Chapter 24: Seek the Strategist

 

Two in the morning to six — the hours that do the most damage.

Insomnia at this particular stretch doesn't just keep you awake. It opens a door and lets everything in: the embarrassing memories that surface without invitation, the way darkness eats through whatever you'd convinced yourself was solid, the specific cruelty of uncertainty about someone who hasn't said anything definitive one way or the other.

Hu Xiu gave up on lying down. She found the Super Junior concert DVD she kept within reach for occasions like this, opened her laptop, and watched Lee Donghae sing ballads, tracing the piano melody with her fingers across the desk. It was her usual method. It didn't always work, but it gave her hands something to do.

She observed herself from a remove — sitting at the desk, disheveled, running her fingers along a surface, eyes moving without seeing — and recognized the condition precisely. Classic heartbroken state. Since meeting Qin Xiaoyi, she had not sunk this low.

She should stop calling him Qin Xiaoyi, for a start. His name was Diao Zhiyu. Twenty-two years old. Graduate of the Shanghai Theatre Academy. By the income standards of his peers, comfortable. Handsome, with that particular quality of presence that translated immediately across a room.

In the Interactive Theater, he maintained just enough distance to seem profound and just enough warmth to leave traces of feeling in everyone he encountered — all of which, when examined honestly, fell under two headings: acting skill and emotional intelligence. To expect exclusive affection from someone like that would require considerably more than sincerity. She wasn't the only one who came looking for him.

She had misread her own position from the first day. He was the actor; she was one of the audience. Breaking the fourth wall didn't mean she was the only person watching.

The theater worked with public psychology the way self-help books worked with the reader's longing to be understood. Ordinary people needed strategies to be chosen. The word ordinary sat in her chest and pressed.

Hu Xiu shook her head.

Qin Xiaoyi holding an umbrella for her in the rain — he couldn't stand to watch a girl get drenched. Carrying her out of the haunted house — instinct, not interest. Walking her home at that hour — it was late and he was conscientious. If it had all been calculated performance, then for someone his age to maintain such a construction would require a quality of psychological coldness she genuinely did not believe he possessed.

She knew him. At least partially. What she knew was not that.

His warmth was probably just him — the way some people straighten fallen chairs without noticing, not for approval, but because they can't help it.

And she was twenty-seven. She had survived one bad relationship and, counting the adolescent versions, had not been entirely sheltered from the experience of caring about someone. She wasn't naive. She was choosing to be.

So: even if she clung to what proximity to Qin Xiaoyi offered — greedy for a little more of it, knowing exactly what she was doing — she could pretend not to know, stay in the game, treat what Ning Zechen had told her as background noise. Even if she couldn't manage it entirely. She had to try.

The sky outside began to change. The dark went grey, then tentatively blue. The early light had a quality she could only call fragile — the kind that seems like it might not hold.

She moved to the balcony sofa and lay on her back looking at it.

There was something specific about the thoughts that came in those last hours before dawn — thin as gauze but impenetrable, slipping through reason without being resolved by it. Most people experienced them as pure feeling, unprocessed, and were still confused when morning arrived. Hu Xiu was not most people. She lay there and worked through it until she had something resembling clarity.

The chance that Qin Xiaoyi would choose her was, honestly assessed, very small.

And she was so afraid of losing him.

---

Going downstairs for work, the feeling in her chest finally named itself: fear. The particular fear of someone who has already attached and is aware, in real time, that the thing they've attached to may not hold.

She sat at her computer for an hour. The characters she was entering into the system appeared to be moving independently. The consequences of a sleepless night had arrived.

Monday's large meeting was likely to run until noon. She needed coffee — the kind with supplemental shots. She was calculating how to leave long enough to get it when a colleague looked up.

"Xiao Hu. Leaders from Huangpu District are here. Meeting's starting. Are the materials printed?"

"I didn't hear about it last week."

"Surprise inspection — it's a hospital. We just set up and sit in the back. Nothing to worry about."

