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Lu Guang dreams in red.
He can’t say that he’s scared of the color, what an absurd thing that would be. Yet the reality is that there are too many hair-trigger associations for him not to flinch when it flashes him by. Red like the darkroom, red like blood, red like—like the hair of the man who sits across from him now. The restaurant’s searingly vivid walls tower around them; between them, the hotpot bubbles dark and steaming.
“Really now,” Vein says conversationally, “if you were so repulsed by the idea of a dinner date, you could have just said so.” He idly swirls a glass of wine. “I showed you such hospitality, and this is how you repay me?”
It takes Lu Guang several precious moments of rapid breathing to find his voice. This isn’t how it usually goes. Usually, Vein isn’t so quick to catch him.
“This,” Lu Guang finally manages, “isn’t real. You’re dead, I—”
Vein tsks. “You should leave the killing to the experts, my dear.”
Lu Guang’s blood goes cold. “What does that mean?”
Vein’s only answer is a grin that shows all of his teeth. He pokes his chopsticks into the pot and fishes out a slice of meat—still red, somehow. “I will admit, you’ve got style,” he adds, after swallowing. “With a few more years, you could’ve had fun in my line of work. Pity.” This time, it doesn’t seem he’s referring to fashion modeling.
This is worse, somehow, than Lu Guang’s typical dreams of panicked flight through twisting corridors. He wonders where Vein’s gun is. Wishes he would just draw it already. “What would it take for you to leave us alone?” Lu Guang tries instead.
“Wrong question.” Vein tears off another bite, and red drips along perfectly sharp canines. “I remind you that you chose this path of your own free will—freer than most. Therefore, the consequences are yours to bear as well.” He gives an airy sigh, waving his chopsticks. “The inescapable burden of power, I’m afraid. You may as well enjoy its privileges.”
What privileges. The privilege of watching the light fade from Cheng Xiaoshi’s eyes, over and over again?
When Lu Guang refuses to speak, Vein continues, “Let me give you some free advice.” He neatly sets his chopsticks down and rises, his full height casting a shadow over the table. “You’ve already made your choices, so why the hesitation? Get rid of those distractions and embrace where this goes. It’ll be good for you.”
Lu Guang glares at the still-boiling pot. He won’t look at Vein. “You don’t know me.”
“Whatever you say, Mr. Detective.”
Vein saunters past Lu Guang, humming a jaunty tune—but then Lu Guang hears him pause in his step.
“By the way, you dropped something,” says Vein. “You should really keep a closer eye on these things.”
Abruptly, the red around Lu Guang blinks out.
Lu Guang opens his eyes to gold.
When he lifts the hat that’s been yanked low over his head, the shock of the new color almost blinds him. His first instinct is relief—gold is life, gold is hope, gold is home. But when he looks closer at the figure who stands before him now, it’s not the one he’s been chasing through time.
It’s Xia Fei, hair bright, eyes dark. That long black coat he’s wearing—it looks familiar, even as it swallows his figure. He isn’t smiling.
“Lu Guang, I really thought we were friends.”
Through all of Lu Guang’s unsettled nights, never before has he met Xia Fei like this. Lu Guang thinks he’s grown used to being hunted through the darkness, and so often there’s a numbness that dulls the expected terror. But today it’s in the warmth of the setting sun that Xia Fei steps closer; Lu Guang steps back, his heel hitting the wrought-iron gate behind him. They’re at the exit of that park in which they’d done their photoshoot, during that last day of carefree joy.
Lu Guang looks down at the hat in his hands, the white cap with its silly little cat ears. He’d thought it lost forever after that drunken alley chase, until Xia Fei had heroically reappeared with it. “You approached us first,” Lu Guang says quietly. “You had dishonest intentions from the start.”
Guilt twists Xia Fei’s face, but it doesn’t block the next accusations. “So I deserve this?” he spits. “So laoban deserved this?”
Xia Fei’s blind admiration of that man is something that Lu Guang could never reconcile with his own lived future. But how to explain? In the end, all he manages is, “Vein is not the man you think he is.”
“What gives you the right to judge his worth?”
“He killed—”
“You killed him, Lu Guang,” says Xia Fei. “You killed him, and then lied to my face. You saw me begging for answers, and then you flew back to your happy little home and left me to pick up the pieces. After laoban was gone, do you have any idea what I went through?”
