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It was difficult to park unobtrusively near the Human Services building, so Wenwu took a bus and got out across the street. The building was of the ugly, utilitarian fashion that had become so ubiquitous at the end of the ugly, utilitarian twentieth century. There was much in the city of San Francisco that Wenwu admired—he had visited many times in earlier years—but he could not understand why a city with such a lovely setting had chosen to mar itself with buildings like this. He wrinkled his nose briefly, then went inside.
Montoya was on the telephone with someone who seemed distraught, and he paled when he saw Wenwu. He looked like he had been in this cramped and overheated office for a long time; he had loosened his tie enough that the top of his Ten Rings mark was visible beneath his ear. This was not a good idea in the States, especially in California, since that idiot Raza had displayed the symbol behind a bound and beaten Tony Stark, for all the world to see. Two years ago, the imposter had caused quite a fuss with the symbol as well, and Stark—who had become, of all things, a superpowered national hero—had challenged him on international television. Wenwu had briefly considered answering the challenge in person. It had been many years since anyone other than Li had bested him, and he’d wondered if it would be worthwhile to take on this Avengers group. In the end, it hadn’t seemed like a good use of the Rings or his army. After that, he’d dreamed that Li wanted him to join them and offer them the strength of the Ten Rings to support whatever business they were doing, but that…
Well, he had already learned that such paths were forever closed to him. If the aliens returned, he supposed he would find a way to start trading with them instead.
Montoya was speaking rapidly in Spanish now, trying to calm the high-pitched voice on the other end of the line long enough to provide assistance. He made a pained face in Wenwu’s direction, and bowed clumsily several times.
Wenwu sat down in a plastic chair and waved at him to finish his job. Since his cover job was helping children in distress, this call might well take priority. Besides, it wouldn’t do for him to be fired. Someone else might be found to trail Shang-Chi, but Montoya was in the best position for it and already had all of the relevant information. The fewer people who knew where the boy was, the more comfortable Wenwu was with the situation. Not all of the Ten Rings cared for the boy. Some of them, he knew, grumbled that they would never take his orders or allow him to lead. They would be dealt with before the boy came home.
It took almost five minutes. Spanish was not Wenwu’s best language, but he gathered that the distraught woman was trying to find safe harbor and medical attention for her injured child, and that neither of them had adequate papers to satisfy the bureaucrats. He picked up a notepad and wrote, “I will take care of it.”
Montoya smiled and said, with great relief, “There are angels, Señora. Take the boy to the hospital, and I will meet you there in”—he raised an eyebrow, and Wenwu wrote “thirty minutes”—“thirty minutes.”
He extracted himself from her garbled gratitude and hung up, then tipped his head to Wenwu. “I apologize for not greeting you more respectfully.”
“More respectfully? In a thousand years, I don’t believe anyone has ever called me an angel.”
“She’s—”
“I understood enough to know. Call Reynolds at INS, and have him fix her papers on my direct order; he can contact me if he questions it. I know he can do it. He fixed Shang-Chi’s papers enough that no one questioned him. There should be enough in our local coffers to cover the medical treatment. Now, I… happen to be in San Francisco. I would like a report on my son.”
“Oh. Yes. Of course. Sir.” He fumbled for a key and opened the bottom drawer of his file cabinet, then found another key and unlocked a panel at its base. From there, he extracted a tablet, which he tapped. It scanned his retina, then the Ten Rings appeared on the screen. Only instead of their usual glyphs, each ring held a folder, and each folder was labeled with an assignment. The top one read “Shaun Hsu,” which Shang-Chi apparently had considered an unbreakable alias of some kind. Wenwu never had taught him about undercover work.
“I finished the background check on his foster parents. Of course, I vetted them personally before I placed him, but I’ve extended the search through four generations in China and Korea—the husband’s grandparents were from Kangwon province, and his mother was born in Shenyang, where her parents had come to work. Everyone else on both sides comes from Fuzhou for several generations. None of them has ever dealt with the Ten Rings, and can’t have a grudge.”
“Good.” Wenwu held out his hand for the tablet, and when Montoya handed it to him, he opened Shang-Chi’s file folder. There was a PDF of his CPS case file, but Wenwu had seen that when Montoya sent it to him six months ago. “Hsu, Shaun” was apparently an undocumented immigrant fleeing a cartel. He had arrived from China via El Salvador, which was true enough. Mother: Hsu Li. Father: Unknown. Nothing else in the file mattered. It was fabricated.
