3:17 a.m. The whole building was dark except for the emergency exit light at the end of the hallway, burning like an eye that refused to close.
Lin Ruoqing leaned her back against the iron railing on the rooftop. The cold seeped through her thin T-shirt and into her spine. She dug a crumpled cigarette pack out of her pocket, shook out the second-to-last one, and clicked the lighter with her thumb. The flame shuddered twice in the wind before it held, throwing light across her half-lidded eyes and the eyeliner she hadn't quite finished taking off.
She took the first drag deep. Smoke flooded her lungs with a raw, scorching sting — like someone pressing a fingertip into the center of her chest, reminding her: you're still here, don't drift off.
She let it out slowly. The white cloud dissolved into the dark beyond the streetlights, swallowed by the night without a trace.
The city slept below her. Now and then a truck slid across the overpass in the distance, its taillights dragging a thin red line through the dark — something pulling it forward, no say in the matter. Ruoqing watched that line until the ash on her cigarette grew long enough to break, then tapped it off against the railing.
The ash fell. The wind caught it and scattered it into nothing.
She thought about the day.
The fluorescent lights in the office were always too bright, bleaching everyone's faces flat and pale, like they'd been fed through a photocopier. When the team lead dropped a stack of documents on her desk, nobody looked up. The keyboards kept going. The printer kept humming out pages. Nothing had happened.
"Lin Ruoqing. One more mistake on the report this month, and you'd better think hard about where you stand."
She said okay. Her voice was so quiet she wasn't sure she'd actually said it out loud.
After that she stood in the break room for five minutes, staring at the water dispenser. The faucet dripped — each drop hitting the stainless steel sink louder than it should have, like a countdown.
She didn't cry. She hadn't cried in a long time.
Not because she was strong. It was more that at some point, tears had evaporated along with a lot of other things. What was left was a dull, gray exhaustion — like clothes worn too many days in a row, until you couldn't smell yourself anymore.
Second drag.
The wind picked up and lifted the hair across her forehead. Ruoqing tucked it behind her ear, and her fingertips grazed the small silver stud in her earlobe — she'd bought it in college, off a street vendor, two pairs for ten dollars. She couldn't remember anymore who she'd given the other pair to.
The rooftop was quiet. Quiet enough that she could hear her own breathing, could hear the faint hiss of paper burning down near the filter. It wasn't an unsettling quiet. It was more like a blanket, something that put distance between her and the noise below.
She liked this hour.
The world at 3 a.m. didn't ask anything of her. No smiling. No texts to answer. No pretending to care about things. She just had to stand here, smoke a cigarette down to the end, watch the wind take the smoke away, then go back to her little rented room and sleep a few hours before daylight.
The cigarette was almost gone.
Ruoqing looked down at the short stub between her fingers, the orange glow pulsing faintly — some weak, uncertain signal. She took one last drag, pressed the butt out against the railing, and tucked it carefully into the little tin she always carried. She didn't like leaving cigarette butts on the ground. It was one of the few rules she still kept.
The lid snapped shut.
She stayed by the railing a little longer. The wind carried over a dog barking somewhere in the distance, broken and intermittent — less like barking, more like talking to itself.
Ruoqing thought, suddenly, that she and that dog had something in common.
She smiled. Just barely, just the corner of her mouth. Not really a smile. Then she turned and walked to the stairwell, pulled open the heavy metal door. The hinges let out a sharp cry that echoed down the empty stairs for a few seconds.
Her flip-flops hit the concrete steps. Slap-slap, slap-slap, one floor at a time.
One cigarette left in the pack.
Tomorrow — no, today — she had to be up early. Alarm set for seven. Forty minutes on the MRT. Clock in by eight-thirty. The fluorescent lights would come on right on schedule, the keyboards would keep going, and everything would be exactly the same as yesterday.
But that was a few hours away.
Right now she just wanted to get back to her room, pull the covers over her head, close her eyes in the dark, and think about nothing.
She stopped on the fourth floor landing.
A line of light showed under the door across the hall. Someone else still awake. Ruoqing looked at it for two seconds, then kept walking down.
She didn't wonder who was on the other side of that light.
Not tonight, anyway.