Fang Zhuo turned around and sat down with her back against the cool door panel.

The motion-sensing light in the corridor went dark, leaving only a thread of fading brightness filtering through the window.

Fang Zhuo took out her phone and called Yan Lie.

The familiar ringing tone sounded for a long while, then gave way to a busy signal.

She switched to a different number and called Wei Xi.

Wei Xi’s line went unanswered as well.

She tried Shen Musi.

No idea what the whole group was busy with — the calls broke off one after another, ending in failed connections.

Fang Zhuo sighed, stared at her phone’s remaining 20% battery, and felt a little dazed.

She knew she had made a mistake. Not the mistake of coming to City C — but the mistake of boarding the wrong bus, miscalculating the time, misjudging how things would unfold, and making a thorough mess of everything.

She was inherently unsuited to the unexpected. Though she had come to this same conclusion after her last impulsive act.

She sat on the floor, lifted the cake box and turned it over in her hands, straightened the ribbon, and carefully set it back on the ground.

The elevator went up and down intermittently; the sounds of doors opening and closing drifted down from above and below.

Fang Zhuo sat there, doing nothing — just sitting. When the clock ticked to half past nine, she checked again and found only 15% battery left. If she didn’t head back soon, she might not have enough charge to navigate her way back to City A. The relentless drain of the battery gave her a deep, creeping unease.

Fang Zhuo picked up the cake box and got to her feet. She sent Yan Lie one final text.

Fang Zhuo: I ordered you a same-city delivery cake. Have it with Zhao Jiayou and the others. I tried calling but couldn’t get through — I had them leave it at the front desk.

Fang Zhuo: You should have cake on your birthday.

She had never really celebrated a birthday herself. Cake was the one thing she knew — the one symbol she could attach meaning to.

The colored lights inside the KTV strobed until everything in sight seemed to shimmer with a blurred, hazy glow.

Yan Lie’s phone had been receiving messages all day and was nearly dead. After sending his last message to Fang Zhuo, he cut the data connection and shoved it into his pocket. He had been planning to go back and charge it, but under the insistence of the group he’d come along for another round.

Wei Xi and her roommate were fighting over the microphone, belting out folk songs. Zhao Jiayou and the others had dragged Yan Lie to a table in the corner to play cards.

Shen Musi said with an agonized expression: “That sounds terrible. Can you turn up the original track a bit?”

Zhao Jiayou said: “Then your ears are done for. A three of hearts!”

“When was it your turn to play? Take it back!” Shen Musi said hotly. “I just played three kings — nobody responded yet!”

Zhao Jiayou played dumb: “Sorry, what? I can’t hear you!”

Shen Musi covered his ears and yelled: “Wei Xi, change the song! This one is really, genuinely unbearable!”

And yet somehow, Wei Xi’s otherworldly wailing won her first place in the venue’s hourly karaoke contest, and before long a server arrived with a complimentary fruit platter — prompting Shen Musi to exclaim that this world was beyond saving.

Wei Xi laughed triumphantly: “A bunch of tasteless men who don’t know art!”

Zhao Jiayou muttered under his breath: “If it’s still that rough on pitch, it means she’s just genuinely bad.”

“You never should’ve invited them,” Shen Musi said miserably. “After spending time around them, I feel like I might never date anyone in my entire life.”

Zhao Jiayou played a sneaky card while still running his mouth: “Yan Lie hasn’t said a word, so what are you worried about?”

Shen Musi said: “He has a girlfriend — of course he doesn’t have to worry.”

Yan Lie had been half-listening with his mind elsewhere, but his eyelid twitched at that. He looked up at the person across the table.

Zhao Jiayou was already looking sharp-eyed between the two of them, and asked: “Who?”

“Fang Zhuo,” Shen Musi said, genuinely surprised. “Hello? Have you forgotten where you come from?”

Zhao Jiayou pounced on him and pinned him to the sofa, laughing and cursing: “Go to hell!”

After the two of them wrestled and settled down, Zhao Jiayou climbed back up and asked: “Yan Lie — are you actually with Fang Zhuo? Why didn’t she come for your birthday then? When did it happen — why didn’t you say anything?”

He gave Yan Lie a punch on the shoulder, and noticing something odd in his reaction, started reading into it carefully.

When it came to guessing a close friend’s thoughts, boys had their own particular and incisive way of seeing through things — not unlike a girl’s sixth sense; between two guys, even two lines that weren’t parallel would eventually intersect.

He thought back — Yan Lie had always been dismissive and low-key about birthdays in the past. This was the first time he had actively proposed an outing like this. Not only had he arranged food and accommodation for everyone, he had specifically invited female friends along and covered most of the costs.

It was his own itinerary, yet he had spent the whole trip glued to his phone, looking utterly disengaged.

“No,” Yan Lie said, head down, when Zhao Jiayou had expected it. “We’re not.”

That look of quiet despondency on his face — Zhao Jiayou felt a pang of sympathy immediately, and pulled him close: “Don’t be sad. I think it’s because you’re too straightforward but too roundabout at the same time, so Fang Zhuo hasn’t caught on. Call her right now. Tell her — I like you, and I feel terrible that you’re not here. My whole birthday trip was planned with you in mind. When you like someone, don’t play the silent hero. You don’t have a little notebook to slip her at just the right moment, like she does.”

