Archive of Our Own

He’s adopted before his first birthday and named Noah Rothman as soon as he’s brought to Florida. The many photos from his parents’ one big trip to southwestern China stay on the walls, side tables and mantle his whole life. As a boy, Noah points them out to every new friend who comes over, and to the transracial adoptee groups his family joins, and especially to the Asian kids with Asian parents from school. He’s never really certain how connected he is to his birth culture, though. He knows Hebrew better than Chinese and high school Spanish better than either.

Noah’s parents and his cousins and his communities don’t look like him. His comfort foods are brisket and bullshit organic mac’n’cheese (mix the cheese sauce with yogurt; it’s extra tangy). Sometimes other kids ask blunt and unkind questions about his eyes, his hair, the color of his skin, if they ask at all, rather than mock. In third grade, he decides he’s going to stand up for himself. He begs for karate lessons, and then begs to drop out. He can’t explain to his parents the pressure he feels to somehow already be good at martial arts, or to know more, deep inside, about why he’s at the dojo at all.

Noah grows up looking for something he can’t name. He also grows up doted on and comfortable. He nearly skips first grade, but his teachers caution that he’s socially immature, even if he’s bored with the pace of learning in the Gainesville public schools. His favorite Disney movie is The Jungle Book; he dislocates his elbow performing King Louie’s big number at his own birthday party, but his whole fourth-grade class signs the cast, so it makes for a great story later. He likes soccer and basketball and hard sci-fi. His first kiss happens at 14, at camp in Wisconsin. She breaks his heart at the end of the summer and he gets really into Vertigo comics for a while.

He escapes high school basically happy, basically unscathed. He gets into Stanford but goes to Kenyon College. For months, he gets weird looks at Hillel, until someone finally asks if he’s observing services for a class. Noah breaks out his entire haftarah portion until the perpetrator slinks away. It’s not the first or last time this happens, but it is satisfying. He figures out he’s bisexual (and hornier than he could ever have imagined) on his Birthright trip. He writes his thesis on Cold War civil defense programs and the Bush-era surveillance state, though his best work is in his political philosophy classes.

In his mid-twenties, Noah Rothman works at a voting rights organization, building partnerships with traditionally disenfranchised and marginalized groups and institutions. He thinks about law school, and how flooded the job market is with JDs who can’t get jobs anymore. He joins a hobby robotics club and remembers how much he loves inventing with his hands. He volunteers for the census, just like he volunteers to be a poll worker. He knocks on Apt. 6J without a second thought on the Saturday morning when his life turns inside out.

It’s a guy his own age who answers: a little taller than him, Asian, awkwardly growing his hair out. Noah puts on his friendliest smile and says, “Hi, do you have a minute to talk about the U.S. Census?”

The guy stares at him like he’s having a panic attack. His jaw goes tight, but his Adam’s apple bobs conspicuously. Noah’s smile falters. “Uh, everything okay?”

The resident of 6J squeezes his eyes shut and shakes his head. “I’m not a citizen,” he says, and blinks at the floor. Maybe he’s having contact lens trouble.

“Not a citizen, like, you’re working on naturalization? Because the census counts—”

“I’m Canadian,” the guy snaps.

“Ah.” Noah wags his eyebrows. “I mean, eh?”

The guy’s glare sharpens, and Noah allows himself a stupid little thrill, not least because the guy is staggeringly attractive.

“Anyway,” he continues, “the census counts the entire resident population of the U.S., whether they’re citizens or not.”

The guy doesn’t budge. “Xue Yang,” he says, and Noah goes totally still.

“What did you call me?”

The guy narrows his eyes. Something about the atmosphere in that dingy hallway changes. Noah has no idea why he should feel like he’s in danger, but he does check for the nearest stairwell, just in case.

“Your left hand.”

“What?”

“Show me your left hand.”

“No, Jesus.” He’s clutching a clipboard to his chest, though, and the guy grabs his wrist.

“You have to be—” the guy starts.

Noah wrenches away. “No thank you!” He puts more distance between them, but he can’t flee, not yet. “What did you call me?”

The guy is halfway out the door, nearly into the hall now. His face has gone so serious. He looks a decade older than he probably is. “Xue Yang.”

Noah laughs. “Yeah, I’ve never met you before. Are you stalking me or something?”

The guy frowns. “You came to my front door.”

Noah hugs his clipboard closer. “How do you know that name?”

The guy goes still. “I’m sorry,” he says at last, stiffly. “You startled me, that’s all.” He starts to retreat back into his apartment.

“Hey — hey.” Noah sets his jaw. “Who are you?”

“My name is Lan Wangji.”

Noah looks down at his clipboard. The line denoting the resident of 6J says “David Lan.” The guy is peering at him, still some weird mix of hostile, curious and awkward.

“I’m here for grad school,” he adds.

Noah laughs. “Okay. Whatever.” He should be pressing Wangji on the census questionnaire, whatever his own discomfort. He’s got training on this. Instead, he says it. “Why do you know my birth name?”

Wangji sets one arm behind his back, like he’s in a fucking historical drama, and frowns. “You don’t… remember?”

The thing is, Wangji doesn’t look confused, or high, or anything other than totally present and cogent. Noah knows he’s a stranger, and he says so. “I’ve never met you before.”

That seems to disturb Wangji even more. “I’m sorry,” he says, suddenly flustered. “I’m sorry, you should forget about this, then. Please, truly, put it out of your mind.”

His sorries are as Canadian as the rest of him, and there’s no way Noah is forgetting this. But Ron and Sylvia Rothman raised him to be considerate and assume the best of people, or at the very least, to not seek out trouble, so Noah thins his mouth and looks back down at his clipboard. “Well, if you still have a minute, I have some questions to ask you…”

If you’re going to collapse out of nowhere, usually it’s because of a heart attack or a stroke or something. There’s no reason Noah’s right arm suddenly feels like it’s been hewn off at the shoulder, and there’s no reason all the blood should suddenly drain from his face. He’s looking right at Wangji as he faints, and in his last coherent thought, he’s certain that Wangji sees it too: a volcanic, vicious anger that twists his face from the inside, that fills him and grips like he’s a blade.