Instead, he opened a new picture, dated a week ago. It had been taken with a telephoto lens by a “tourist” in a loud shirt who was exclaiming over every bit of cheap kitsch to be found in Chinatown. Shang-Chi had noticed him—everyone had—but dismissed him, as Wenwu had expected. Loud tourists observing the locals were part of the landscape in Chinatown these days. But he had been able to catch him at the Portsmouth Square Playground, where he and the two girls he had befriended were playing with a little boy who Wenwu took to be someone’s brother. One of the girls was lying on her stomach in a little yellow cube with a crawl space in the middle of it. Her indifferently measured pigtails stuck out from under a cap with the NASCAR logo on it, and she let her arms dangle toward the ground. She was grinning at Shang-Chi. The other girl was lying on her back on the slide, staring up at the sky. Shang-chi was playing with the little boy, pushing him in a stylized tire swing. The camera had caught them as the swing flew upward, the little one shrieking with joy, and Shang-Chi laughing, moving to run around and push him from another direction.
Laughing.
When was the last time you saw your son laugh? Li asked in his mind. When has he spent a carefree afternoon, enjoying any family, let alone ours?
He swiped the picture to the left, and the next one showed Shang-Chi with his foster parents at a baseball game. The one after it showed him on stage in some kind of school play. Singing.
Wenwu looked up. “He’s singing?”
“I believe that was a dare from the girl, sir. I took the school music teacher out on a date and mentioned the show, and she told me that. She marveled at how quickly the boy could learn dance steps.”
“I don’t wonder,” Wenwu muttered. “Did you enjoy the show?”
“For high school show, it was… well, a high school show.”
“Ah. Is there a recording?”
“Not that I’m aware of.” Montoya looked anxious. “I could have him removed from the school. New foster parents, maybe a good private Chinese school if that would be more to your liking…”
“Why? If my son wants to sing, he should sing. I haven’t heard him do so for many years.”
“He… sang with his mother?” Montoya ventured.
“No. My wife had many talents, but singing was not one of them.” Wenwu looked down at the picture, traced it with his eyes. “He sang with me.”
“Oh.”
Montoya didn’t seem to know what to do with this, and Wenwu wasn’t inclined to elaborate. His men would not despise him—most knew he had tried to leave them behind for ten years—but he didn’t need them to look at him and imagine him dancing on a wet kitchen floor in his sock feet, holding his toddler son while they both sang a ridiculous song he remembered from his long-ago boyhood in a land that no longer existed in any meaningful way. Shang-Chi had always been a good mimic, and he had picked up the words and the melody after Wenwu had sung it only twice and…
He closed his eyes and took a sharp breath. The world where he had sung in the kitchen with his son was as vanished and inaccessible as the village he’d grown up in, a world whose ashes were now buried under the centuries, with no trace left of what had once been there. He opened his eyes. “The girl, this one who dared him to sing… she’s one of them from the playground?”
“The one in the cap, yes. Katy Chen.”
“Katy? What’s her real name?”
“As far as I can tell from the records, she’s always been Katy.”
“And he spends a great deal of time with her? She’s his… girlfriend?” It seemed like an odd concept, but it was possible. Unlikely, but possible. Shang-Chi hadn’t spoken to a girl other than his sister since Li died, as far as Wenwu knew—the men did not bring their wives and daughters to the compound and Shang-Chi hadn’t left it without supervision—but he had always been a personable boy, and he was of the age where he might take an interest in such things.
“I’m not sure about that, but he does spend a great deal of time with her and with her family. I’ve vetted them thoroughly, of course.” He said this last quickly, as if afraid that Wenwu would fault him for not following an assignment to the letter. Which was true, but hadn’t been a concern with anyone since Raza. Raza’s side dealings had gotten him killed, but if they hadn’t, Wenwu had made it quite clear to everyone else that he would not have survived the year anyway.
“And?”
“It was her grandparents who came over from Hunan. Stibnite miners, mostly, and produce merchants. The father has a small produce stall here. It was the grandfather’s, but he’s retired.”
“Connections with the Ten Rings?”
“None. I know that was your greatest concern.”
“As I have already lost my wife to someone who had a vendetta against me, yes… I would like to be assured that my son is not being lulled by old enemies.”
“Of course, sir.”
“And the other girl?”
“Soo Zhou. Her family’s been in town since the railroad was recruiting. They helped lay the track, and since then? Teachers, merchants, an uncle who’s a monk. I checked as far back as the late 1800s. They weren’t connected to any of the tongs, let alone the Ten Rings. Your son has been tutoring her in Chinese.”