Xia Fei pauses, and then a smile stretches across his lips, twisting his model-perfect features. “But you do, don’t you. And that pain hurt so bad, you’d rather inflict it on someone else.”
“That’s not how it was!” Lu Guang bursts out. He squeezes the cap, disfiguring its form. “Xia Fei, this was never about you! You were just—” But he falters, unable to finish the thought aloud.
“Just what? A bystander? Collateral damage? Too bad, you made it about me.” Xia Fei reaches into the pocket of his jacket. “And maybe you’d say I deserve this, for being too blind and weak in a world ruled by power. But not anymore.”
When he withdraws his hand, he’s holding a gleaming pistol, an object familiar in someone else’s grasp. The sight sends a chill down Lu Guang’s spine.
“Everything comes to light eventually, Lu Guang,” says Xia Fei, lifting the gun. “And I promise you too will get exactly what you deserve.”
The gun fires. Lu Guang falls.
Lu Guang drowns in indigo.
Eyes wide open, he stares in what he can only assume is the direction of up, as something grasps his shirt, his hair, his limbs. Hands. Too cold and hard to be human flesh. He twists his head, catching glimpses of mannequins that claw toward him, glowing ghostly against the deep purple.
One hand crawls over his mouth. Biting back a scream, Lu Guang viciously shakes himself free, but others are already reaching to take its place, rolling, twisting, grabbing.
“Having fun yet?”
Lu Guang can’t see him, but he knows the voice too well. He grits his teeth, fending off the invasive figures.
“Look at you,” the voice continues. The mannequins turn blank faces toward him. “Still struggling to spin out a new thread from a fixed end. Aren’t you tired? Haven’t you had enough?”
“Liu Xiao,” he growls, “shut up.”
Softly, beside his ear: “Make me.”
Lu Guang lashes out, but his hands make contact with only hollow plastic. Plastic, and—there’s something tangling between his fingers, the barely-there sensation of a spiderweb unseen until it has already ensnared.
He doesn’t think. Lu Guang grasps the threads in his fists, and yanks.
All around him, the mannequins leap and clatter. With the puppets pulled from beneath him, Lu Guang finds himself abruptly dropped to the ground, the impact rattling through his bones. Kneeling, Lu Guang lifts his head and sees, stark against the dark ground, a forked trolley track.
“Ah, a classic reference you’ve constructed here. How cute.” There, on the branched-off track, Lu Guang finally spots his nemesis. Liu Xiao lounges back, apparently unbothered by the crystalline threads tying him down to the rails. He tilts a smirk at Lu Guang.
“What are you talking about,” Lu Guang breathes. To his left, he hears the clanging of a trolley bell, each ring louder than the last.
Liu Xiao’s smile widens. On his body, the threads look more like decoration than restraint. “You already know what’s going on.”
“No…”
Upon the branched track, next to Liu Xiao, a row of mannequins is similarly tied down. They remain faceless as all the previous, yet as Lu Guang looks, he thinks he can pick out details. One of them in a blouse and pencil skirt, hair tied back in a bun. One in casual clothes, still wearing a police badge. One with twin pigtails, clutching a plushie. One after another, mannequin after mannequin, until their pale forms blend into the track stretching into the distance.
Upon the main track, tied right in front of Lu Guang, lies a single figure.
Take no action, and this will be the victim. Liu Xiao is right. Lu Guang already knows.
“It’s always justified, isn’t it,” says Liu Xiao, mockery clear even through the approaching rumble, “so long as you’re the one holding the lever.”
Above, the indigo sky looms. Hating him, hating himself—Lu Guang claps.
The world clicks teal.
The scene switch happens in a shutter-snap. It’s the set of an office that has sprung up around him, not one he recognizes, yet he knows the face of the woman who sits and smiles at him now.
“Hello, Lu Guang.” Wang Qing greets him, and gestures at the chair opposite hers. “Would you like a cup of tea?”
Lu Guang stares at her, processing, before he says, “This isn’t your clinic.” He could have noticed anything, yet this is what leaves his lips—because the color is wrong. He’s seen Wang Qing’s office a few times now, and always it has been drenched in dying sun or clinging shadow. In contrast, the cool tone of this blue-green is… calm, overbearingly so. Lu Guang doesn’t like it.
Then again, he never much liked her, either.
Wang Qing merely smiles. “Well, I can’t exactly return to my old office at the moment. You could say I’ve borrowed this space from a colleague.” She stirs her tea. “Though it’s for the best that you two never met in this time.”
