot water.

***

Back at my desk I opened the laptop. I navigated to the Tianyu Tech auction site. The pelt prices on Tianlong Server were already stacking — Stone-Spine Hare pelts had not yet been listed by any other player, so Wanqing and I had a small monopoly on a thirty-eight-pelt stack. I priced them at fifty copper per, just under what the eight-day NPC tanner would pay and well above NPC vendor scrap, and listed twenty of them as a public auction with a four-hour timer. The other eighteen I held back. I would walk those to the tanner alley at dawn.

I checked my mail. There was a request to my in-game ID from a player named *RedSpear*. The contact card again. The card was being re-pushed to me as a follow-up; Tianxia's outer-recruitment cells routinely double-tapped their refusals on day two, in case the refusal had been a mood. I did not open the card. I dragged it to the trash.

I checked the public chat. The launch-day forum was already sprouting screenshots: an Iron-Sole Boots drop in a gully (mine), a Wolfsfang Greatsword tease from a wiki-leak that nobody had yet seen IRL (still ten days out), two video clips of opening boss kills by guild raid teams who had skipped sleep. My own name had not yet surfaced on the public boards. The screenshot from yesterday's gully, if it had been taken — and I knew it had — was either still on someone's hard drive being processed, or had been quietly handed to a guild's intel desk without being released.

Either way, the days of nobody knowing my name were numbered.

I closed the laptop. I sat back in the chair. The dorm window looked out across the courtyard at the engineering building. From where I sat I could see, very faintly, the entry steps of the math building where Wanqing had run up two at a time the day before with the hoodie sleeve flicking behind her hand. She was not at the math building this morning. She was, at this hour, in her own dorm room three blocks east, eating something off a small chipped plate, getting ready for an eight-thirty programming lab.

I was not going to call her. I was not going to mention her father. I was not going to be in any hurry to mention her father for the rest of our shared lives, if I could help it.

I picked up the panda mug. I drank the rest of yesterday's tea, cold, without making fresh tea, because making fresh tea required boiling water and boiling water required walking back down the corridor and I was not, just at this moment, in the mood to walk back down the corridor. The cold tea tasted of the inside of the cup. I drank it anyway.

The phone on my desk buzzed.

*Mom (Home).*

I picked up.

"Cangtian," my mother said, "your father coughed for four minutes in a row this morning. He says he's fine. The clinic appointment isn't until next week. Should I move it forward."

I did not have to think.

"Yes. Move it forward. Today if you can. I'll come home tonight."

There was a small pause on the other end. The small pause of a mother whose university-aged son had just, for the first time in his nineteen years, said a sentence with the quiet weight of a person who had decided something and was not going to be argued out of it.

"All right," she said. "Be careful on the train."

She hung up first.

I held the phone for one heartbeat. Then I stood up, picked up the kettle, and went to boil water for fresh tea.

The cracked-egg stain on the ceiling was directly above the bottom bunk, exactly where it had been yesterday morning, exactly where it had been five years ago.

I did not look at it. I had a train to catch.