*

He comes to on a strange couch, feeling like he’s been wracked by food poisoning. Wangji is on the phone, keeping his voice low. Noah strains to hear what he’s saying through his own queasy-cold nausea.

“I shouldn’t have said anything. He could have gone his whole life without— no, no, I know.”

Noah tries desperately to remember if it’s your right arm or your left that hurts right before a heart attack, and whether a healthy 26-year-old should expect a heart attack while standing in a hallway fending off a tall Canadian.

“He’s up,” Wangji says suddenly, and Noah goes still. “What should I do?” Wangji whispers into his phone.

For his part, Noah is still strongly considering grabbing his backpack, helpfully piled at the foot of the couch, and booking it out of here. But Wangji hurries back and blocks the doorway, and Noah can’t even sit up, really.

“Are you okay?” Wangji asks.

Noah can only squint. “What the fuck.”

Wangji vanishes again. He returns with a glass of water. He crouches by Noah’s head as he offers it, and sits on the rug as Noah accepts the glass and drinks. Noah has to close his eyes.

“Why do you know my birth name?”

With no segue, Wangji says, “Do you have strange dreams?”

“Everybody has those,” Noah snaps. “Answer the question.”

“I’m trying.” Wangji’s expression flickers, stern and tentative at the same time. “Do you dream about swords, or coffins, or two daozhangs?”

Noah frowns, not least at the wuxia vocabulary. “I dreamed about snowboarding last night.” That’s what he remembers, at least: He was in Brazil, and he was carrying all this gear through this tropical resort, and people were speaking in pictograms, not Portuguese.

Wangji winces. He doesn’t speak for a few moments. “Something — really big might start happening to you soon,” he says at last, “and I think it’s my fault. I can’t apologize enough.”

Noah sighs, and stares up at the ceiling. “Am I getting kidnapped?”

“No. But people might try to hurt you, if they figure out you’re out here. Do you want to know more?”

“Is this my superhero origin story?”

“Likely it’s not.”

Noah pushes himself upright. His head swims, and his stomach clutches on nothing. This sucks. Everything about this sucks. “Why would anyone want to hurt me?”

“You’re Xue Yang,” Wangji says, as if it’s self-evident.

“I’m Noah Rothman,” he says. At Wangji’s baffled look, he laughs. “Nice to meet you.”

Wangji mns. “You were a demonic cultivator once. A killer for hire who tortured and murdered a whole lot of people.”

Noah glances toward the nearest exit again. “And what were you?”

Wangji bows his head. “I helped kill you. It was the right thing to do.”

He has to laugh. “Somehow this is antisemitic, I know it.”

“It’s — I don’t know how reincarnation fully works,” Wangji says. “But let me prove something to you.” He reaches for Noah’s left hand again; Noah jerks it back.

“What’s this hand thing you’ve got?”

Wangji grabs his wrist. Before Noah can wrench it away, Wangji points his middle and index finger at his pulse point, his hand arranged in an elegant form. Nothing should happen. And yet.

And yet Noah feels something roar to life inside him, an energy that he never knew was missing but that somehow feels complete in a way he can’t explain. It surges up his arm and through his circulatory system. It feels like heat and light and sex and movement and stillness all at once. The lightheadedness and weakness burn away. When Wangji removes his finger, Noah feels something churning behind his navel.

“What the fuck,” he whispers, his back pressed deep into the couch. He’s panting.

“I’m telling the truth,” Wangji says. “You have a golden core.”

Noah stares at him. Wangji looks — lonely. This apartment is a lonely place anyway, but Wangji is looking at him with the strangest mixture of hope and wariness. “Why’d you do that?” Noah’s blood is fizzing. It feels amazing. He’s terrified.

“Because you’re not fully Xue Yang,” Wangji replies. He drops his eyes. “It wouldn’t be fair to leave you unprepared, in case someone else finds you too.”

“Fully? I’m not fully some guy you had to kill in a former life? Okay.” Noah pushes himself upright. He’s still shaky and lightheaded, but he doesn’t feel weak. He feels like he could run forever. “You’re really stupid, you know that? You’re sitting here making threats at me when I absolutely know your name and where you live.”

“Guess what? I’m not.” Wangji crowds him close, his whole bearing tense and getting tenser. “When you start getting memories and feelings you don’t recognize and nightmares about things you’ve never seen or done, you’re going to want someone to ask about it who won’t tell you you’re crazy!”

Noah can’t easily sidestep him. “You realize that sounds crazy,” he says, keeping his voice quiet. “I’m just — that’s really circular, buddy.”

Wangji huffs and draws away.

Noah leans sideways and grabs his backpack. “You know what, if it’s all right with you, I’m going to go and tell my supervisor that I was abducted for a little while. Thanks for the weird zap, whatever it is you put in my drink.”

Wangji doesn’t interfere. He just blinks, sternly. “I’m sure I’ll see you around.” Something embarrassed, or ashamed, surfaces in his face. “I’m still really sorry about all this.”

Noah gives him one of his least friendly grins. “Just fill out your census form online, okay? You should have gotten a mailing. Don’t make me come back here.”

*

He doesn’t feel anything. (That’s not true. He feels the golden core; it doesn’t leave him. He does his best to ignore it.) He doesn’t report the incident and he doesn’t have any supernatural dreams and he doesn’t feel any more murderous than usual.

In fact, his luck starts looking up — he starts finding obscure candies he’d loved as a kid in odd corners of grocery and drug stores. First come the hard-shelled strawberries with the inexplicable gooey center; he goes through that bag in four days, and when he runs out, someone has brought homemade baked goods to share at work. After that, Noah keeps finding obscure flavor packs of Skittles, imported chocolates with Pop Rocks or pretzels in them, free samples of a new kind of soda. His sweet tooth has risen like Godzilla from the depths.

“Not too close to bedtime,” his mother says on FaceTime, when he mentions it in passing.

