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“Don’t die yet, eh?” the sly-eyed senior porter told him casually, and sauntered away.
Right. Don’t die. Wu Xie let his head sink back against the wall and wondered where he was going to find the strength to get back to the warehouse proper. He was short of breath to the point that the edges of his vision kept shading in and out, the muscles of his chest and back knotted and aching. Warehouse 11 would have been a strain for a well man; in his current state it was close to pushing him over the edge. I don’t have much time. Indeed.
His head swam when he stood up, but at least he didn’t cough. He got to the edge of the chain pit and…he’d done harder things, he’d been through worse, a quick scramble back across the chains (at his own pace yet, nobody chasing him, no shibie or zombies or anything else offensive) should be nothing, but…it got harder every time, and he was shaky enough now that…if he started coughing on the way across, or got any dizzier, he’d fall.
(If Xiaoge were—)
Wu Xie choked off that thought ruthlessly: there was a long fall that way too and he couldn’t afford it. Not now. Not yet.
Was the chain pit really the only route back into the warehouse proper? Bai Haotian had tricked him before for her own amusement, and in Qizhi’s sprawling nightmare landscape, anything might be connected to anything. Wu Xie leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes, calling up his best efforts at a mental blueprint of Warehouse 11. The familiar process was soothing, easing a little of the tension humming through him.
He moved slowly along the wall by the pit, one hand tracing the solid bulkhead—there. Okay, it would be a lie if he said he’d known it would be there, but it wasn’t improbable (more than anything else around here). Three fine, ruler-straight crevices, outlining a low door.
Wu Xie pushed lightly on it—no give—pried with the tips of his fingers—nothing. There was no visible handle or keyhole. He tried pressure at different locations. Nothing. In a sour joke with himself, he rapped his knuckles on it, slow-slow-quick-quick, their qiaoqiaohua code for open.
The door opened.
Wu Xie grinned to himself, elated. (Better not to wonder about why it had worked.) The door was so small and narrow—worse than the tunnel into the sub-warehouse—that he had to drop to his knees and turn awkwardly sideways to fit his shoulders through it, but to his relief it gave access to a corridor which allowed him to stand upright. There was a faint pale illumination from no immediately visible source. Wu Xie took the deepest breath he could manage, eased the door shut behind him, and moved forward.
It seemed easy going. The corridor was not quite straight or quite level, the subtle curve making it difficult to keep track of what direction he was going in relative to the dotted-line plot of the Warehouse in his head. There was no sound, except a faraway rippling, barely audible, that made him think the passage must be skirting close to the underwater storage somehow.
On the thought, unmistakable: “Xiao San-ye!” Xiao Bai’s voice.
He turned the corner (had there been a sharp corner there before?) and she was there, standing in the middle of the passage. Her uniform jacket was off and the white shirt all but glowed in the dimness. “Xiao San-ye, there you are. I’ve missed you.”
“So you were playing with me all along.” He was thinking of the chain pit, confirmed in his guess that she’d known there was another access route; he hadn’t expected her to blanch visibly, her look of pleasure fading into distress.
“You found out,” she said softly, eyes welling with tears. Wu Xie saw that she was holding a sheaf of papers, official documentation where the ink had faded rust-colored with age. “I couldn’t tell you. I can’t tell you.”
This wasn’t about the secret corridor. “Sanshu,” Wu Xie breathed, and made a grab for the documents.
Xiao Bai flowed out of his reach like water, her face crumpling. Wu Xie, off balance, caught himself against the wall and spun back to face her, prepared once again to use his greater height and weight to take what he needed by force if he had to. “Show me. Xiao Bai, show me!”
Xiao Bai sniffed, wiped her eyes with the back of her hand like a little girl. “I can’t. I won’t,” just as she had repeated before. “You can’t follow him, Xiao San-ye, the Warehouse knows! He was unredeemable!”
The odd word choice cut short Wu Xie’s second attempt at the papers. “The Warehouse knows,” he repeated, arrested.
Xiao Bai’s dark eyes, brimming over with tears, reflected a light from elsewhere. “He was Unredeemable,” she whispered again. “But you aren’t!” As she slid away from his grasp once again, he saw the black lines of his signature on the back of her shirt. “Xiao San-ye, you have to trust me. I know the Warehouse. And the Warehouse knows you. How do you think you’ve come so far, passed so many tests, seen so much? You aren’t your sanshu—you’re—” She was standing still now, poised in the middle of the corridor, the documents a blur in her hands. Her eyes were huge. “Xiao San-ye, I won’t let you go where he did.”
