If his father was a hole in his heart with specific dimensions, Director Zhang, his mentor, was not designed to fill the space. It was clear from their first meeting, in which the Director, smiling and frank, said: “You scored 2,913 points in all your thirty-one courses—three points higher than I did. There’s a lot going on up there! Yes,” he mused, “a lot going on.” He shrugged, the gesture twitching away whatever security his words might have delivered. “So I’m recruiting you. Because if I let you go out into society and you cause mayhem, it’ll be hard--very hard--to catch you.”

Director Zhang was not a bad man. Actually, Lu Li appreciated his honesty. It’s just that it left him nowhere to stand. 

Eight years later, the notion implicit in Director Zhang’s words has crystallized within Lu Li, to the point that he has given it a name: inherent crime.

Is it because of his genetic heritage, the DNA that allowed the police to catch his father? Or is it that the shock of loss, the reversal of his life, the hollowing-out of his parental role model might have transmitted to Lu Li a new, upside-down world view, along with ample reason to hate the world he saw? 

For the first several months he starts a lot of internal monologues with when I get home.

When I get home I’ll open up a little place, a bed-and-breakfast on the pretty side of the harbor; I’ll hire someone to play the piano, I’ll hire a little old man to sit on the pier, looking picturesque and catching fish so the guests can see him from their rooms. When that does well, I’ll move my mother into her own suite, two nurses, cocoa every morning, imported croissants, anything she wants.

When I get home I’ll give Yinuo a seal stuffed animal with the smoothest fur; I’ll tell her all about riding the ferry and the sound of the bells as you sail under the Golden Gate Bridge.

When I get home I’ll put my life in his hands, like a jewel. 

Chi Zhen takes off his sunglasses and cleans them on his sleeve. It’s freezing out; the ocean’s grey like he’s never seen, the surf’s high enough to frighten him, sitting in his rental car on the turnout surrounded by mounded ice plants. The wind batters his car. On the road just ahead, someone’s house has slid down the cliff and lies collapsed on the rocks at its feet like a pile of matches. 

His phone rings. 

“What do you need?” he asks, in English. It’s his standard greeting now. 

“The fuck are you, man?” This English-speaker has a Russian accent. “Waiting over an hour.” 

He’s never going home, Chi Zhen understands then. 

“It was Baccarat,” Chi Zhen explains, watching the fire. “Rouge à l’or, all right? Made entirely by hand. The most expensive…”

Lu Li’s spent. His entire body’s boneless, aching like it’s been left under a train. He inches forward, the microfiber throw underneath him slipping across the polished floor, closer to the fire, closer to the source of warmth, closer to Chi Zhen. 

Chi Zhen puts out a hand, feeling blindly, finds his partner on his blanket in the dark. 

“It was that much?” Lu Li asks. 

“It was more than that. It was…” Chi Zhen picks up his snifter, drinks, grins. “It was Chanel Number Five, thirty ounces of pure perfume in a handmade bottle—not eau de anything, it was extrait de parfum, OK? Nothing more, nothing less—and part of the deal was hand-delivery. To anywhere. Anywhere in the world.” 

The train he needs, Chi Zhen discovers, travels under the Bay. 

He’s underwater, surrounded by expressionless white faces and the rattle and roar of the train. He crosses his arms, tries to ignore his smelly neighbor, and settles down to wait; twenty minutes underwater to reach the city.

The City, natives call it, as if it’s the only one in the world. It’s got a famous profile and some fancy bridges, and when he stands on top of one of its seven hills, staring at the sky, he feels every kilometer separating him from his home. 

--

Chi Zhen’s nickname in Little Lanya is “The Loupe.” He hates it. 

For a long time—more than six months—he has sustained this paper-thin identity with sheer force of will. Since then, though, a few lucky breaks and a lot of late-night studying has earned him the reputation he’d been assigned by Boss Chen when he’d gotten out of Lanya with a wad of cash and a fake passport. 

Now he smiles, pats babies, and shows the shy expats what they want to see: quality from a trusted source. 

Hua City has hundreds of unfinished buildings, left to stand in rain and rot when the financial winds failed to circulate. You could move in, Lu Li knows; you could live like vermin, survive on the edges until the investments shifted, the money came through, the developers kicked everybody out, and the cycle started all over again. 

