8: The Recruit

I logged in from the Suzhou flat that night at ten-twenty, with my back against the headboard of my old single bed and the helmet's strap loose across my chin and my mother's slow careful breathing audible from the next room through a wall my father had built thinner than building codes recommend, in the year before I was born, because he had been twenty-four years old and laying his own drywall and had not yet learned what walls were supposed to do.

Wanqing was already in. She had pinged me twice while I was on the train and once during dinner. She had not asked where I had been. She had said *log in when you can* and *I picked us up a side quest, two-player, prep ready, you'll like it.* The second message had a small smiley emoji of a fox at the end of it, which was Wanqing's way of saying *I am being patient with you and you may notice that I am being patient.*

The Jianghai south gate at ten-twenty in the in-game evening was a different gate than it had been at dawn. The launch crowd had thinned out to a manageable several hundred. The criers around the fountain had dropped down to a tired four. The torches along the wall had brightened in the system's dusk-to-night transition. The air had that specific Tianyu Tech violet-blue tint that the company's atmosphere artists liked and that I, two months into old timeline, had started to find sentimental and that, two days into new timeline, I was finding sentimental again, in a different direction.

Wanqing was sitting on the gate's lower step with her bow across her thighs. She had retuned the avatar a third time. The hood was down. The ponytail had been pinned up at the back of her head with a small in-game hairpin she must have crafted from a tutorial reagent — the kind of tiny customization the launch-week wiki would not document for another two months. The grey of the Beggar's Tunic was now pale silver-grey, a small recolor that read better at night under torchlight. The collarbone was visible. I noted it and I did not look at it.

She tipped her chin at me.

"You used your daily already. Sit. I have a thing."

I sat.

She held up a small folded slip of in-game parchment between two fingers — a quest icon, soft amber, the kind the system used for non-NPC player-to-player propositions. The text on it read, *Greenleaf Inn — Founder's Quest: A Partnership Forged. Both parties agree to a co-founder pact.*

I had not seen this quest. It was not a quest from old timeline. It had to be one of the half-hidden launch-week social systems the wiki had eventually catalogued under *Bonded Duo — discontinued in patch 1.4* — a small early-launch experiment of the Tianyu social-design team that had quietly been removed when guilds had figured out how to abuse it.

Right now, in launch week, it was still in the game. In launch week, two players who triggered the Founder's Quest at the Greenleaf Inn and accepted each other's pact would receive a small permanent shared bonus — a +1 to all stats when in party together, a free third inventory slot for shared loot, and the right to register a co-founder claim on any future guild charter without any further verification. It was the cheapest cofounder lock-in the game had ever offered, and it was open for exactly the launch month.

In old timeline I had not known about it. By the time I would have known, the patch had already removed it.

Wanqing was already two steps ahead of me. Wanqing had read the right launch-week forum thread, or had clicked a torch in the inn that I would not have clicked, or had simply asked the right NPC the right question.

I looked at her over the parchment.

"Where did you find this," I said.

"I asked the innkeeper for a tutorial of his menu. He was bored. He has nine menu options if you say *bored* twice. The seventh is a Founder's Quest if you have a current party member."

"You asked him *bored* twice."

"I have asked NPCs *bored* twice in three other games in my life. It always works. NPCs are programmed by tired people."

I started to laugh, and stopped.

The parchment was sitting between her two fingers. Her face was the half-amused half-careful face of a person who had, while her best friend was on a train to a hospital all afternoon, made a decision about him she was not sure she had the right to make. She had not asked me. She was asking me now.

I did not say yes immediately.

I sat on the step beside her with the launch-evening city spread out at our feet. The Jianghai outer wall sloped down toward the lower city in a long shallow run of staircases and sloped lanterns. From the gate step you could see the first three blocks of the old quarter, the tile rooftops scaled in the system's careful approximation of a Jiangnan dawn-tile pattern, the lanterns making small gold points along the eaves. I had not stopped at this step for a long minute on the second night of the launch in old timeline. I had not had a person to stop with.

