The God Who Forgot He Was Dead

Chapter 2 : What the Rich Man Saw

Bai Lu did not take him home.

She took him to a noodle shop - small, warm, loud with the sound of a television nobody was watching. An old woman behind the counter took one look at Lin Fan and pushed two bowls across without being asked. Bai Lu paid. They sat in the corner booth, and the broth steamed between them, and neither of them spoke.

Lin Fan ate. Of course he was hungry - this body was a bird that had been squeezed. And eating was useful. So he ate, and watched her over the rim of the bowl.

She watched him back.

"You're not going to ask me anything," she said at last.

"I'm deciding which question is worth asking."

"Ask the right one and I might answer it."

He set the bowl down.

"Who do you think I am?"

Her chopsticks stopped halfway to her mouth. Something moved behind her eyes - relief, maybe. Or fear. In his experience they were usually the same thing wearing different coats.

"Not here," she said. "Not yet."

"Why not?"

"Because there are people in this city who would burn this whole street flat to hear me say it out loud." She said it plainly, the way you'd say the price of a coffee. "Eat your noodles. You look like a corpse that lost a fight with a corpse."

He ate his noodles.

Halfway through the bowl, the old woman behind the counter came over.

She did it the way people did things in this district - without ceremony, wiping her hands on her apron - and she set a small dish of pickled greens down between them that neither of them had ordered.

"On the house," she said.

Bai Lu looked up. "We didn't - ""I know what you ordered." The old woman said it to Bai Lu, but she was looking at Lin Fan, and she had been looking at him, on and off, since they sat down - the way people look at a song they are trying to place.

Lin Fan met her eyes.

She did not flinch. That was interesting; everyone flinched now. She only frowned, slightly, like a woman doing sums.

"You're the Lin boy," she said.

"I am."

"Mm." She went back to wiping the same clean spot on the

same clean counter. "He used to come in here."

"Who?"

"The boy who lives in your house." She said it perfectly

naturally. The boy who lives in your house. "Three, four times a week. Ordered one bowl, ate half of it, took the rest out in a paper box." A pause. "There's a man sleeps under the bridge on Chancery Street. Old. Doesn't ask anybody for anything. Your boy bought him dinner every night for a year, and told me not to say a word about it, because he said the aunties would gossip and the man would stop coming."

The television droned. The broth steamed.

"I never told anyone," the old woman said. "I don't know why I'm telling you."

She went back to the counter.

Lin Fan sat with the bowl in front of him and did not move.

He had the boy's memories. All of them, complete - the years of shoving and laughter and the F stamped at fifteen. He had gone through that life the way a man goes through a drawer, and among all the humiliations there was nothing at all about a bridge.

Nothing about a paper box. Nothing about a man on Chancery Street.

Either the boy had kept this one thing private enough that even his own memories had not written it down.

Or Lin Fan's borrowed memories were not as complete as he had assumed.

He filed it away, and said none of it out loud, and ate the pickles.

For a while they sat in the warm noise of the shop, and he let the borrowed memories turn slowly, like pages in a book he had read once and not liked. Bai Lu. Two years of small kindnesses.And under the kindness, if he looked closely - and he always looked closely - something else. Something watchful. Something that had been counting down.

"Why did you protect him?" he asked. "The boy who lived in this body before me. You knew what he was. F-rank. Useless by

every measure this world uses. Why spend three years on him?"

She was quiet for a long moment.

"Because he was kind," she said, "and it cost me nothing, and

someone had to."

"That's not the reason."

"No," she admitted. "It's not."

She looked at him then the way a person looks at a door they

have been standing outside for three years, wondering if it will

open.

"I was told to," she said.

The television droned. The old woman behind the counter

wiped the same clean spot on the same clean counter.

"By whom?"

But Bai Lu only shook her head, and stood, and said, "Come

I'll walk you home."

They left the shop an hour later. Night had come down

properly, and the street was lit by one working lamp and the

headlights of a car that had not been there when they walked in -

long and black, engine off, parked across the road like something

patient.

Lin Fan stopped.

Bai Lu went very still beside him.

The rear door opened.

A man got out. Fifties. Grey at the temples. A suit that cost

more than every building on the street combined. Lin Fan knew

the face from the borrowed memories - knew it the way a

drowning man knows water.

Zhao Jingtian. Head of the Zhao Group. The name on half the

towers in the eastern city. The father of the boy who had beaten

this body to death.

He crossed the road. The closer he got, the more wrong his

face became.

He had come, clearly, with a purpose. To threaten, or to buy,

or to make a nuisance disappear - the way men like Zhao Jingtian

had done a hundred times. That was what men like him did.He had not counted on getting close enough to see.

He stopped three steps away. He looked at Lin Fan's face -

really looked, under the streetlamp, in the dark - and the color

drained out of him like water out of a cracked jug.

His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

"You," he whispered.

Lin Fan said nothing.

Zhao Jingtian's legs gave out.

Not a slow sag. Not a stumble into a bow. The man simply

went down - both knees hitting the wet asphalt, hard enough to

bruise - and for one endless second the richest man in the eastern

city knelt in the middle of the road in front of a seventeen-year-

old boy in a hospital gown, and the boy did not have the decency

to look surprised.

"My son," Zhao Jingtian said. His voice was shaking. "My son

did this. I did not know. I swear it to you - on my life, on my

family's name, on everything I own - I did not know it was you."

Lin Fan looked down at him.

He had spent nine hundred years being knelt to. Somewhere

along the way he had forgotten it was supposed to mean

something.

"Stand up," he said. "People are looking."

Zhao Jingtian did not stand up.

"Tell me what you want," the man said. "Tell me what will

make this right. Whatever it is. Anything. Anything at all. I'll

bring my son to you myself. I'll - "

"You'll do nothing until I decide what I want," Lin Fan said.

"Which means you'll do nothing tonight. Go home."

And then he did something he did not fully understand: he

reached down and took the man's arm, and lifted him to his feet -

a seventeen-year-old weakling pulling up a middle-aged

billionaire with no more effort than a man turning a page - and the

touch made Zhao Jingtian flinch as if he had been burned.

Lin Fan let go.

"Go home," he said again.

Zhao Jingtian went. He walked backward toward his car, and

only when the door had closed behind him and the car had pulled

away into the dark did Lin Fan let out the breath he had been

holding.

Behind him, Bai Lu said, very quietly, to nobody:"There it is again."

He turned his head.

"What?"

She was looking down the road where the car had gone, an

expression on her face that was almost pitying.

"He doesn't recognize you," she said. "And he's still terrified.

Everyone who sees your face - they don't know why they kneel or

panic or want to run. They just do." She turned to look at him.

"You should think about what that means. Because I have. For

three years."

He held her gaze.

"Then tell me."

"Not yet." She started walking, and did not look back. "Come

Your real problem isn't him."

"And what is my real problem?"

"You," she said. "You don't know who you are. And sooner or

later, someone is going to remind you."