The God Who Forgot He Was Dead

Chapter 4: The Letter

The letter came at dawn, and it came by hand.

Lin Fan heard the knock from the cot in the closet he slept in.

He had not slept. He had spent the night sitting cross-legged with his back to the wall, feeling out the shape of the lid he had found in his own core, and he had learned three things: that the seal was old beyond reckoning, that it had been fitted by someone who knew exactly what they were doing, and that it was, at one point along its edge, not quite flush.

One point. A flaw the width of a hair.

He had not touched it. He had learned, nine hundred years ago, that the difference between a man who opens a door and a man who breaks one is patience.

The knock came again.

His aunt got it. He heard the front door, and a man's voice, and then a silence that lasted long enough to be interesting. When he came out, his aunt was standing in the middle of the kitchen holding an envelope with both hands, and his father was out of his chair for the first time in eleven years before eight in the morning.

"What is it," Lin Zhenguo said.

His aunt did not answer. She held the envelope out toward Lin Fan without looking at him, the way you hold out something hot.

The paper was heavy. There was a seal in the corner - a rank-ring struck in blue wax, and above it, printed in the small severe letters of a document that expects to be obeyed:

BUREAU OF AWAKENING — EASTERN CITY.

NOTICE OF COMPULSORY RE-EVALUATION.

Subject: Lin Fan.

Lin Fan read it twice.

F-ranks did not get re-evaluated. A re-evaluation was for the ambiguous - the boys whose readings had wavered, the girls whose families had money and lawyers. F was final. F was the number that ended the discussion.Somebody had overruled that.

"Why?" his father said. He had taken the letter out of Lin Fan's hands and was reading it with the particular ferocity of a man looking for a fault in a gift. "Compulsory. Nobody gets compulsory. You'd have to - " He stopped.

"Have to what?"

"Have to be flagged." Lin Zhenguo looked up, and something was moving behind his eyes now, and Lin Fan recognized it, and did not like it. It was arithmetic. "Flagged by the Bureau itself. By a Director, or a senior office. Compulsory re-evaluation is what they do when a reading is wrong and they can't say so in public."

The kitchen went quiet.

"Well, well," said Lin Tao from the sofa.

He had been pretending to sleep. He was up now, leaning on the armrest, and his voice had the thin cracked brightness of a boy who has just watched his own little kingdom tilt. "The Ordinary One got flagged. That's rich. What did you do, cousin? Bribe somebody? Sell something?"

"Shut up," his aunt said.

"I'm only - "

"I said shut up." She did not raise her voice. She never did. She stood there in her apron with her hands wet from the sink, and she looked at Lin Fan for a long moment, and then she said, more quietly: "Go get your coat."

"Why?"

"Because it says today," his aunt said. "It says nine o'clock, at the Bureau, in person. And I have known this district thirty years, and nothing in it has ever come by hand at dawn unless somebody important wanted it done before anyone could argue."

She turned back to the sink.

"Water the tree before you go," she said. "It's been three days."

Lin Fan looked at her back.

He had spent the entire night deciding he was going to leave this house. He had done the arithmetic - one month, maybe two, and then gone, quietly, the way a man leaves a room he was only ever borrowing. It was not cruelty. It was kindness, and it was also arithmetic: he had one enemy somewhere in the world who was still walking, and he would not drag three strangers into that.

And the woman at the sink had just, without looking up, told him to water the tree."Aunt," he said.

Her shoulders moved. She did not turn.

"Don't," she said. "Whatever it is. Just go to the Bureau."

He went.

* * *

The district had changed.

Not physically. The same cracked pavement, the same three shops, the same broken lamp on the corner where the old men played cards. What had changed was the way it looked at him, and the way it did not look at him, which was a different thing entirely.

At the corner, two of the boys who had helped hold him down four days ago were standing by the wall. Lin Fan walked past them, three feet away, close enough to smell the cigarette.

Neither of them said a word.

The bigger one had gone grey-white, and his hand had come up - half a movement, aborted halfway, the way a man's hand moves toward something it does not know why it is doing.

Neither of them looked at his face. Both of them looked away, hard, as if Lin Fan were a light that hurt.

They don't know why, he thought, walking on. None of them know why.

Behind him, one of them said, in a very small voice: "Did you feel that?"

And the other one said nothing at all.

Lin Fan kept walking. There was a small, cold, useful thing clicking over in his mind now, the way it did whenever a problem started to show its shape.

Something in him - not the F-rank body, not the soul he had carried across death, but something older than both - was leaking.

Every person who came close to his face seemed to catch it: fear, kneeling, a folded hand, a lump in the throat they could not explain. He had spent four days assuming it was the habit, the way a man at the top of a mountain holds his head. It was not the habit. The habit was nine hundred years old and this effect was hitting strangers across a street.

Whatever he was, the world could see it.

Whatever he was, he did not know.

He turned the corner toward the Bureau, and stopped.Bai Lu was waiting for him under the lamp, in her grey coat, with her hands in her pockets and something folded in her hand.

"You got one too," she said.

"One what."

She held out the paper. It was the same heavy paper, the same blue-wax ring, the same small severe letters - and Lin Fan read it standing in the street, and the morning got colder.

It was a single line, under the seal.

Your companion of three years has been summoned as a witness.

She will attend.

Lin Fan looked up at her.

"A witness," he said.

"Yes."

"To what."

Bai Lu looked at him for a long moment - the way she always looked at him now, patient, watchful, standing outside a door she had spent thirteen years waiting at.

"I have no idea," she said. "That's what worries me."

She folded the paper and put it away.

"Come on, then," she said, and started walking. "Nine o'clock.

Try to look like a boy who has no idea what's about to happen to him."

He walked beside her.

"I do have no idea what's about to happen to him," he said.

Bai Lu did not answer for three steps.

"That," she said quietly, "is exactly what I meant."