Noah laughs. “Of course not, Ma.”

“Okay. I love you, baby boy.”

He knows he’s smiling deep. “Ma, you embarrass me.”

At Noah’s bar mitzvah, half a lifetime before and in front of all his friends and family, he’d broken out the ancient and ongoing Rothman joke that no one could deny his Ashkenazi nose. Jews believe that converts (and he did technically convert, circumcision and all, though he was raised at Temple Beth-El his whole life) have Jewish souls, and that there is no change in conversion, only a homecoming.

He keeps seeing the girl he’s seeing, casually, just for fun. Neither of them has an expectation that it’s for anything beyond a good time, and he’s liked that for the past few months. Some nights, though, when they’re exchanging flirty texts and memes, he uncovers a dry socket he hadn’t known about, an urge to find someone who understands him without trying to change him. One evening, when he’s jerking off while she’s on speaker, his hand cramps up — his left hand, so badly that he curls over himself, gasping. The girl stops talking.

“Everything okay, babe?”

“Yeah,” he says, through tears, after a moment. “Yeah, wow, sorry, my hand fell asleep.”

“I don’t believe that,” she purrs, half as a joke, but still concerned.

Wangji’s building is inconvenient to both work and home. There’s no reason to run into him again. Noah doesn’t make eye contact with any overly dramatic strangers or mysterious stalkers. His life manages not to fall apart again for at least three weeks, until he’s out bowling for a coworker’s birthday party.

It’s a disco bowling alley, with neon and flashing lights and cheesy videos on multiple TV screens all around. The front of house sells shitty beers and horrible fried food, and the lanes pump retro hits over fuzzy loudspeakers. Noah is terrible at bowling but excellent at making fun of himself, and the crew is halfway into its second game when the lane next to theirs fills up.

It’s two guys on a date — it has to be, the way the taller one is hovering by the pretty one. Noah is mid-laugh when he gets his first good look at him: his curling mouth, his bright, quick eyes, his soft shaggy hair, his bird-boned wrists. His date looks positively hulking behind him, only because he’s one of those lithe gym rats, big shoulders and narrow hips. He’s got a small mouth and a guileless expression, which hardens instantly when he catches Noah staring.

They’re on a date, one voice insists inside Noah’s head.

I’m gonna fuck it up, says another, merrily.

Noah raises his beer can, biting his lip as he toasts. The pretty one beams, but the grim reaper he’s leaning against is fully glaring daggers, with a force that feels out of proportion with a little cross-lane flirting. Noah doesn’t make his move yet; he’s got time just to observe.

The big guy is one continuous gutterball machine, so the date must have been Pretty Mouth’s idea. When Big and Tall allows himself, he seems to be enjoying it, especially when Pretty Mouth demonstrates a better way to hold the ball before he bowls. The many attempts to correct his posture and improve his swing are a free show for everybody, and Noah’s friends join in appreciatively from time to time.

Big and Tall gets up when their set is finished. He presses a kiss to Pretty Mouth’s temple and sweeps away, past Noah’s party. Something resentful in the air follows after him; the lanes are more relaxed, more open to possibility with him gone. A giddy feeling warms Noah’s skin. Pretty Mouth doesn’t take out his phone or anything, he just sits there with his legs crossed, watching the flashing lights. Noah slips away from the birthday party and crosses into their seats.

“So, who won?”

Pretty Mouth glances up and smiles. “He hasn’t been bowling since he was a kid,” he says, almost apologetically, and gestures at the scorecard still flashing on the screen overhead. The final score isn’t even close; Player No. 2, Henry, has handily beaten Player No. 1, Zeke.

Noah holds both palms up. “I saw you trying to coach him. A really valiant effort.”

Henry (it has to be Henry) chuckles. “He’s having fun. I know it doesn’t look like it, but I can tell.”

“Why wouldn’t he be?” Noah doesn’t flirt like this, not openly predatory. Still, there’s a wolfishness in his eyes and smile that he doesn’t care to tamp down. Henry seems to be taking it in stride. Noah’s mouth never fully closes. “What’s that trick you were teaching him, with the hands?” He nods over his shoulder. “I still have to uphold my honor against all these guys.” Three of Noah’s friends heckle him from their lane. They’re easy to ignore when Henry is right there in front of him.

“Oh. It’s less about how you hold the ball than where you look.” Henry unfolds himself to pluck his ball off the rack. It’s sparkling white with a huge red star across the belly. Henry stays distant; they won’t be touching, like he did with Zeke. Noah watches his hands, his pretty mouth, as he demonstrates and explains his method. None of it sticks. Noah doesn’t give a shit about bowling. He just knows, with implacable, rock-solid certainty, like nothing else he’s ever known in his life, that the only thing that matters is to make Henry pay attention to him.

The knowledge pulses through him. It lights him up, as real as the golden core he refuses to contemplate. He’s floating in a celestial sea of horniness and higher truth when Henry’s focus settles behind Noah’s shoulder, and he says, with his own perfect-soulmates smile, “Zeke.”

Big and Tall has stopped a few feet away, holding two bottles of Sam Adams and a paper carton full of chili tots. He looks enraged that he can’t behead Noah with his expression alone.

Instead of quailing, or keeping the peace with a joke, Noah grins. “He was just giving me some tips,” he says, and saunters back toward his own group. When he passes Zeke, he sing-songs, “He is gonna destroooooy you!” He can almost hear Zeke growling above the pounding hair metal.

“Which one are you?” Henry calls. He points with his chin at Noah’s team screen; Noah is playing as Captain Rattlesnake tonight, so he laughs.

“That’s for you to find out!”

Noah doesn’t approach them for the whole rest of the game. It seems to drive Zeke absolutely over the edge, that he’s right there, being happy, doing dumb victory dances, shooting Henry a triumphant grin whenever he manages a single strike. He doesn’t think anything of it, especially not when he’s emerging from the bathroom, where the hallway is dim and out of the way and empty.