Meanwhile, though, you could hide, Lu Li thinks; you could hide for quite some time. 

Lu Li can’t direct the attention of his officers to these buildings, have them shine a light into these places. He doesn’t want the law finding Chi Zhen. 

So he goes by himself. 

Maybe he thought only of himself that night. 

It would be understandable. After all, here was a chance to erase the trajectory that faced him—prison, scandal, penury; it was all too much. Exhibit A: Chi Zhen’s bijou apartment, tiny and perfect. Exhibit B: he is a man unaccustomed to standing in cafeteria lines, unaccustomed to taking exercise in the yard. He’s a man in nice shoes, in silk shirts, a man who likes having money, even if it isn’t his own. What would this prison stay do to such a man? 

Then again, maybe it’s too much to say he thought of no one else; it’s possible he thought of his mother, upended, humiliated, her love choked off. The truth was that if you were going to destroy the illusion, destroy the remnant son, you might as well kill her, or him. 

You don’t come back from that. Better he was dead. 

And in a moment of incomprehensible shock, that possibility arrived. Here it was. Actually, he could die: dying, he could be reborn. So maybe Lu Li never crossed his mind as he gathered his strength, leaving his phone behind in a pool of blood. 

Maybe that’s how it was.

—

It might be comforting to tell that story. Any decent lawyer could make something of that story. It wouldn’t be hard at all. 

Besides, what does it matter what Chi Zhen thought? If Chi Zhen worked it all out in his head as the train rattled from station to station? 

If he stayed, stayed in the blood; if he stayed in Hua City, whether he went to prison for Lu Li for years or were implausibly, miraculously convicted of a lesser charge, he would be a thread for Dong Lingqi’s long fingers to pick loose. He would be a knife in Dong Lingqi’s dead hand. He would be the instrument after all, the vehicle of Lu Li’s end. 

For Lu Li’s position was already precarious. His movements that day were suspicious and far from opaque. He might pass a gunpowder test that would absolve him of actually pulling the trigger; but there were too many questions whose answers pushed toward an inappropriately close relationship with a highly motivated murderer.

So die: erase that trajectory. Erase any chance of being used by the man he’d killed. 

And keep silence, for the sake of the man he’d saved. 

If he reached out, found a way to tell Lu Li he was still alive, it would force Lu Li to act. How could he not? Chi Zhen had watched the same dynamic play out for Lu Li two times already. He’d harbored two murderers already: if the first time he’d been all unknowing, the second time, with Wu Wenxuan, when the light finally dawned, where had he been left? What would be left of Lu Li if he acted, if he failed to act? 

Contact meant collusion. Collusion meant averting his eyes. To avert his eyes a third time would destroy him. 

—

So maybe Chi Zhen never thought of his friend as he sat on that train, blood oozing from his side. Maybe he didn’t cauterize his heart to keep Lu Li safe. 

No goodbyes. No hand on his shoulder. No eyes to look into. 

“Is it counterfeit, is it stolen—“

“No! no—it was, well, sure, it was wholesale, all right? I didn’t sell my soul for it or anything, but it’s real. And I really paid for it. OK? If you don’t like it, give it to Yinuo.”

Lu Li holds it up to the light. It’s round, honey-colored, almost as big as his fingernail. It keeps changing as it turns on its chain; the jeweler cut it like an open lotus. 

“You’re ridiculous,” he says, his face red. 

“Just—“ Chi Zhen takes it from him, fumbles with the clasp, and fastens it around Lu Li’s neck. He pulls the collar of Lu Li’s shirt down and settles the sapphire in the hollow of his throat, where the collarbones meet. Then he twitches the collar back up; the stone’s hidden now. “Like that,” he says, a little hoarsely. “No one’ll bother you. You’re the only one who knows it’s there.”

If his father was a hole in his heart with specific dimensions, Director Zhang, his mentor, was hardly a substitute. It was clear from their first meeting, in which the Director, smiling and frank, said: “I’m recruiting you because if I let you go out into society and you turn to crime, it’ll be a pain to catch you.”