“Go back and revise it.”
Yin Che said only those four words. As she turned, the heels of her leather shoes tapped twice against the tile, and she was already around the corner. She left not half a word more behind, and not the slightest hesitation in her steps.
Zhou Yuwei stood where she was. The taut wire at the back of her neck, stretched tight all night, suddenly went slack. Her shoulders sagged half an inch, and only then did she hear the faint gasp escape her throat.
She lowered her head to look at the stack of folders in her arms. Her knuckles were still white. Slowly, she loosened her grip, leaving red marks in her fingertips. Before the door at the end of the hallway closed, Yin Che had stared at her for three seconds. She had thought she'd given something away, but now it seemed she'd only scared herself. Someone who'd been revising work until three in the morning couldn't exactly keep her eyes from wandering, could she?
Go back and revise it. Four words, delivered in exactly the same tone Yin Che used for ordinary instructions, without a second more pause or a second less. Zhou Yuwei chewed over those four words twice in her head. The more she did, the more she felt that those three seconds in the hallway had only been her imagination running wild. A person who'd revised work until three in the morning could dream up any number of ghosts and monsters.
She hugged the folders tighter and walked back to her desk.
Lin Xiaoyu was still sprawled across the desk, dead asleep. Half a bag of unfinished potato chips lay on the keyboard, and a small patch of drool had soaked into her arm. She didn't notice Zhou Yuwei return.
Zhou Yuwei shut down the computer. The instant the screen went dark, it reflected her own sleep-deprived face. Half her forehead showed beneath the brim of her cap, and the dark circles under her eyes were even worse than when she'd reported for work that morning. She reached up and tugged the brim lower, then grabbed her backpack and left.
The motion-sensor lights in the hallway flickered on and off in time with her footsteps. Beyond the glass curtain wall, the sky had already begun to turn gray. The sound of the cleaning lady's mop drifted over from far away, swish after swish, as if she were making one final pass through the building. The most exhausted people in the city were gradually waking up, while Zhou Yuwei was about to escape that same building.
She was alone in the elevator. The mirrored walls reflected her whole body swallowed by the suit jacket, its cuff swinging around her wrist with an extra, floppy length.
She stared at the face in the mirror for two seconds, then gave a weak little smile, like someone who had just crawled out of an exam and still didn't know whether she'd passed. As the floor numbers ticked downward, she tugged her baseball cap lower again, covering the mark pressed into her forehead. Only then did she remember that no one in this building would be staring at her face anymore. The thought struck even her as a little ridiculous, and only then did the nerves she'd kept wound tight all night finally loosen for real.
Downstairs, she flagged down a cab and sank back into the seat. She couldn't be bothered to adjust the seat belt pressing across her shoulder. The car smelled faintly of air freshener mixed with the stuffy scent of leather seats warmed by the sun and then cooled again. She drew a deep breath and decided it smelled a hundred times better than the office air-conditioning.
The glow from her phone lit her face. She started recording a voice message, deleted half of it, and started over. The first version still had the lowered throatiness she'd used all day and didn't sound like her. She cleared her throat and recorded again. In the end, she kept only the shortest sentence: “Bro, I made it through today. Rest easy and focus on recovering.”
The instant she sent it, all the strength she'd used to hold herself together that night suddenly drained away. She closed her eyes and rested the back of her head against the seat. When the cab turned, she swayed with it without opening her eyes, feeling only that she'd finally made it through this ordeal. The driver's radio was playing softly. She couldn't make out what was being broadcast, but the static drowned out the sound of her heartbeat, which made her feel oddly safe.
Streetlights swept past beyond her eyelids one after another. She turned off her phone screen and rested her forehead against the cool window for a while. The chill relaxed her so much she nearly fell asleep. The suit jacket's collar pressed against her chin, and her tie had loosened half an inch, but she couldn't be bothered to retie it. For this moment, she was just a new hire who had stayed up all night and could finally catch her breath—not anyone's stand-in.
The desk lamp in Yin Che's office was still on. It was the only light left on the entire floor. Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, the traffic on Zhongxiao East Road had thinned. The HR system window sat in the center of the monitor, the cursor blinking in the search bar.
She pulled up Zhou Yuen's résumé, then a copy of his ID card. She enlarged the two images side by side until even the grain along the photo edges emerged one speck at a time. The quality was so poor that even his features were blurry; all she could make out was the face of a young man.
Her finger stopped on the trackpad. She didn't move it.
In that moment at the end of the hallway, when the other person had suddenly looked up, Yin Che had looked her over from head to toe again. The image had frozen in her mind more clearly than any résumé.
The two piercing holes in the exposed earlobe had nearly faded from view. Only at an angle where the light slanted across them did they leave two extremely shallow dents, several shades fainter than fresh piercings. This wasn't the first time she'd seen marks like that. At her former company, a female coworker had been left with the exact same marks after removing her earrings.
The area around the throat was completely clean, flat all the way to the collarbone. There was none of the protrusion that should have been there.
She remembered the strip of wrist that had shown beneath the cuff when the other person handed her documents that afternoon. It was too narrow to fill out the suit sleeve, the bones so fine they looked as if a cuff link could bruise them. The jacket had clearly been made to someone else's measurements. Everywhere it touched the body, it was a compromise.
Then there was the cup of coffee in the break room. Whenever the other person held it, her thumb hooked beneath the handle instead of resting on top. Yin Che had seen that small habit more than once today, always at the same angle. It wasn't a repeated motion that coincidence could explain away.