She checked her numbers against the system one more time. Five minutes left.

Then a wave of physical awareness hit her, specific and unwelcome. She looked at the calendar date. Of course.

Emergency restroom. Hot water from next door. She was moving back to her desk when she noticed a man in a white coat standing at her computer. He looked at her briefly and left. She had never seen a doctor in the administrative office before and didn't know what to do with the sighting.

The spreadsheet was still open, waiting to be printed. She checked it — no typos, the head nurse's shift schedule correct, the work hour calculations intact — and sent it to print.

---

The meeting began. Hu Xiu stood in the back row.

The Party secretary arrived at 9:15 — a middle-aged man, neither the bureaucratic nor the performatively jovial variety. He nodded at her pleasantly. The discussion covered year-end bed and medication shortages, included some acknowledgment of younger staff, and was delivered at the pace and pitch of something she was losing the battle to remain awake through.

She was leaning against the wall near the door, periodically touching the back of her head to it as a preventative measure, her stomach making its own slow, grinding complaint. Such an unlucky Monday.

She thought, not entirely coherently, that an occasional outbreak of Snowpiercer-style shouting from the leaders would have been genuinely helpful right now.

The door beside her opened.

The doctor from earlier — the one who'd been at her computer — came through it. With him came a current of cold air and, unmistakably, the smell of caramel macchiato.

The vice president by the window looked up and, smiling, addressed the Party secretary. "This is our Dr. Pei — Pei Zhen. Thirty-one, already holds his own patents, high-impact publications. Associate professorship soon."

Before Hu Xiu had finished processing the introduction, the caramel macchiato was in her hands.

She looked at it.

The topic had shifted to the cross-regional outpatient settlement platform — a key initiative for 2018, extending universal healthcare coverage across the Yangtze River Delta, removing regional restrictions on settlements. Hu Xiu now understood why the inspection had come. Her department had been doing the relevant system data entry for weeks.

She brought the cup close to her face and breathed in.

Don't sleep. If you sleep, you lose. The macchiato is at stake.

After roughly fifteen minutes, Pei Zhen excused himself with the ease of someone who has been in many rooms and knows how to leave them gracefully. "I'll take my leave — I have other matters. I need to borrow someone for a moment. Documents to print."

He took hold of Hu Xiu's sleeve and guided her out through the door.

She stumbled backward several steps and found herself in the corridor, still holding the coffee.

If he needed to take something, she thought, he could have taken the macchiato and left her. Was she some kind of cup holder?

She tapped his sleeve. When he turned she was already composing the offer to return it.

He yawned, unhurried. "It's for you. I'm coming off night shift and going home soon."

"Ah?"

"You were about to fall asleep in there. I pulled you out so no one could accuse you of slacking off — go wait in my break room. Print another copy of the shift schedule while you're at it, I need one for the head nurse."

"Alright. Thank you for the coffee, but I — I shouldn't drink it right now. My stomach."

The sentence was barely out before a wave of cramps moved through her, bending her forward. Her back curved involuntarily.

"That serious?"

"Occasionally. I've been overworked recently." Three medical conferences over the weekend, all for Li Ai's benefit.

"Then what you need isn't to avoid coffee. It's medication. Come."

He walked ahead. Hu Xiu followed, bent slightly, doing her best impression of walking normally.

The break room was not substantially different from hers, except marginally larger with an additional sofa. Pei Zhen's workstation was organized in the way of someone who had a system and used it: books in order on a three-tiered shelf, document holders stacked neatly, stethoscope on the desk, a green checkered coat and two slightly worn white coats on the rack. No photographs.

He retrieved a box from a drawer and handed it to her, then bent toward the water dispenser. "Evidence-based pain relief. For next time, ibuprofen."

Hu Xiu held the paper cup. The macchiato was still in her other hand, untouched.

Pei Zhen looked at her. "Stop staying up late." A pause. "I corrected the typo in your document title earlier."

He handed her the box. "Keep the whole thing. My shift's over."