Zeke doesn’t so much as offer a hey to get his attention. He just shoves Noah at the shoulder; Noah bumps against the cinderblock wall, looks up into Zeke’s storm-riddled face and grins.

“Oh hey, how’s date night going?”

“Stay away from him,” Zeke says. He’s really tall, with one hell of a jawline. Noah imagines toppling him, kicking him while he’s down.

“I’m not doing anything but being my general cute self,” he insists. “Sounds like you have an issue to resolve, though.”

Zeke steps closer. “I’m not going to say it again.”

Noah snorts. “You want to kiss me so bad right now, it makes you look stu—”

The back of his head smacks against the concrete. Through his own dizziness, Noah tastes blood in his mouth. It blooms over his tongue and coats his teeth. His vision swims. It hurts, and everything feels sharp, narrowed to one singular point. He raises his eyes to Zeke’s face, which stays stern.

“Don’t start something you can’t finish, Zeke.”

Noah doesn’t know what he’s saying. He doesn’t know how to fight. But his own rage is unfurling in the pit of his stomach, settling on his shoulders like a robe. Zeke looks a little uncertain now. Noah’s vision flickers; in the thin fluorescent light, the widow’s peak at Zeke’s forehead seems to point toward a cascade of hair. Noah chuckles as he straightens up. He swipes his tongue over his bloody teeth, never looking away. His right hand clenches around nothing, but a word rushes between his ears, jiangzai jiangzai jiangzai—

Zeke wrinkles his nose. He looks less certain of himself, now that Noah’s calling his bluff. “You’re an animal,” he says at last.

“Sure am.” Noah laughs and slumps back against the wall, his hips jutting out. He narrows his eyes and lifts his chin and speaks without thinking. His voice goes low and hoarse. “What’s eating you, daozhang?”

The sword point emerges right from Zeke’s solar plexus. His dumbfuck confusion renders him totally motionless. It’s when the black tendrils start snaking up his neck and cheeks that Noah’s bravado falls away completely. He yells and scrambles out of the way. There’s no sword. There’s just Zeke looming in the middle of the hallway, his expression stunned.

The air is too close. Noah is panicking, hard. He doesn’t wait up for more banter. The closest escape is the fire exit, which doesn’t go off when he plows through it. Nobody follows him.

Noah spends forty minutes crouched by the dumpsters, his head in his hands, trying to calm down enough to face his friends and Irish goodbye it.

*

His whole body is reverb, hours and hours later. Every time he thinks he’s back to normal, some new sensation or emotion claws out from inside and wraps python-tight around him. Noah doesn’t sleep all night. He takes the hottest shower he can stand, and even though the stream blasts the back of his bare neck, he feels long hair against his shoulders, along his back and down to his elbows. Something vicious fills his empty spaces when he thinks of Zeke. Noah knows that he won, implacably, no matter what happened after, but there’s nothing specific to tell.

Sometimes, through the night, sensations come to him: the windy quiet of running along a tiled rooftop; warm bathwater in a wooden tub; the taste of a red bean bun. Somebody laughing, which fills him with sweetness. His breath cut off as he’s lifted high by the throat, higher. The weight of metal on the crown of his head, his fingers braiding and pinning and tying thick hair. None of it tells a story, or explains why anyone would want to kill him.

By sunrise, he’s slumped in front of his full-length mirror, staring into his own manic expression. The blood is long out of his mouth, but he still tastes along his teeth, trying to find some insight there. Noah’s face starts to swim in the mirror, jerking like silent movie footage. He tries to close his eyes and breathe through it. That thing in his belly, in his dantian, purrs on, growing stronger.

“Xue Yang,” he whispers. “Who the fuck are you?”

He’s never gone by that name that he can remember. It’s part of him but not him, and that’s not his fault or his doing, and it’s troubled him on and off throughout his life. Before he could walk, he was brought to a government administrative office in the middle of nowhere, and then the Rothmans flew thousands of miles to take him back home. He tried to learn more about his birth parents in high school, and he even took one of those ancestry tests to see if he could find any relatives. All it told him was that he was 99.7 percent Han and no one else with his genetics existed yet within the system. His birth parents left no trace beyond him.

Noah knows he comes from an underpopulated region in the southwest called Yiling, where there’s a dead mining town called Kuizhou. He used to make up elaborate stories about his background, but the truth is, he can’t recognize the person he might have been if he’d grown up there. He worked hard throughout his life not to think too hard about him. He whispers the name again, Xue Yang, staring into the mirror like a child at a sleepover. His left hand aches.

At 9:30, Noah takes the bus to Wangji’s neighborhood. He circles the block on foot a couple of times, then stands across the street until he realizes he looks like he’s casing the building. When a nanny with a stroller struggles to exit the front door, he grabs it for her and slips inside, after nodding at her thanks. Maybe Xue Yang was a bad person, but Noah Rothman is a nice kid. He’s still got a choice in all this, whatever this is.

He doesn’t hesitate once he’s in front of 6J. He pounds on the door. “Census!” he calls through the crack; no answer. “Hey! Lan Wangji! David Lan!”

The unit stays quiet. No one’s inside to ignore him. Noah slumps back against the wall and slides to the vinyl-plank floor. He didn’t bring anything to keep busy with, aside from his phone. He wishes he had a knife, until he questions why. His head starts to nod. He’s so tired.

There’s no natural light in the hallway, which means when Noah gets hauled to his feet by his collar and slammed against the door to 6J, he has no idea how long he was asleep. The man handling him isn’t Wangji, but a broad-shouldered, thick-jawed guy with a mustache. His lip is curled enough that he’s actually snarling.

“What’s this doing here?”

Noah blinks at this new face, with its high cheekbones and spiky short hair. An overlay flickers in and out of sight, slate-gray robes and a two-handed hilt at his shoulder.

“Oh,” Noah says, bemused and not quite sure of himself. “Baxia.”

“Mingjue! Put him down, stop, stop!” Another man pulls Mingjue off Noah. He’s also tall, with dark eyes and a superhero chin. Wangji swoops in a moment later, his hand on Noah’s shoulder. When they’re standing together, it’s obvious that they’re brothers. Twin Jades floats through Noah’s head.