"Wanqing."

"Mn."

"Before we accept this. I want to say a thing."

"Say."

I looked at the lanterns. Easier than her face.

"In a few months," I said, "people are going to know my name on this server. They will know it because I will be doing things that are very, very visible. I will not be a quiet account. I will be the loud one in the room. There will be — by the end of the year, probably — there will be people who would benefit from hurting people I work with. Not me. Not directly. People around me."

"Mn."

"I am asking you to lock yourself to a name that is going to be a target, before the name has had any chance to earn the targeting. I am not asking you to do this because you owe me anything. You don't. We do not have to do this quest tonight. We do not have to do it ever. We can keep playing the way we have been playing, for as long as we want to, and it will be fine. The plan does not require it. The plan does not even prefer it. I prefer it, but I—"

"Cangtian."

"Mn."

"Look at me."

I looked at her.

The torchlight from the gate behind us was warm orange. It caught one side of her face and let the other side stay in soft blue twilight. The freckles were on. The pinned-up ponytail had a small loose strand falling along the line of her jaw. She was, very obviously, eighteen years old in a holographic projection at ten-twenty in the evening on the second day of a game launch in a fantasy city named after a balance she did not yet know she was carrying. She was, very obviously, also a person who had made up her mind long before this conversation had started.

"Cangtian," she said. "I am going to tell you something, and you are going to receive it, and we are going to move on. Are you ready?"

"I'm ready."

"You did not have a person to do this with last time."

I did not move. The cradle band against my ribcage took a small sharp climb in my heart rate that the system pretended not to notice and that she could not see. The pass-through gave my avatar the very faint involuntary stillness of a person whose heart rate had just told the system to be quiet.

"You have not told me what last time was," she said. "I have not asked you. I am not asking you now. I am only telling you that I have noticed, in two days, that you are doing all of this with the small economy of motion of a person who has done it before and did it alone. I am telling you that I am not going to let you do it alone this time. I am not asking your permission. I am informing you. Are we clear."

"We are clear."

"Mn." She held the parchment out. "Then accept the quest, please. You're being slow."

I accepted the quest.

The parchment dissolved. A small bright icon bloomed in the air between us — a stylized double-arc, two crescents interlocking, faint gold against the indigo of the launch-night sky. The system chimed.

> *Ding!* [Founder's Pact accepted: WindSpirit and Bladeless are now Bonded Duo. While in party together: +1 to all base stats. Shared inventory slot unlocked. Founders' rights reserved on any future guild charter.]

> *Ding!* [Hidden Achievement Unlocked — *First-Week Pact.* You have triggered the launch-month Founder's Quest. Reward: One-time free name registration for any future guild.]

The double-arc icon settled itself into our shared UI as a small permanent badge. Wanqing reached out and tapped it with her fingertip. The icon brightened briefly under her touch and dimmed back.

"There," she said. "Civic. You can stop looking at me like a person who just signed his roommate up for a kidney donation."

"That is not the face I was making."

"It was very near to that face."

"Walk."

We walked. The Greenleaf Inn instance was three blocks from the gate; we had to pass through the lower lantern lane to get there. Wanqing walked beside me. She did not take my arm. She did, three steps in, bump my shoulder with her shoulder once, the small ten-year-friend bump, and the bump landed against my collarbone with a small soft impact that the pass-through carried through my IRL ribcage with the warmth of a fingertip pressed briefly to the skin and lifted away.

"Treat used," I said.

"I did not stare at you. You don't get to use me using my elbow as your daily."

"I'm using mine, then. I'll save the next one for tomorrow."

"Allowed."

She elbowed me again, lightly, deliberately, eyes forward, and the second elbow was the elbow I would remember when I went to sleep that night, because the second elbow was on purpose.