“Do you see him often?”
“I have a check-in with his foster family once a month. They want him to get counselling. They say he has nightmares. If he were to speak to a psychologist, it is… well, I’ve talked to the boy, and I’m fairly sure he came close to confessing to me that he… well, why he was in San Salvador. He might talk about it to a counsellor.”
And maybe, Li spoke inside his head again, that would be the best thing that could happen. Someone could undo the damage you have done to our son.
He didn’t push the voice out, because he missed it, even if he was supplying the words himself. He would make his own argument with her later. Your way didn’t work, my love. Your way left you lifeless in the snow. I don’t want that for our children.
“How troubled is he by what happened? He doesn’t look troubled in the pictures.”
“He insists that he’s not. Of course, as far as he knows, I have no idea what prompted him to come, since he didn’t tell me himself.” Montoya sighed. “Sir, will there be… that is to say, has the legal situation…”
“Will the Party send investigators to check into the death of a petty gangster on foreign soil? I highly doubt it.” He shook his head. “Besides, we had a stroke of luck. Deng was as unwise in his entanglements on this side of the ocean as he was at home. He had crossed blades with more than one family here, and as it happened, one of them found the body and displayed it to his enemies as if he’d anything whatsoever to do with it. As far as the authorities are concerned, it’s an open and shut case that has nothing whatsoever to do with a teenage boy from Yunnan Province who was backpacking through the area.” He swiped back to the playground picture. “But never mind that. What is your impression, Mr. Montoya? How troubled is he?”
“Well… he did run. And he has assiduously avoided any violence since he got here. Even perfectly fair fights.”
“No fight with an outsider is fair if my son is on the other side of it.”
“Yes, well. He narrowly avoided a school fight on the day he met the girl. He has been quite loyal to her simply because she interfered with it.”
“Ah.”
“I asked him if he would have fought if she hadn’t stopped it. He said…”
“Yes?”
“He said he’d have probably just taken the beating because he couldn’t fight. He assumed I thought that meant he was incapable of fighting—he said something about not wanting to take any lessons—but I think he meant… I think he meant that he simply couldn’t make himself do it. That he plans to take a permanent vacation from fighting. I’m very sorry, sir.”
“For what?”
“I know you trained him and count on him…”
“He’ll come home, Montoya. Eventually, he’ll come home. Is he still doing his forms?”
“In secret,” Montoya confirmed. “And only once a week. He’s told his foster parents that he likes to meditate on his own, but in fact, he generally rides his bike to the beach near the Seal Rocks and does his forms early in the morning on Sundays, before anyone else comes—there are pictures if you swipe further—and then continues his bike ride, usually for two hours or more. But yes, he does do his forms, and is maintaining his training after a fashion. His habit is to finish his ride at the Chens’ home and have lunch with them before returning to his foster home. We don’t have photos from the inside their home, but he rises early and he told me that he lifts weights and does calisthenics in the basement before his foster parents get up. I asked him why. He said he doesn’t know another way to be.”
“Do you know where he is tonight?”
“Are you going to take him home?”
“I’d like to see him.”
Montoya pulled out his phone and started a trace on Shang-Chi’s number. “It’s a Saturday. I’m willing to bet that it’s an adventure night.” He shrugged. “Well, that’s what he calls it. The girls like to go see strange sights in parts of the city they don’t usually visit.” He checked the tracker. “His phone is out in West Portal. There was some kind of disturbance there last night.”
“Disturbance?”
“The paper wasn’t clear, but it had something to do with what happened to the Pymtech building. Rumor has it that was HYDRA.”
“I doubt it. They were doing business with Cross, which is why I was not. I have no interest in being the same room as HYDRA agents.”
“Yes, sir. And it’s just as well. The building imploded.”
“I read the papers, Montoya. But this other thing is in West Portal?”
“Yes. It… it seems to involve a giant child’s toy doing damage to a house there. It seems like the sort of thing the children would want to see.”
“I agree.”
“Do you need me to take you there?”
“No, you have a distressed woman to help with her papers, and an injured child to get to the hospital. I’ve delayed you too long already. I can get there on my own.”
Montoya stood and offered a hand to shake, American style, then withdrew it and made another awkward bow. “Thank you for honoring me with a personal visit, and for offering your assistance to this client.”