Wangji glares while the big brother steps between him and Noah. “You might have called.”

“Happy weekend, your number’s in a work file,” he retorts peevishly. He offers the two new characters a wave and a little grin. “Hey there, I’m Noah.”

“Are you,” Mingjue growls.

Noah’s face contorts into something bored. “One of the ones who wants me dead?” he asks Wangji.

“Noah,” says First Jade diplomatically. “We were just at breakfast. Maybe we can speak inside?”

*

“Please, you should eat something.” Lan Xichen keeps his face soft, just like he keeps his shoulders soft and his hands at ease. Noah, however, holds back.

“So him, I tortured and killed, with his own sword,” he says, pointing to Mingjue. He turns to Wangji. “You helped kill me. What did I do to you in a past life?” He turns back to Xichen, whose soft face stays impressively peaceful.

“You worked with a warlord who massacred my sect and burned down my ancestral home.”

“Shit, man, that sucks.” Noah swallows. “If Xue Yang was such a piece of shit, my whole life sure seems like cheating.”

Xichen bows his head. “Reincarnation isn’t always straightforward.”

“Reincarnation.” Noah laughs and rolls his head back against the couch. “What are we even talking about?”

“You tell us,” Mingjue says tightly. “Why’d you come to Wangji’s place unannounced?”

“I woke him up,” Wangji interjects. He keeps his eyes lowered. “This is my fault.”

“You know that’s not how it works either,” his brother tells him gently.

Noah eyes the three of them. “Yeah, why am I answering questions? You guys tell me what the hell is happening.”

They exchange glances. Mingjue breaks the silence. “Eight months ago, I was wrecking my apartment every night. I kept dreaming I was exploring a temple, but all the men I’d brought kept dying and I couldn’t save them. My brother was there too. Then I met Xichen at a music festival and I just.” He waves one hand. “Recognized him.”

Xichen nods. “My depression took a serious turn, worse than it had ever been. I left my job, went on a retreat. All I knew was that I’d killed someone I loved, which I also knew I hadn’t done.” His mouth twists into something self-deprecating. “A friend recommended acid, so one weekend, I got access to all of those memories. The whole story.”

“The whole story.” Noah feels absurd, sitting here listening at all. But his hands are itching for something to do, something sharp, and that word still scratches at the inside of his skull, jiangzai jiangzai jiangzai. So he turns to Wangji.

“I composed a song,” Wangji says, “and couldn’t stop playing it.”

“Reincarnation.” Noah furrows his brow. “So, who are you?” The three men look at him, each clearly hearing his question in different ways. Something shivers along Noah’s shoulders. “What’s it mean? Are you those people? Do you recognize yourself? Can you opt out?”

Mingjue cocks an eyebrow. “Can you?”

Fuck this guy, sneers the voice in his head that Noah thinks isn’t him.

“You have a golden core.” Wangji seems to be the only one looking right at him. “It may not comport with your understanding of the world, but it’s real. You have to decide what to do next, or he will decide for you.”

“Is that what you did?” Noah asks.

Wangji goes silent. “He’s… overwhelming,” he says at last. “He only has — I have — big feelings. It’s hard to know what to do with them all.”

“That was you too, though.” Xichen looks like he’d put a hand on Wangji’s shoulder if they were sitting close. “As a kid, you knew exactly what you wanted, all the time. You’re not as different as you think.”

Wangji keeps his gaze on the floor. “It feels different. But it also feels right.”

“Okay, but your guy was a hero. My guy is a war criminal.” Noah starts worrying at his cuticles, something he trained himself out of in middle school. “Why should I have anything to do with this guy? I’m a good son, I’m a good person. I like my life. I think I’m doing good work in the world.” He looks from one upstanding cultivator to the next. “What is this guy to me? Why does he get to change me? I don’t consent. I fucking dissent!”

“He’s already fucking up your life.” Mingjue narrows his eyes. “This is the hand we’ve been dealt. You can either deal with him pressing up against the inside of your head, out of your control, or you can look him in the eye and choose who to be, every single moment, from here on out.”

Noah wrinkles his nose. “That sounds exhausting. I would rather not.”

“It will be worth it,” Wangji says, rather forcefully.

There’s an awkward silence, until Mingjue nods. “Sometimes you find that you’re missing somebody.”

“Why don’t you meet Xue Yang,” Xichen suggests, “and let that inform your decision?”

“Who could I possibly be missing in my life? Wouldn’t I know?” Noah blinks. “Wait, meet him? What?”

*

Noah has taken some yoga classes (mostly just this one time to impress a girl), but meditation has always been beyond him. It’s too woo-woo, too anxiety-inducing, too still. He’d rather be on a rowing machine or giving head if he wants to totally clear his mind. It’s no easier with these three strangers seated on the floor of this bare and boring living room, the sound of traffic floating up from the street.

Wangji has a real-deal covered incense burner, one of the kinds you put cones into, and the scent of it coats the back of Noah’s throat. It’s the guqin, though, that really makes this hard to take.

“Is that for grad school?” he asks when Wangji hauls the instrument out of its soft black case and onto the coffee table.

“No,” Wangji says dryly. “This is just for fun.”

Noah sees that Mingjue is watching him very closely, and that Xichen is keeping a close eye on Mingjue, just in case. Noah taps arrhythmically on his kneecaps while Wangji sets up, still scanning for something to look at.

“All right.” Xichen gives his yoga-teacher smile. He arranges his right hand into an elegant shape and holds it in front of his sternum. “Noah, I want you to follow me. I’m going to talk you through accessing your golden core, and then we’ll all go in.”

“Ah, some real Gusu shit, huh.” Noah screws up his face. He doesn’t like where that came from, but Xichen just nods.

“The real Gusu shit, that’s right.”