"Thank you—"

"You're welcome." He looked at her name tag briefly, with the focus of someone reading something interesting. "Hu Xiu? Is that your real name?"

"Mm."

"Unusual. Goodbye."

---

She printed the shift schedule, clipped it, and left it on his desk. Under the glass desk pad she noticed a postcard — the Northern Lights.

She took the afternoon as sick leave and went home.

In bed, she saw the DVD on the desk and knew she was not going to sleep.

They said exhaustion crushed impulse. For Hu Xiu it did not.

She checked the showtimes and made a decision: last time's unused haunted house voucher. The 3:30 Snowpiercer session.

---

She had changed and settled on the sofa when she heard four women in the adjacent lounge.

Their voices had the quality of people who are accustomed to being the most interesting thing in any room they enter — mature, each sentence shaped with the particular care of a certain Shanghai enunciation, delivered with the slight performance of women who know they are being observed and find this appropriate.

The actress who had previously played Lin Qiumei was among them, buying coffee for the group and clearly in excellent spirits.

One of them stood — blue bob with side-swept bangs, a face maintained with precision, expression calibrated to project a specific variety of effortless superiority. "Fiftieth visit anniversary. Let's see whose name I pick for a tip today."

She stepped out and found Hu Xiu in her eyeline. The look she received back was brief, assessing, and conclusive. The other three followed, each with the particular gait of someone who has decided the ground exists to be walked across in a specific way. Hu Xiu had stumbled onto the Tycoon Ladies Club.

The gates of Rong City opened.

A young man in a white suit stepped out.

Hu Xiu looked at him.

He was Qin Xiaoyi's age, but a different version of the character entirely — features more refined, more aristocratic, a slight arch to the nose, straight brow bones, the full-cheeked look of a young master from a Republican-era period drama, someone who had come back from abroad to find his world rearranged by war. She recognized the character. She recognized the costume.

She had forgotten to check the actor schedule.

The real Qin Xiaoyi — her Qin Xiaoyi, the one with the sharp angles and the cold elegance and the neurotic edge that was entirely his own — was apparently not in this session. She had bought a ticket and come across the city on a sick afternoon, and she had forgotten the one thing that would have told her whether it was worth it.

She acknowledged the misfortune. There was something almost restful about a disappointment this clean.

The four tycoon ladies positioned themselves in front of the other players and examined the new actor with the focused attention of connoisseurs. The young man flushed slightly and redirected his attention to the players behind them. "Has everyone brought their Invitations? Please follow me."

---

Inside Rong City, first scene.

Players in two rows. The new actor and Feng Youjin performing opposite each other, finding their footing.

Ning Zechen came in with his collar loose, saw Hu Xiu, winked once, and immediately became his character. He gestured between the performers with the easy manner of someone oiling a mechanism. "Minister Qin and Officer Feng, enough — our distinguished guests are waiting." A beat. "Minister Qin in particular — newly appointed, ambitious, handsome, well-resourced. Everyone's lining up to visit Room 301. Isn't that so, Miss Feng?"

Hu Xiu looked at her name tag. Then at Ning Zechen, who had spent an entire night outside the theater telling her things she hadn't asked to know, and was now performing complete ignorance while deploying his most practiced rogue-with-a-warm-heart manner.

"This Miss Feng — clearly just returned from overseas. What a coincidence, Minister Qin as well. First meeting, perhaps a proper conversation is in order?"

Five hundred yuan. An afternoon off sick. A new actor and four tycoon ladies. Nothing was going right.

Then, from somewhere on Rong City Avenue, a voice she recognized:

"Gathering rumors, trading what's valuable — in chaotic times, fortunes rise like flame and scatter like wind. Seek the strategist. I, Li Rong, can accomplish anything."

A lanky figure crossed the doorway at speed, glanced inside, and gave her a casual smile on the way past.

Hu Xiu's heart made a decision without consulting her.

Qin Xiaoyi had turned into Li Mazi, and Li Mazi had just smiled at her on his way through a doorway, and her heart had done what it always did.