Wenwu reached out and shook the man’s hand, as he was clearly more comfortable with that gesture. “Thank you for keeping an eye on my son. Notify me immediately if anything changes.”
There was nothing further to be said, so Wenwu took his leave, and took a bus back to the hotel where his rental car was stowed. It was a nondescript dark blue sedan, not the top of the line or even a particularly new model. He didn’t think Shang-Chi would make assumptions about it if he happened to see it. It took a bit of doing to get to West Portal, a small suburban-looking enclave in the middle of San Francisco, but once he got there, it wasn’t hard to find the oddity. Gawkers were milling around a perfectly ordinary family house, in front of which was police car that had been flattened under a blue plastic train engine roughly the size of an eighteen-wheel truck. Apparently, the Pymtech Cross had tried to sell him on actually worked, but Wenwu still could not imagine a good use for it. His men were quite stealthy enough without shrinking themselves, and quite strong enough without growing themselves.
He spotted Shang-Chi and the girls near the front of the engine, which had a jolly, childish face. They were laughing together, and Wenwu just watched them from across the street for a long while, until the house’s owner, a frazzled looking blonde, came out and shooed all the gawkers away. The girl Soo led the way toward a woodsy hill area not far away, and they headed up a hiking trail.
Wenwu considered just letting them be, but knew he wouldn’t really do so. He parked the car, looked over his shoulder, then rolled up his sleeves. It would be too intrusive to simply leap into the air and land among them, but he followed them, and when they paused in a small clearing, he used the Rings to boost himself enough to land on a rock formation above them without making too much noise climbing. From here, he could see and hear them, but he wasn’t in a place they were likely to look in the casual course of a conversation.
“Did you see that?” Soo asked.
“No, we missed it,” Katy said. Tonight, she was wearing a shade of pink that was probably aiding in the illumination of the neighborhood, and her clumsy pigtails did her face no favors, but Wenwu thought the photographs hadn’t done her justice. Despite her rather bizarre fashion choices, she seemed to be quite a pretty girl, and… yes, he was reasonably sure from the look on Shang-Chi’s face that he had, at the very least, noticed it. She turned and looked at him, and he arranged his face to mirror her loud disinterest—his skill as a mimic had not faded. Katy grinned, “Shaun, did you miss the giant blue Thomas the Tank Engine on top of the police car?”
He rolled his eyes, and moved just slightly, letting his shoulders relax like hers, adjusting his stance so that, like her, he would seem ironically detached, and yet somehow still the center of attention. She was unquestionably an American girl, all loud voice and sharp elbows, and Shang-Chi was learning how to be an American from her. Maybe he would learn to do undercover work after all.
Or maybe, Li interjected from her corner of his mind, he could just be happy.
“Do you think it’s Avengers stuff?” Soo asked.
“I doubt the Avengers need giant toy trains,” Shang-Chi pointed out, climbing up onto a low rock and sitting down. “A lot of them can fly.”
“Captain America can’t fly,” Soo said. “I think he has a motorcycle or something.”
Katy snorted. “Don’t believe her. If Captain America has a motorcycle, Soo knows the make and model, and what color the leather on the seat is.”
“I do not!”
“You like him?” Shang-Chi asked, obviously trying to get his bearings in his suddenly female-dominated world.
“He’s cute,” Soo admitted. “But if I were an Avenger, I’d want better powers. I want Thor’s lightning hammer. It would be so cool. Just go, ‘boom!’”—she thrust her hand into the air and made a spinning motion with her hand—“and then you’re flying and shooting lightning everywhere.”
Shang-Chi, who had seen artifacts just as powerful in action, looked a bit green.
“I’d be Hulk,” Katy decided. “Just get mad and start throwing everything out of my way. Which one would you be, Shaun?”
“Oh, I’m not Avengers material. You know me. I don’t want to get into fights.”
“Oh, come on. You could be Hawkeye, with a bow. Or that new guy with the wings. Or don’t they have girl with glowy hands now?” Katy made a gesture like she was throwing a baseball. Or a Ring.
Shang-Chi just shook his head.
“Come on,” Katy goaded, sitting down beside him and bumping him with her shoulder. “What superpower would you have?”
“I’d be invisible,” he said promptly.
“I don’t think they have one of those yet,” Soo said. “Shaun Hsu, Invisible Boy! Lurks in the shadows and strikes down the unrighteous.”