It’s tough not to fidget, but Xichen’s got his instructor voice down to an art. Noah settles into his lotus pose, into his body. Unseen maps within his limbs start to crackle; Xichen tells him that’s just his meridians channeling qi, and that Noah’s is powerful already. It’s a good sign. Noah tries not to open his eyes. Wangji is good at his instrument, the playing intelligent and confident. Something about the space is opening up around him, the temperature shifting, the background noises falling away.

Noah’s eyes snap open. The room — a new room — is quiet, elegant, full of paper screens and tasteful ceramics. A pine scent hangs on the air, infusing a chill breeze. The three men sit in a semicircle around him: Mingjue stormy in metallic robes with forged-beast epaulets, Wangji funereal in unadorned white, Xichen radiating quiet power in a deceptive light blue. All of them sport elaborate metal hairpieces, the Twin Jades with headbands resting above their brows. It’s all extremely costume drama. It should feel flimsy, cheesy. It feels real in ways Noah has craved his whole life.

Now he looks down at his own hands, his wrists wrapped close in leather braces, his left hand masked with a glove. That one finger is wood he absorbs with dreamlike acceptance. He’s wearing black and shimmering olive robes, a wide leather belt, burnished hints of bronze thread. His hair falls past his elbows, red-black in a way he’s never seen it before. Noah reaches for the crown of his head; whatever’s woven into his forelock is spiky, intimidating, unfriendly.

“So,” he says, a little dazed, “this is my true self, huh?”

“Not yet,” Xichen says. He glances at Wangji, who shifts into a new melody: more twanging deep notes, a dancing counterpoint on the upper register. It itches under Noah’s skin.

“Noah, I want you to stay calm, but I also want you to take a look close to you,” says Xichen. “Do you see that black smoke?”

Noah thinks he should feel panic, but it’s not there. The black smoke twists and unfurls at the edges of his vision like ink in water.

“That’s resentful energy,” Xichen says. “He’s probably very near and about to make contact. Remember that while he’s you, you’re not wholly him. You have a choice about how you react to what he says.”

An intrusive thought, with a cutting edge: What the fuck does he know? That thrums in his meridians too.

“Xue Yang was a demonic cultivator, with an outlook that he used to justify terrible things and deeds. If you find him persuasive, or if he makes you do something you don’t want to do, I just want to remind you that the three of us won’t stand idly by.”

Maybe he means that they’ll come to his defense. Even for him. But Noah knows a threat when he hears one. How could he not?

His mouth moves. “Zewu-jun is always so fancy,” he says with a smirk. “Listen to that rules-lawyering, that poetry. We haven’t even done anything.”

His eyes fall on one after the other: Mingjue a fine warlord, ready to bolt toward him; Wangji glaring so righteously over his strings; Xichen smiling, to show how he’s not threatened.

So noble, these cultivators. Something outside of himself laughs. They’ve got you penned in and unarmed. Never mind. Don’t look at them. Look at me.

The black smoke congeals. Kneeling before Noah is — Noah. It’s himself, his right shoulder empty, his robes soaked in his own blood. Xue Yang grins, obscene and ruined and amused. With his remaining hand, he points to Wangji.

“He did this to me,” he says, in the rasp of a dying man. “The great Hanguang-jun. Him and Song Lan. You know, Zeke.” Xue Yang laughs. “They hated me. They were afraid of me. They should have been. I wasn’t even at my best. It took their all and some stupid tricks to take me down.”

A sense-memory slams into Noah: a fog-swathed town, empty coffins, his heart racing, his hand empty — the pouch, the pouch—

Xue Yang spits. The bloody mess stains the pristine wood floor. “Song Zichen,” he sneers, “thought he would stay out of the Great Sects’ world by making his own, but what did he do about it? What did any of them do that I didn’t? Disposable orphan from nowhere, changed the world far more than they ever dared. It needed destroying, so I did.”

He’s on his feet suddenly, whole and clean and handsome. He’s a breath away from Noah, cocky. Noah could get up, he could fight him or he could flee or he could say something, but Xue Yang simply leans close. He drags a thumbnail across one side of Noah’s face, then the other. Blood blooms on each cheek; the pain is very real.

“What’s it like having only good choices, I wonder?” Xue Yang’s eyes burn, malicious. Noah is transfixed.

“Noah—” Xichen calls, but Xue Yang snarls and digs his left hand deep into Noah’s chest.

The borders between them vanish. It’s Noah’s now, everything Xue Yang feels, rage and tragedy and desperation. His right hand clenches around nothing, and then, it’s full: a sword.

Jiangzai. His laugh goes wild. If these sect cultivators want Xue Yang, they’ll get him.

The wild joy of fighting, of actually joining with Nie Mingjue, is a brush fire inside him. He’s fast, he’s powerful, he’s smarter and more ruthless. He’s going to survive this, he’s going to live and humiliate this saber-master and then he’s going to track down his fan-waving didi and undo him for days, weeks—

A second sword in the fight, Lan Xichen trying to talk sense into him, but it’s bullshit, it’s just self-serving bullshit, as if those white robes don’t show stains themselves—

The room jolts beneath his feet. His arms yanked over his head, the sword falling from his hands. He wrenches against the ropes binding him, if only he could get to his dagger—

The guqin notes slow from their frenzy. He blinks at the scene: he’s strung up in the hall. Chang Manor.

“What is this?” Mingjue huffs, dragging his saber as he stares.

“A memory,” says Wangji.

Noah laughs. He throws his head back, a jackal, a hyena. There’s no counterweight to his new truth, no calming words to tease out the modern boy again. When they let him down, he will kill them. They know what he has done, what he can do. There’s nothing to stop him now but a bit of rope, and he can find his way out of that too. There’s nothing these big sects think they can’t handle, but they hadn’t counted on Xue Yang, fuck a courtesy name, even his own.

The three cultivators are desperate to solve him, looking to each other, so none of them notice the figure at the back of the hall. Noah spots him, though: tall, elegant, bright-eyed, wreathed in white. The sight punches all the rage out of his lungs.

“Daozhang,” he whispers. His own eyes are huge.

