"Would you mind coming with us?"
The voice carried no weight at all—flat, unbothered, like still water that had never known a ripple.
Ling Hao's chopsticks stopped halfway to his mouth. A bead of sweat slid down his spine. He set them down beside his half-finished noodles, slow and deliberate, buying himself a second to think.
"What do you need? I've never offended anyone in my life."
Steady. Calm. Straight to the point. It was the same tone he used to give bad quarterly numbers to a room that didn't want to hear them.
The two black-robed figures traded a glance. Something about the cut of those robes nagged at him. He'd seen them before, hadn't he: flanking a girl at a market stall, arms crossed, faces carved from the same stone as now.
His stomach dropped.
The tiger. The dead sister story. Her.
Neither of them answered. Neither needed to.
What the hell am I supposed to do here.
His pulse kicked into a sprint. His throat closed. He reached for the chopsticks again, like they'd do anything against two trained agents, like habit could pass for a plan.
Wait. It has to be her. The rich girl from yesterday.
He gripped the chopsticks hard enough to hurt, breath coming quick, the room gone cold around him. The other patrons kept their eyes on their bowls—nobody in this city ever looked up when it mattered.
No. Not after everything. Not like this.
I can't die again.
I am not going back to that forest.
Something shifted behind his shoulder. Before he could turn, heaviness dropped over his skull like a curtain falling, and the room folded in on itself.
Shit.
That was the last complete thought he managed before the dark took the rest.
---
"Do you hate it?"
The voice came from nowhere and everywhere at once, close as breath, familiar the way an old scar is familiar.
"Maybe." Smaller than he meant it to sound.
"Then maybe you should end it."
"But how? I just want to go home."
Grief in that, unpolished and real.
"Try. Just try, and see what's left when it's done."
"And maybe you'll finally see the ending."
The dark pressed in after that, heavy with everything unsaid. He let it.
"Sometimes I want to give up. I know I won't. But I want to."
"I hate that I didn't take care of the life I had on Earth. Some part of me actually thought it wasn't worth keeping."
"Some days I wish I'd never been born. I'm tired of fighting for a life nobody asked me to live."
Then the dark swallowed him whole. No echo. No answer. Just the hush of something erasing itself.
The voice came back, and this time it had teeth.
"Why bother with another life just like the last one? There's no point in that. Everything repeats. So why didn't you quit when the repeating started to hurt? What's still keeping you here?"
"Because I exist to be alive. That's the whole reason. Just to take up space where other things get to live, too."
He said it into the dark, not even sure anymore that anyone was listening.
"But there's still things I can't put down. Love. People who'd notice if I disappeared. Work that mattered, even on the days it didn't feel like it. Family."
"We don't share blood. Didn't stop her from changing everything."
Grandma Chan. He didn't say the name. He didn't need to.
A paused came for a moment.
"If I died again tomorrow, I'd come back just to have today."
"I hate my regrets. Won't pretend otherwise. But I don't think they're a bad thing. They're a wall that keeps getting knocked down and rebuilt stronger, over and over, until it can take anything you throw at it. That's not broken. That's finished. It just has cracks where the scars are."
The silence stretched, then broke. When the voice came back, the ice was gone from it.
"Then don't you dare regret it."
"Yeah. I won't."
The shadows peeled back to show him himself: same face, tired around the eyes, dressed in the gray suit he used to wear to a job that felt like a costume from another life. Gloomy Ling Hao looked at present Ling Hao and smiled like he meant it, for once.
Light tore the dark open.
If I die and open my eyes to see the familiar night sky I would be sick seeing it.
Dammit. I hate that forest. I'm so sick of it.
---
Ling Hao's eyes cracked open to a face hovering inches from his.
He let out a noise that wasn't quite a word—closer to a full-body *nope* translated into sound—and threw himself backward. He got nowhere. Wrists lashed to the arms of a chair, ankles bound to its legs, rope biting in with every twitch.
Fuck. This is it. They're going to take me apart at a time. Or even torn into peices.
The face pulled back enough to come into focus. Familiar—too familiar. The girl from the stall. Behind her, arms folded, stood the same two black robes from the inn, patient as furniture.
"You're finally awake." Zhu's voice was pleasant in the specific way that made it worse. "Good. We have things to discuss."
"I—what things? I don't even know you." A lie, and a bad one, and he knew it the second it left his mouth.
"You sold my sister a stuffed tiger." She tilted her head, unhurried, like she had all night and fully intended to use it. "Along with a very touching story about a dead sister of your own. Word for word the same story you told the silk merchant two stalls down. Except his dead sister had a different name."
His stomach hit the floor. Oh no. She actually checked.
Wait sister? So the stuff tiger was a gift her little sister?
"Okay, that's—that's a fair point. But marketing isn't the same as spying."
"Who sent you." Not a question. Flat, final, agent-issue. "Someone above? Answer me."
"Nobody sent me! I sell toys. I make them with my own hands, and sometimes I lie about a dead relative to sell a product, which is just—" He heard himself say it out loud and winced. "That's just business."
She didn't blink; neither did the robes behind her.
He pulled against the ropes, testing, and got a groan of old wood for his trouble.
"I'm serious. Ask Uncle Jiang. Ask anyone. I'm not a spy, I'm a guy who sells stuff animals to little kids and occasionally lies, which, in hindsight—"
"Stop moving," one of the robes said.
"I'm not moving, I'm—"
He was moving. Rocking the chair in short, useless jerks, some animal part of him convinced enough friction would fray the rope, or tip the chair, or do something besides sit here explaining his sales tactics (badly) to a woman who could have him disappeared before breakfast.
The chair creaked. Loud. Wrong. Something giving in the back leg.
All three of them went rigid.
"He's breaking it—"
"Your Highness, get back—"
"Grab him," Zhu snapped, already moving.
Two hands seized his left arm. A second pair caught his right. Zhu lunged for his shoulders to pin him down, and the chair—already complaining, already half gone—picked that exact moment to give out from under all four of them at once.
It went over backward, taking Ling Hao with it, and everyone holding on to him crashed down as well. For half a heartbeat Zhu landed flat against his chest before she scrambled upright and planted herself across his waist instead, both hands braced on his shoulders to hold him still. The two robes hit the floor on either side, each with a fistful of his wrist, hanging on out of pure reflex.
Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. The chair lay in pieces around them.
Then the door opened.
Tang Ning stood in the frame in her sleeping robes, blue hair mussed, a stuffed tiger clutched to her chest—*his* tiger, he realized distantly, the one he'd stitched by hand and sold with a lie attached. She blinked at the scene like she was still deciding whether she'd dreamed it.
"Big sister," she said. "Are you playing adult stuff?"
The silence that followed had a texture to it.
"NO—" Zhu was off him before the word finished leaving her mouth, hands raised, robes flying. "No, Tang Ning, this is not—go back to bed, this is grown-up business, this is not—"
"It's an interrogation," Ling Hao offered helpfully from the floor, roped to two men who'd gone red to the ears. "A bad one."
"Nobody asked you."
"I'm just saying, if this is how you treat suspects, I understand why your spy program isn't—"
"Nobody asked you."
Tang Ning hugged the tiger tighter and considered them both with the grave suspicion only a four-year-old can produce. "You were sitting on him."
"I was restraining him."
"That's what people who are playing adult stuff say."
One of the black robes made a sound that might have been a cough. He did not look at anyone for the rest of the night.