Shang-Chi stiffened, and Katy put a hand on his shoulder absently. To Wenwu’s surprise, she didn’t demand to know why he was drawing away from his own stated power wish. She just moved the conversation on to the strengths of the various Avengers—whose powers were best, which ones they could be with the right training and tech. Shang-Chi made a better effort at not reacting when Soo brought up Black Widow, who only had the power of “like, super high level training and stuff so she can fight like the super people.” (Wenwu, who had dealt with the Red Room from time to time, considered this an accurate statement, though he found it distasteful. He’d heard things about what they did to those girls, and he’d always been vaguely offended by it. He knew the world had changed at some point, but surely, they knew that women should not be subjected to the things the Red Room expected of them.)
The conversation went on for quite a long time, ranging from one frivolous topic to another—the best Greek gods, the coolest cars, the stupidest things tourists said in Chinatown. Wenwu didn’t think he would remember the details later, but it was children’s talk, and his son was part of it. He laughed with his friends. He made jokes about what superpower would show up next (his suggestion was that the next Avenger would sneeze acid, or expel knockout gas from other orifices). The girls started gossiping about other boys, and he made a great show of being disgusted with them, and Soo laughed and said, “Don’t worry, Shaun, me and Katy still love you best.” Then she made exaggerated kissing noises until Shang-Chi fell down laughing and made a warding gesture in her direction.
Sometimes, when the girls weren’t looking, his smile faded and he looked off into the shadows, or worse, down at his hands.
Then one or the other of them would drag him back into the conversation, and the laughter came back.
It was eight-thirty when Katy looked at her watch and used a rather colorful expression to show annoyance. “My mom’s going to kill me if I’m out with you after nine,” she said. “She’s completely scandalized that I’m hanging out with a boy.”
“But you have a chaperone and everything,” Soo said, pointing to herself.
“She thinks you need a chaperone, Soo.”
“Hmph.” Soo reached down and grabbed a backpack, and headed down the hill, turning her nose up theatrically.
Katy started to put on her coat, but Shang-Chi slid down from the rock and touched her arm, looking concerned. “Your mother… she doesn’t really think… I mean that we’re… I thought she liked me.”
Katy made a dismissive gesture. “Oh, she loves you. I think she loves you more than me.”
“That’s not true.”
“But you know her, Shaun. She can’t wrap her head around being friends with a guy. She thinks it means that I’ll stop doing my homework and become a total loser, just because it’s what she would do. If there’s a male creature other than my little brother anywhere in sight, she goes into, like, total ‘Yes-dear’ mode. If I ever start in on that with anyone, please throw me in the ocean.”
Shang-Chi still had his hand on her arm. “I’m not throwing you in the ocean, Katy.”
“Well, throw me somewhere, because I’m not going to turn into her.”
“I’m not throwing you anywhere.”
They looked at each other long enough that Wenwu was considering averting his eyes, but then Shang-Chi grinned and yanked one of her pigtails and Katy gave him a playful shove. He made a show of falling over, and she reached down to help him up. They followed Soo down the hill, leaving Wenwu alone in the clearing.
Wenwu lowered himself down into the hollow and stood beside the rock where Shang-Chi had been sitting. He touched it. It was still warm. He looked around, hoping the boy had dropped something.
What? A letter saying, Baba, bring me home? Of course. Why not? After all, he laughed so much at home.
He sighed. There was more to life than laughter, and Shang-Chi would learn that eventually. But he could laugh for a little while. He had done his most important duty already.
He would come home. Soon. As soon as he got this out of his system.
Wenwu got back into his car and drove to the hotel, where he had the penthouse suite, and lay down on his bed with his phone, flipping through pictures of an older vintage. Shang-Chi, covered with powdered sugar in the kitchen. Li making ridiculous faces at baby Xialing. Both children in India, when they’d gone during Holi, covered with bright colors they’d spent the morning throwing at one another. Li hadn’t played, but she’d picked Xialing up and her dress was printed with red and yellow and green and pink. Xialing had thought it would be funny to paint Mama, so she had scraped powder off of Shang-Chi’s face, leaving four narrow stripes, and put handprints on Li’s face.
He remembered the fall of the Northern Song Dynasty like it had happened last week (in fact, he had recruited the thief Cai Jing to cause as much trouble as he could, and had often missed the man’s canny political manipulations in the years since), but these pictures, less than a decade old, seemed like an ancient myth he had read in his childhood.
Li smiled up from the photo, Xialing in her arms with her tiny hand pressed chummily in Li’s hair.