Yan Lie waved him off with one arm. This guy was an absolute obstacle in his life. He pulled Shen Musi over: “See? Spend too much time around him and you might genuinely never find a relationship.”

“Wait, I’m serious!”

Self-appointed love guru Zhao Jiayou, impatient with the slow drink-ordering process, ran out himself to find a server and came back with two bottles of beer.

Yan Lie thought of the rice wine he’d drunk at Fang Zhuo’s home over the Lunar New Year, and for the first time felt that alcohol carried an intoxicating sweetness — that warm, mild sweetness mixed with the sharpness of the alcohol, traveling once through the stomach and leaving the whole body with a sensation of barely suppressed heat.

So when Zhao Jiayou poured for him and called it Dutch courage, he didn’t say no.

Wei Xi glanced over from the mic stand and laughed: “That beer is eight percent — you’d need a whole case to get drunk. Dutch courage? Want me to mix in some soda?”

Zhao Jiayou jumped on the suggestion: “Exactly, I’ve heard mixing speeds things up — let’s go, Yan Lie. And want a piece of cake?”

The rest of the group were having a great time. Yan Lie, however, felt hollow. He watched their liveliness and thought of Fang Zhuo settled quietly over a desk.

He felt that alcohol’s greatest function was to allow a person to freely practice a kind of self-suggestion. But he didn’t have anything he really needed to suggest to himself.

He was simply not satisfied, asking too much of things, hoping for a lucky turn of fate — while lacking the courage to face it if things went wrong.

Look — he was perfectly lucid, yet he kept drifting in this half-lit, unresolved space.

Yan Lie set down his glass: “I’m heading back — there’s still over an hour left on the room, take your time.”

The chatting and laughing around him came to a stop. Several people looked up at him. Yan Lie stretched the corners of his mouth, said nothing further, and wove his way through the room and out.

Zhao Jiayou clicked his tongue and said with feeling: “This, right here — is the suffering of love.”

The KTV wasn’t far from the house he’d borrowed. Yan Lie walked along the road under the night lights, and a gust of wind flung sand into his eyes.

He raised a hand to rub them. When he opened them again, through the slightly misty blur in his vision, he caught what felt like an eerily familiar figure.

Yan Lie fixed his gaze on her back — watched her hitch up a shoulder strap, tuck her hands into her pockets, tilt her head to glance up at the moon, and walk unhurriedly along the pedestrian path.

Her clothes, her way of moving, her gait, even the bag on her back — all of it, despite the fact that the lighting made it hard to see clearly, matched Fang Zhuo’s everything, exactly.

Yan Lie’s world went quiet. The entire street fell away until only that silently walking figure remained. Then, all at once, an avalanche of strange images rushed in, accompanied by a background of voices reading aloud — loud and scattered and unceasing, like a string of firecrackers going off, leaving clusters of sparks still burning in his mind.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone.

The battery had dropped below 5%. The top of the screen showed a missed call and unread messages, all from Fang Zhuo.

Yan Lie swiped his finger and called back the number.

The person walking along the street ahead of him looked down at her phone, raised it to her ear — and at that same moment, the familiar word hello came through his speaker.

Yan Lie’s time, at 9:41 p.m., officially resumed its counting.

He couldn’t help it — he broke into a smile. Even the wind at his back seemed to be pushing him forward.

“Where are you right now?”

Fang Zhuo answered slowly: “Where do you think I should be?”

Her next line — at home, of course — was still unspoken when Yan Lie got there first: “I think you should be thinking about me.”

The figure under the streetlight stopped. Then, in a tone entirely devoid of inflection, with perfect seriousness, she asked: “Are you out of your mind?”

Yan Lie’s voice drifted clearly through the quiet night, carrying a faint warmth: “Is thinking too much a kind of illness?”

Fang Zhuo said, unhurried: “What do you have to think too much about? Aren’t you on holiday?”

“You,” Yan Lie said. “Your share of space is too large. The moment I start thinking of you, the whole system crashes.”

Fang Zhuo fell silent. Two seconds passed before she said: “Then clear it out.”

“I won’t!” Yan Lie lowered his voice, and through the phone it felt as though the words were pressed right up against her ear. “You are the startup program I cannot get around.”

Fang Zhuo moved the phone away from her ear, wondering what new variety of scam this might be. But the number, the voice — both were real.

The person on the other end continued:

“Do you know — I came to the seaside for my birthday so I could invite you.”

“You not coming left me devastated. I felt like a new year of my life was beginning on a day that had no meaning.”

Fang Zhuo heard every word. She just didn’t know how to reply. She watched the call timer tick upward, and all she could think of — entirely ill-timed — was the phrase silence is golden.

She said: “…I’m paying two jiao per minute for this call.”

The line went immediately silent.

Fang Zhuo opened the messaging app, intending to send him a word — telling him her phone was nearly out of charge — when behind her a flurry of footsteps rang out, light and quick, carried on a rapid, shallow breath, growing closer and closer.

Fang Zhuo turned around — and was pulled into a full embrace.