Chapter 33 – A level of Trust

The doorbell chimed at 6:34. He opened the door.

She was holding a paper bag in one hand and a thermos in the other and her jacket was the one with the torn elbow she had been meaning to mend for a year. She looked exactly like Lin Yue, which was somehow the most disconcerting part of the entire day. He had expected her to arrive transformed somehow: cautious, guarded, other. She looked like she’d just gotten off shift, because she had.

“Scallion,” she said, lifting the bag. “And pork. And one order of the sweet ones because I have a problem.”

“Come in.”

She came in. She took off her shoes, which was something she had done the three previous times she had been in his apartment and which had always seemed unremarkable and which now, today, for no particular reason, made his throat do a small stupid thing. She set the dumplings on his desk. She looked around his apartment the way she always did (quick sweep, no comment) and sat down on the floor cushion by his low table, the one he had bought in the Third Market two summers ago for eighty yuan.

He poured the tea.

They ate for a while. She complained about the pork filling, which she always complained about, because Mrs. Han’s pork dumplings were marginally under-seasoned and Lin Yue had strong opinions about seasoning. She did not ask any of the questions. She waited. He understood, after the second dumpling, that she had decided the conversation was his to start, and that she would sit here drinking tea and critiquing Mrs. Han’s salt ratio for however long it took him to find the shape of what he was going to say.

He set down his chopsticks.

“I found something,” he said.

She looked up. Her expression did not change, which he appreciated.

“Not going to tell you what,” he said. “Not going to tell you where. I need you to understand that going in, because the rest of what I say is going to be true, but the true part stops at a line. I can’t move the line. Not today. Maybe not for a long time.”

“Okay.”

“I found something that gave me access to — ” he considered the phrasing, and discarded two versions before landing on one that was technically accurate, ” — cultivation resources that Grade C cultivators don’t normally see.”

She was very still.

“That’s why you advanced,” she said.

“That’s why I advanced.”

“How far.”

“Above Stage 5.” A breath. “I’m not going to tell you how far above.”

She nodded, slowly. “The less I know, the safer I am.”

“The less you know, the safer we both are.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I figured that part out.”

He continued.

“I developed a technique,” he said. “The thing you felt. The lantern. It’s a concealment layer, two layers, actually. I can go into the structure sometime if you want, but the short version is it lets me present as a lower stage than I actually am, with a fabricated history that holds up to most scrutiny. I built it because advancing at my actual rate, with my root grade, was going to get me flagged. The Cultivation Commerce Bureau has protocols for people whose trajectories don’t match their paperwork. I didn’t want to be in those protocols.”

“So the Stage 5 signature — “

“Is a presentation. Yes.”

“And the — the certification scan last month.”

“It was a presentation.”

“You walked me through the formation safety module while presenting a false cultivation signature.”

“Yes.”

She laughed once. Short and surprised, the way she’d laughed about Jun getting Stage 7, a long time ago, in a different conversation. She shook her head. “Wei. You absolute lunatic.”

“I know.”

“I helped you review the answers.”

“You did.”

“Some of those answers were about detection protocols for false cultivation signatures.”

“I know.”

She ate another dumpling. She chewed thoroughly. She drank her tea.

“Okay,” she said. “Keep going.”

He kept going.

“I’m not doing anything illegal with my cultivation itself,” he said. The framing was deliberate and the framing was lie-adjacent. What he was doing with his cultivation was not illegal, strictly speaking, because there was no legal framework for dimensional pendants; the materials pipeline was a different story, but the materials pipeline was the part he was not telling her. “The technique is grey. The advancement is real. What’s complicated is the resource access. That’s the part that’s sensitive. That’s the part I can’t share.”

“Because it would get you in trouble.”

“Because it would get me in trouble, and because it would get anyone I told in trouble. It’s not a one-person secret. It’s a one-person-pretending-to-be-no-people secret.”

“So why tell me anything at all.”

He looked at her across the low table.

“Because you already knew,” he said. “And I’d rather you know from me than piece it together and decide I’m running something darker than I am. And because — “

He stopped.

She waited.

“Because I’ve been sitting at my desk for six weeks writing notes about you in a journal under a heading called Personnel Considerations,” he said. “And I read them back last month and I didn’t like the person writing them. I’ve been treating you like a variable I needed to manage. That’s not — that’s not how I want to have a friend.”

Her face did something complicated.

“You have been writing notes about me.”

“Yes.”

“In a journal.”

“Yes.”

“Under a heading called Personnel Considerations.”

“Yes.”

“Wei.”

“I know.”

“Wei, that’s appalling.”

“I’m aware.”

“Did I have a trust rating?”

He considered lying. He was very tired. He did not lie. “You had a trust rating.”

“What was it.”

“High.” A pause. “Personal.”

“What does ‘personal’ mean.”

“It means I trusted you. The technical rating was High. The bracket meant — it meant I was pretending to be objective about something I had decided subjectively, and I knew I was, and I kept doing it.”

“Oh for — ” She pressed the heel of her hand into her forehead and laughed without any sound. “You are such a weirdo. You know that, right? You know that’s an actual fact about you?”

“It’s been mentioned.”

“By who.”

“Mostly me.”

“Good. That’s the healthiest thing you’ve said tonight.”

They sat with it. The tea was cooling. Outside, the building’s Qi recycler hummed its soft, broken rhythm, the same one it had hummed every night for the four years he had lived here.

“Some of it, I know you didn’t tell me,” Lin Yue said, quietly. “I’m not dumb. You gave me the outside of a wall and you did not invite me in. I noticed.”

“I know.”

“And that’s, okay. For now. That’s okay. I’m not going to push, Wei. I’m not going to try to figure out where the wall stops. If there’s a day when you can move the line, I’ll — I’ll be here, and you can move it. If there isn’t, I can live with what I’ve got.”

She picked up her tea and looked at it and did not drink.

“But I need you to do one thing for me.”

“Name it.”

“Don’t make me the last person who figures it out.”

He didn’t say anything.

“If somebody’s coming for you,” she said, “I want to know before they get here. Not after. Not when there’s a stretcher. Not when a compliance officer calls me in for a statement and asks me when I first noticed my coworker’s irregularities. I’d rather be your accomplice than your witness. I know that’s not fair, and I know you don’t want to put that on me, and I know I’m the one asking. I’m still asking.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

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She looked at him. Her eyes were very bright. “Thank you for trusting me with that. Some of it. I know you didn’t tell me everything. But you told me enough that I can stop pretending I don’t know. I’ve been pretending for months. It’s exhausting.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t. Just, don’t be sorry. Be careful.”