Xiao Xingchen barely seems real at the best of times; now he’s like a visitor from another dream, his mouth a bit open, like he can’t quite comprehend his own presence either. The three others are just as surprised; they make no move either as he walks slowly toward Noah.

“Daozhang!” he calls hopefully. “Xiao Xingchen, help me down!” His throat constricts. It’s so strange to see him with eyes, which are searching his own. Noah tries again. “Xiao Xingchen, I don’t care about them. Help me down and I can explain.” The silence harrows him, like everyone’s lost their tongues just to mock him. Noah can’t keep the frantic whine out of his voice. “Daozhang, say something, I just want to talk to you again. Daozhang!”

Xiao Xingchen drifts closer. Shuanghua juts out against his shoulder, fully in his own control. If he drew it and ran Noah through, Noah would weep with joy and thank him for it.

“Daozhang!” he tries again. “What if you took me home? I can explain everything, I can tell you everything. I just need you to believe me. Daozhang!” He can’t bear it, Xiao Xingchen standing there, staring with his unblemished throat and his face so open like that. Noah calls his name and struggles against the rope, and nobody moves, nobody helps him. The anguish has its teeth in him now, the fear and panic that’s always at his heels. “Daozhang!” he cries, his voice rising and cracking. “Xiao Xingchen! Xiao Xingchen!”

The daozhang in white blinks out of the room. He’s simply gone between one breath and the next.

The whole world closes in on Noah. The fear shreds him. His screams go wordless, incoherent. He’s bleeding all over now, wounds appearing all over his body that he hadn’t minded until now.

He’s only barely aware of Mingjue bellowing Wangji’s name. He doesn’t know when they’re no longer in Chang Manor and back in Apt. 6J. Noah has no injuries. His left hand is totally whole. He’s doused in sweat, shaking, gasping. Someone is holding him, wrapping him close. Only when Noah looks between the Twin Jades, standing slack-jawed above him, does he realize it must be Mingjue, holding him down, letting him fall apart.

*

It feels like shock. He’s awake, but he can’t track what’s happening. His face is wet. He’s cold. He can barely feel his limbs.

“Noah. Noah. Come on, drink this. Noah, come here, I’ve got you.”

“I don’t…” he croaks, but he doesn’t know the rest of the sentence. He doesn’t know.

“Get him on the couch.” Wangji. David. Noah’s own body, light in six hands.

*

He licks his lips. The light has changed. No dreams. The three of them, all still holding vigil in the living room.

Noah flexes both hands. He can’t move the rest of him still. The pillow on the back of his bare neck. He whispers, “Was it that bad for you?”

His voice rasps. Mingjue and Wangji look at him. Xichen does not.

*

The light has changed. Late afternoon slants, cider-colored on the landlord-beige walls. The Lan brothers out of sight. Mingjue on a chair, his arms propped on his knees, eyes on the floor. Noah studies him for a while. He’s carrying something. It’s inside him, and it’s heavy.

Noah thinks he can sit up now. Mingjue watches him do so.

“They’re picking up takeout,” he says. “Do you eat pork?”

Noah checks in with his body. It’s leaden, stiff. “I make exceptions,” he says, with a wan smile.

Mingjue nods. Neither of them move, or pursue small talk.

“Your brother,” Noah says. “Is he… your brother?”

Noah grew up an only child. The expression on Mingjue’s face isn’t hard to parse, though. “He can’t ever know,” Mingjue says. His shoulders don’t buckle.

*

The text comes in the car, after soup and a promise to check in, when he gets home and after. After they’re certain that Noah is leaving them, and not Xue Yang. The three of them, Chifeng-zun and the Twin Jades. Who would have thought.

Captain Rattlesnake, my strange friend, the message begins. Your daozhang, it concludes.

*

Noah wonders if it’s possible to shake to pieces.

*

They each bring their own coffee to the park. Henry is waiting for him, not looking at a phone, just watching the trees. There he is, beige trench coat, jeans, a sweater. Noah stops several feet away, staring, until Henry notices him.

He smiles, the way he always did. Noah swallows.

“Does Zichen know you’re here?” He’s trying to be kind. He needs to be kind. It’s important that he be kind.

Henry chuckles. “Zeke. Ezekiel.” He shrugs, a little helplessly. “His parents are very religious.” Something in his face shifts. “He’s starting to be aware, though. He was even before you saw us.”

Noah has so many questions. How much time does he want to waste on Song Lan? But he’s trying to be kind. “How long have you known?” he says.

“Since I was a boy, I think.” Henry tilts his to-go cup a little. “Mind if we walk? It helps me think.”

Noah ventures closer. “I always liked walking with you.”

When Henry smiles, even slightly, his dimples show. “So did I.”

They begin circling the well-appointed park pond. Henry says, “I recognized you at the bowling alley right away.” Noah doesn’t interject, so he continues. “I think I was waiting for something to happen, and then I felt you, yesterday morning. It was like a whirlpool, it just sucked me in.”

“I’m sorry,” Noah says. “That wasn’t me at my best. If it was me.” He rolls his shoulders. “I still don’t really understand it.”

“It’s you. It’s just.” Henry gestures vaguely. “He’s the source, but you’re the prism that alters how he comes out. You’re both the same person, expressed in different ways.” He looks right at Noah. “How are you?”

The question is too expansive. Everything about the universe that he’d thought he understood has turned on its head; some of it is better than the old way. He’s wretched with love that had no build-up at all. He dreams about deaths he’s caused, and there are so many. He’s never been so comfortable in his own body. “I don’t know,” he says.

Henry nods. “It must be very hard, to learn it all at once like that. I’ve had a long time with it. I don’t know what else life is like.”

“How do you talk about it?” Noah can’t keep up the eye contact. His throat has gone tight, the corners of his eyes pricking. “I know what I felt, and what I saw, but I know I didn’t do all those things, but I also know that I did.” He shakes his head. “This isn’t what I was raised with, you know? This life is all you’ve got, when you’re a Jew. I’m an atheist and I believe that.”

There’s something implacable in Henry’s expression, as real and indifferent as a star. “And yet, you’ve got a golden core.”