***

The Withered Hollow extension she had picked up while I was on the train was a small two-player escort run — protect a bookish young NPC scribe from a haunted glade on a rune-cataloging errand for a temple in Jianghai. The reward was modest gold, a small reputation bonus with the temple, and a single-shot enchanted scroll that, in old timeline, I had remembered as a niche but perfectly serviceable utility item that nobody would think was worth the effort of the escort run for another six weeks.

The run took us forty minutes. Wanqing covered the perimeter while I stayed close to the scribe; we picked off the haunted glade's wisps one at a time with a kiting routine that the bonded-duo +1 stat bonus made noticeably smoother. Wanqing's first arrow landed three percent harder than it had landed an hour ago. The longsword's two-handed downstroke clipped the wisps' transparent shoulders three percent cleaner. Three percent was not nothing in launch-week math.

Halfway through the run she said, mid-step, without looking at me, "Cangtian. About the call this morning."

I almost broke step. I caught myself in the half-second.

"Which call."

"My father called me at ten this morning. He did not tell me the details, which is unlike him. He told me three things. He told me to be careful with the helmet. He told me that you had had a hard summer. And he told me that he was going to look at a different bank for the shop. He said the change was his idea." Her voice was even. "It was not his idea, was it."

I did not answer immediately.

"You don't have to answer," she said. "I am only telling you that I noticed. I am noticing things this week. I am — I am going to keep noticing things, and I am not going to ask you about the noticing, and I am going to file each thing in a small mental box, and one day, when the box is full, we will sit down and we will open the box. Until that day, you may continue to have your hard summer. Are we clear."

"We are clear."

"Mn." She loosed an arrow at the next wisp, casual, easy, dead center. "Don't look at me right now."

"I'm not looking at you."

"Liar."

I was not looking at her. I had not turned my head. The pass-through, however, had registered the very small shift of my chin in her direction by maybe half a centimeter, which was the radius of attention a person paid when they were being asked not to pay attention, and Wanqing knew the radius the way she knew everything else.

"I am going to forgive you the half-centimeter," she said, "because the box is also going to be empty if I make you pay for everything. Move. The scribe is wandering."

We escorted the scribe back to the temple. He bowed three pre-recorded bows and gave us each a small enchanted scroll. Wanqing tucked hers into the shared inventory slot. I tucked mine into mine.

> *Ding!* [Quest Complete — A Lantern in the Hollow. Reward: 80 silver, 1 Scroll of Calm Mind, Temple Reputation +20.]

> *Ding!* [Level Up — You have reached Level 8.]

I sheathed the longsword. The Greenleaf Inn was three blocks east. I had told Wanqing I would log out by midnight; I had a six-thirty train back to Hangzhou for an eight-thirty class.

We walked to the Inn instance together. Outside the Inn's painted door, on the small wooden step under the lantern, Wanqing stopped. She turned to face me. The torchlight caught one cheek and the corner of her mouth. The collar of the silver-grey tunic was loose; the line of the throat caught the warmer light and slipped away from it as she breathed.

"Treat," she said. "Real one. Three seconds."

I looked at her. I looked at her for the three seconds.

She nodded once, gravely, accepted the look, lifted a hand, and pushed me back a half-step with the heel of her palm against the center of my chest.

"Good," she said. "Sleep, ghost. I'll see you in the morning."

She walked into the inn and the inn's door closed behind her with the small chime the door always made.

The pass-through registered, one heartbeat after she vanished, the small persistent warmth where her palm had pushed against my chest.

I logged out.

In the dark of my old room in Suzhou I sat for a moment with the helmet across my knee, listening to my mother breathing in the next room, listening to the small ticking of the cooling helmet, listening to the small stupid thump of my own heart that the helmet was no longer reporting back into a server in Beijing.

I set the helmet on the floor beside the bed.

I closed my eyes.

I was already smiling. I tried to stop. I could not, immediately, stop.

I let myself smile.