You have a child left at home, Li said—though it sounded more like his own voice than it usually did. A child who may not yet need to study laughter to regain its sound. You were the man who took these pictures. Your face was bright purple because I did take a moment to remind you that I could always win, and…
He closed the picture and opened his contacts. It was—he did the math—one o’clock tomorrow afternoon at home. Xialing would be taking a break from her studies to have lunch. Even if she weren’t, no one at the complex would fail to answer a call from this number.
He poked her name on the screen, and she answered after four rings. She didn’t even ask if he meant to have her on video, just switched the setting. She was not in the kitchen. She was up in the mountains.
“Yes, Baba?”
“Where are you? Aren’t you having lunch?”
“I”—her eyes darted around—“I wasn’t hungry, Baba. I wanted to have a run.”
“Is someone with you? Who is watching you?”
“I’m not far from home. Just up the path—”
“You shouldn’t be out there alone.”
“Everyone else has real training all day.”
He frowned. “I’ll assign someone to watch you better when I get back.”
“You could…” She trailed off. “Yes, Baba. Did you need something?”
He did, but no words occurred to him to express it, so he said, “How are your studies?”
“Fine.”
“I want you to go back inside the walls.”
“But—”
“Now, Xialing. I will stay on the phone until I see you pass through the gate. The compound is large. I’m certain you can find a place to run.”
She tightened her chin and said “Fine,” and then bent down and gathered some rags from the ground. Something inside them glinted in the sun. Jewelry, maybe. Perhaps he’d caught her in a game of make believe. “Why did you call? Have you found Shang-Chi?”
“I didn’t come here looking for your brother. He will return when he chooses to do so. I came for business, remember?”
“Oh.” She started down the hill toward the walls. “What… what business was it, Baba? Did you meet anyone nice?”
“Not really. I didn’t want to buy what was on sale.”
“What was it? Was it a new gun?”
“No. You don’t need to worry about such things, daughter.”
“But what are you doing?”
“Would you like me to bring you something pretty from America? A new dress, maybe?”
“Do you know how big I am?”
“I… no.”
“It’s okay, Baba. I know how big I am, and Ching-Lin taught me to order things online.”
“I’ll set you up with your own account.”
“Is that why you called?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.” She reached the gate and went inside. “Are you coming home now, since you didn’t buy anything?”
“I have to stop in Bucharest first.”
“Oh. Is that good business? In Bucharest? Maybe I could come next time.”
“You don’t have any business with my business, daughter. I don’t want you to worry yourself with it.”
Her face tightened. “I’m smart enough,” she said. “So maybe I should get back to my lessons.”
“Yes, I think so.”
She cut the connection. Wenwu went back to the picture of her in Li’s arms. He didn’t sleep. It didn’t seem necessary.
He supposed he had known from the start that he meant to get an early start, and where he meant to go. The beach near the Seal Rocks was deserted when he got there, and he went up to the patio of the nearby restaurant to wait. (It wasn’t open yet, but there was a security guard, and he was easily bribed.) Shang-Chi arrived on his bike twenty minutes after Wenwu had settled himself. He looked like he had been riding hard, and seemed almost dazed as he made his way out onto the sand. For all that, he still performed his forms perfectly, his movements sharp, his punches strong. This was not Shaun Hsu. It was Xu Shang-Chi. He was strong.
But he wasn’t laughing.
And at the end, he sat down on the sand, his toes in the frigid Pacific Ocean, and moodily threw rocks into its water for ten minutes.
Go down to him. Let him know his father is worried. Tell him that he doesn’t need to come back until he’s ready, but the door will be open, and his family will be waiting for him.
But Wenwu knew what would happen if he did that. Shang-Chi would stare out over the water and thank him in a distant voice. And the next time he called Montoya, the boy would have fled again, left this safe haven, left people who made him happy. And he would—correctly—blame it on Wenwu showing that he could always find him.
And, admit it, you do not want to see the way he would look at you. You want him to be the boy who once loved you, not the one who ran from you in terror and hatred. The one who filled out a form and listed his father as "unknown."
And Wenwu was under no illusions about which of those Shang-Chis was sitting on the sand below him.
So he stood at a distance, looking at his son over the parapet as the morning came to life around him. After a long while, Shang-Chi got back on his bike and rode away to burn off whatever traces of his old life were still lingering, before he joined his new family for the afternoon, before he became Shaun again.
Wenwu stayed for breakfast, then made his way to the airport, where his plane was waiting.
There was business to be done.