They walk in silence for a bit.

“I was glad to see you,” Henry says quietly. His eyes stay on the ground. “I. I had no idea. I know I shouldn’t have come back at all, but someone tried to put me back together. We were friends, I thought, and then… I thought you just hated me. That it was all a big game you had rigged, and I was your biggest dupe. The way you reacted, though…”

Noah stares straight ahead. In college, a psych professor once told the class that there’s a reason you don’t remember pain, only the experience of it. Right now that seems wrong too. Noah can’t look at Henry. “You had no idea?” He says it quietly. It burns in his chest cavity, the spells and the Tiger Amulet and the endless hours crouched next to the daozhang’s corpse.

Henry bows his head, like he’s ashamed. “I had no idea.”

Noah wonders what would happen if he could summon Jiangzai again, to beat back against Henry until he realizes how stupid that was. He wonders if he could hide in the shrubbery off to their left until Henry rightfully gives up on him and lets him live out this life in humiliation and agony. He grips his coffee until the cardboard bends beneath his fingers.

He says, instead, “Tell me about what you do now.”

Henry Xiao is a public historian. He runs a nonprofit, which he founded, to expose kids and adults to labor activism, grassroots fights for equality and boundary-smashing voices of color from the civil rights fights of today. Noah’s heart stutters. He’d love this man even without the complicated reincarnation backstory. Henry smiles when Noah gets going about his own work, about the necessity of the franchise and how America has never been a democracy, but someday it could be.

“You’ve had a good life,” Henry says.

“And a whole new exciting way to feel guilty about it.” He laughs; it comes out dark. “You want to know something I’ve been thinking about? I promise I’m not religious-religious, it’s just — there’s a story, about Noah the Patriarch, that he also brought two of every demon on the ark.”

Henry muses over his empty coffee cup. “Reincarnation shouldn’t be understood as carceral, or capitalist and transactional,” he says. “There’s not one opposite thing that cancels out betrayal or treachery or murder. The balance needs to be in what we put into the world.” Before Noah can process the full force of that, Henry adds, almost casually, “I think an A-Yang allowed to have a good life is one who can begin to make amends. That it’s what you’d do anyway just — speaks well of you.”

Noah stops walking.

He has to sit down. He has to sink to his knees and plant both hands on his thighs, breathing deep.

Henry doesn’t notice for a pace or two. One hand flies up to cover his mouth when he does. “I’m so sorry! Are you all right?” He crouches down in front of him, his frown and his downturned mouth and his searching eyes so close. “Noah?”

He’s been Xue Yang his whole life. That’s it. The other guy has no more chances to change what that means.

“Xingchen,” he says, without asking. He meets his eyes. “You can call me A-Yang.”

His daozhang smiles. It’s not flashy, but it’s utterly real. He doesn’t try to stand up either. “Let me look after Zichen over the coming days,” he says. “After that… Why don’t you come over, and we’ll simply have a nice time?”

It’s one way to repair the world.

*

Fourteen days after his life falls apart, Noah starts a fire using his qi for the first time. In the backyard of a mutually inconvenient bar, under strings of gold-tinted lights, Lan Xichen dares him to learn regular cultivation. When Xichen shows Noah the move and the trashcan lights up, Wangji panics and upends the bin to smother the flames.

The Twin Jades scuttle after the embers, stamping out old napkins and smoldering sandwich crusts. Mingjue has a braying laugh, which betrays deep dimples at his cheeks. Those shear years and hardships off his face. Noah is cheering-a-soccer-match pumped; he grabs everyone’s faces, screaming about what he just did. Wangji, who spends most of his time moping, smiles a little. Mingjue blows Noah’s mind by telling him he can come monster-hunting in the warehouse district if he learns how to fly.

The sects aren’t alive anymore, just the people. It helps quiet the old distrust and disdain about politics and power, at least between each other. Sometimes Noah pores over photos of himself, from before and after he knew the whole story. Maybe his smile has gotten a little sharper; maybe his eyes burn a little now. He chooses to keep moving forward.

He doesn’t say anything to the girl he’s seeing casually. She doesn’t remark on whether he’s hungrier or he needs more. He loves that nothing changes with her, that her sharp tongue and soft Singaporean accent stay constant in his life. One night at her place, his vision goes double. She’s wreathed in red, three needles tucked into her sleeves. Noah wants to be shocked again. Instead, he doesn’t say anything. She’s happy, here in the States for med school. Her brother’s in the city too. He’s glad she’s happy.

Those first few days, he doesn’t know how to talk to his parents. He finally texts to apologize; he got busy and time got away from him. Ron Rothman teases him with a physics joke; Sylvia Rothman announces she’ll send a care package. Noah wonders what he’d even tell them, if he told them. He wonders what he’d see if he looked at the pictures from their big trip again.

“Come home for Passover,” his mother insists. “Why don’t you come home for the whole week, do all the seders with us?”

“Your mother would love that,” his father adds.

“Maybe,” he muses, “but only for the free laundry.”

His golden core churns on and on.

Song Lan refuses to meet him again. Xingchen apologizes, but Noah gets it. They’ll get there. He’s just got to keep his eyes open for opportunities. Xue Yang, for his part, knows how to get what he wants.

Noah’s life doesn’t stop, not even for the protest on a bright morning in front of the statehouse. He’s manning a voter registration booth, but not so secretly wants to be out among the signs. It’s good people-watching, at least, and he’s always watching for something these days.

He feels it before he spots him, the warmth of a fellow cultivator’s qi close by in the world. Noah squeezes the nonprofit-branded ball he’s tossing from hand to hand and squints into the crowd. To everyone around him, the world doesn’t need destroying, just improvement and real conversation. It needs good faith. It needs someone who listens.

“Hey!” he calls out. “Yiling Laozu!”

Only one person reacts. The red ribbon holding back his high ponytail sails as the man twists, trying to locate the voice. Noah stands up, grinning. He launches the ball toward him, watching for the instant it’s spotted and caught.