Four details lined up together. There was no need to verify a fifth. This was already too many for coincidence to contain.
She closed the window with the two photos side by side and leaned back in her chair. Her fingertips tapped twice against the armrest without conscious thought, at a very slow rhythm, as if counting out a beat for herself. The fluorescent light overhead buzzed once, then fell silent. The entire office held only her. Somewhere in the distance outside, the music from a garbage truck drifted in, breaking up before disappearing after two lines.
The coffee she'd made in the break room had long since gone cold. She lifted it and took a sip. The bitterness made her frown, but she didn't get up to brew another cup.
Three months earlier, she had also been alone like this, signing the contract that parachuted her into this company in a conference room at a rival firm. No one had asked whether she wanted it. They'd only told her it was headquarters' decision. She remembered walking into Clearstone's lobby on her first day and looking up at the LED wall. What she'd thought then was the same thing she was thinking now: Not one person here is on my side.
Yin Che moved the cursor over the gray “Report Anomaly” button and stopped. She didn't click it.
The cursor remained over the button for a long time, so long that the screensaver nearly appeared. She moved the mouse and suppressed it. Clicking would be easy. Two seconds, one form, and HR would handle it tomorrow. The problem would no longer have anything to do with her. Yet she didn't move, letting the cursor hover there as if waiting for an answer she herself hadn't figured out.
She opened the department staffing chart. Of the eleven names, ten belonged to the team her predecessor had left behind. They were probably all waiting to see when the joke would begin. They agreed quickly in meetings, while she pretended not to hear their voices gathering in the break room afterward.
Ke Minghan's name was on the third line. He had the most seniority and made the most moves. Yin Che had already taken his measure. It simply wasn't time to confront him yet.
The newest name at the bottom, Zhou Yuen, was someone she'd interviewed and hired herself—the only one of those eleven names who belonged to her. Seen that way, handing over the only person who belonged to her with her own hands wasn't worth it any way she calculated it. It would be like cutting off one of her own escape routes.
She pulled up tomorrow's schedule and moved Zhou Yuen's seat from the row by the window to the one beside her. In the reason field, she typed: New hire requires close supervision. She looked it over after typing and found no fault with the line. Anyone who checked would find no crack in it. Only then did she move the cursor away. She casually gave HR instructions to deal with whoever had occupied the original seat and where to move them in the morning, handling it more decisively than she'd handled client projects.
She didn't type the third thing. She only ran through it in her mind.
Today in the hallway, she'd watched that person stand between two identical doors, unable to tell which one was the women's restroom. The look of helpless confusion on her face had made Yin Che laugh.
Since joining Clearstone, Yin Che could count the number of times she'd laughed on one hand. Meeting small talk didn't count, and polite pleasantries didn't count either. This was the first time she'd laughed for such a trivial, completely unprompted reason. She'd even frozen for a moment afterward, then instinctively glanced around to make sure no one had seen the director randomly cracking up in the hallway.
Everyone in this building wore the same expression: strictly business, not a drop out of place. She wore the same face herself—until those three seconds that afternoon.
She let that thought sit in her mind for a while, then didn't pursue it any further. She knew the weight of each of those three things, but not one of them alone could explain why she hadn't pressed that button tonight. Maybe even all three together weren't enough. But she'd decided not to dig any deeper. Overthinking at a time like this would only make her change her mind. She closed the window.
The system returned to the main screen. She opened a new browser tab and typed into the search bar: freelance studio client work contract template.
A string of results appeared. She clicked through them one by one: template clauses, tax registration, the difference between contractor agreements and employment contracts. These were things that had originally had nothing to do with her, yet she read them carefully, as if preparing an escape route for someone who had not yet asked for help.
She opened one of the template links and created a new document. The cursor blinked in the filename field. She didn't type anything. Instead, she closed the input window, leaving the file unnamed, and saved it at the very bottom of the folder among project files with proper names. No one would give it a second glance.
She picked up her phone and opened the chat. The name above the text field read Zhou Yuen. She stared at those three characters for two seconds, then brushed her thumb along the edge of the screen before letting it drop into the text box.
“Tomorrow at nine a.m., come meet a client with me.”
The vibration from pressing Send hadn't even faded before her thumb returned to the text box. It paused for a second, then added: “Wear a better suit.”
After typing those words, even she felt the instruction was a little unnecessary. How much difference could one suit make? Still, she pressed Send. She set down her phone, then picked it up again and glanced at the two gray message bubbles in the chat. She felt like she'd typed more today than she had in the entire previous month combined.
The message had been sent, but no read receipt had appeared. She placed the phone facedown on the desk and stood to turn off the desk lamp. The office sank into darkness. Only the headlights along all of Zhongxiao East Road outside flowed into a single line, quietly streaming forward.
She stood in the dark and watched that ribbon of light for a few seconds. Every so often, a night bus passed along Zhongxiao East Road, its route display casting a short streak of light across the ceiling. Then it was gone.
Only then did she pick up her jacket, lock the door, and leave. Behind her, the hallway's motion-sensor lights went dark one after another, returning the entire floor to the night.
On the elevator ride down, her phone buzzed once. It was marked read. There was no reply, and she didn't wait for one. She slipped the phone into her pocket. When the elevator doors opened, the lobby security guards were changing shifts. The two men quietly signed the logbook during the handoff, and neither looked up at her.