Lu Guang doesn’t know what she’s talking about. It’s a distraction, he thinks. “Let me out. I’ve had enough.”
“We still have time,” Wang Qing counters. “Let’s chat. You have a lot weighing you down.”
“I don’t need therapy.”
This earns a chuckle from her. “You already know what I have to say to that.”
Lu Guang has already turned away, walking toward where he assumes the exit would be. But instead of a door, all he sees is the teal wall. He spins, and somehow he’s no farther than before.
“You can tell me what’s on your mind,” continues Wang Qing, her voice still frustratingly gentle.
“Why should I tell you anything?”
“Because I’d like to help you, believe it or not,” she says, a little wry. “Call it an occupational hazard.”
“You’re not even real,” snaps Lu Guang.
It’s meant as some sort of provocation. It doesn’t earn the reaction he’s hoping for, but he can’t hold back anymore, the three dreams and too many lifetimes of anguish that bubbles forth. “You’re not here, you’ve vanished,” he says. “This is all in my head. You already know all there is to know. So go ahead and tell me that I’m fucked up, that I’m evil, that I doomed this world for my own selfish desires. I know it. I’ve heard it all already.”
Lu Guang feels a little silly as he snaps his mouth shut. He also feels, undeniably, a little relieved. Wang Qing takes her time, lifting the teapot on the table before her and deftly pouring an amber stream, and by the time she slides the teacup toward him, Lu Guang finds that his breathing has calmed. He drops into the chair, suddenly tired.
“It is not my job to tell you what to think, or what to do, or what is right or wrong,” says Wang Qing.
Lu Guang closes his eyes. “Then what’s the point of this?”
“Tell me this, Lu Guang.” She waits until Lu Guang meets her gaze once more. “Past or future, let it be—what does this mean to you?”
“What?”
Wang Qing’s expression is serene. “Was it a lesson to impart to Cheng Xiaoshi, as he navigated his world-shaping power? Was it a lie to keep him in your control? Or was it, in truth, for yourself?”
Lu Guang’s instinct is to deflect. What does it matter? But it should be such an easy question, with how often they exchanged those words. Why is that no answer feels adequate? Every time that mantra crossed his lips, what was he really trying to say?
“…I don’t know,” Lu Guang finally admits.
It feels like a defeat, yet Wang Qing smiles. “Your loved ones are calling for you, Lu Guang,” she says. “Take care.”
A shadow falls over Lu Guang.
His eyes remain closed, but he can sense it, in conjunction with the extraordinarily unsubtle stage-whispering going on around him. “Cheng Xiaoshi,” and he can hear the eyeroll in Qiao Ling’s voice, “can’t you just wake him up like a normal person?”
Cheng Xiaoshi’s reply comes from right above him. “It’s a valuable experiment,” he says, and it’s with an impressive amount of self-control that Lu Guang keeps himself from flinching.
“There’s this super cute video, haven’t you seen?” Cheng Xiaoshi’s voice continues, as his shadow shifts closer. “Someone’s holding up a cooked shrimp right under the nose of a sleeping cat. And then you see the cat’s nose starting to twitch, until finally it wakes up, sees the shrimp, and—”
Lu Guang opens his eyes and bites off the Pocky stick that’s being waved in front of his face.
Cheng Xiaoshi stares. Lu Guang stares back, chewing the cookie. Chocolate—good classic. The broken end of the Pocky in Cheng Xiaoshi’s hand dribbles a few crumbs.
“Hey!” Cheng Xiaoshi finally splutters. “Wait—that was my last one!”
What did he expect. Lu Guang swallows, and with all the deliberate emphasis he can fit into the syllables, says, “Idiot.”
Cheng Xiaoshi stares at him with massive, kicked-puppy eyes. Past him, Qiao Ling’s face is scrunched up in a perfect mixture of incredulity and poorly-restrained laughter. Lu Guang looks at the two of them for several heartbeats, and then lets his head fall back against the couch cushions. His gaze slides from the studio walls, to the white ceiling, to the window behind and above.
The cushion sinks on his left. “You good there?” comes Cheng Xiaoshi’s voice, more gently. “I know you’ve been tired ever since we got back.” To the right, he feels Qiao Ling settle beside him as well.
Sunlight filters warm through the windowpanes. Bright leaves sway in the breeze outside. Beyond, the clear sky stretches a brilliant blue.
Let it be. And Lu Guang replies, softly, honestly, “I’m good.”