Wu Xie was seeing stars, the grand warehouse’s illusory constellations scattered from her eyes. “You have to let me choose that for myself,” he said, and could not get the sentence out on a single breath.
“It was my choice too,” Xiao Bai whispered, and he couldn’t see her face any more, only hear the thread of her voice. “For love. Xiao San-ye, I did it for love of you—”
The passage tilted sharply down and Wu Xie staggered along with it, groping for a wall he couldn’t see, blinking as the light shattered across his vision into momentary darkness. He kept his feet under him somehow through a long, dizzy stumble downward, until the ground came up suddenly level and knocked him to his knees.
Gradually the soft indefinite light came up around him again, and with it a shape dark against the pale walls. Not Xiao Bai, not his own shadow. Not Sanshu, but unmistakably—
“Xiaoge,” Wu Xie whispered.
“Wu Xie,” even softer, but clear, Xiaoge’s voice without a doubt. He took a step forward and drew Wu Xie to his feet, hands on his forearms, strong and steady.
“How are you here.” Wu Xie could hear the helpless smile in his own voice, tears coming as easily as Xiao Bai’s had. “Not that I’m complaining—Xiaoge—” They were standing so close that he could feel the heat of Xiaoge’s body. He wanted to bask in it like a hot spring, surely the only way to ease the adamant constriction in his chest.
“Where you’re going, Wu Xie—I can’t follow.” It was a terrible inversion of what Xiaoge had said to him before the Bronze Gate.
Wu Xie swayed, held upright by Xiaoge’s grip on his wrists. “Xiaoge, no. There’s nowhere I would go that…”
Xiaoge’s long fingers traced the ridges along Wu Xie’s forearm: one, two…six, seven…fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen…
“I know what I did.” He couldn’t breathe enough to manage a full voice; it came out a hoarse whisper. “I did what I had to…ah Xiaoge, I did it for love of you,” hearing Xiao Bai’s voice doubling his own. “And it’s over now.”
“But you don’t know that,” Xiaoge said very quietly. “For you it’s never over. You redeemed me, Wu Xie—“ another echo of Xiao Bai’s voice, unredeemable—“while you put your own redemption into the wrong hands.”
Wu Xie felt his own lips trace Sanshu, soundless. He made a shuddering attempt to draw breath, and managed, “I’m always…always in your hands.”
Xiaoge’s eyes deepened, darkened, glinted with another light as Xiao Bai’s had. “In my hands,” he repeated softly. His right hand moved up Wu Xie’s arm to his shoulder, slid inside his shirt collar to stroke the vulnerable dip between shoulder and collarbone. Wu Xie shut his eyes, heaved a breath that tasted of iron and electricity, let his whole weight sink into Xiaoge while that strong sure hand traced the scar on his neck and then closed around his throat.
He was still in darkness when he opened his eyes again, pressed against the corridor wall, shoulder and hip tingling as if he’d been thrown against it hard. There was no air in his lungs. He tried to inhale, choked, folded up coughing while the pain in his chest flared as if he’d breathed in hot cinders. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t…Xiaoge, please…not here, not alone in the darkness…
When the coughing finally subsided he was doubled over, slumped against the wall in lieu of collapse, blood in his mouth and pain radiating through his chest. Wu Xie turned his head and spat, realizing at the sight of the deep red splash that there was light again, the same pale indistinct lighting, this time with a distinct underwater ripple to it. Had he been underwater this whole time, was that why it was so hard to breathe…?
He struggled up against the wall, blinking hard to fight off dizziness while he found his balance. It was suddenly too hot, the narrow corridor dense with an oppressive, boiler-room heat, and he got his uniform jacket off somehow and tied it awkwardly around his waist. His breath came a little more easily with the heavy shaped twill off his shoulders, but the white shirt—just what Xiao Bai had been wearing—made him feel vulnerably undressed.
There was a faint upslope in the passage ahead of him. Wu Xie followed it, more slowly than before: he couldn’t catch his breath and his vision blurred when he turned his head. Sweat ran out of his hair into his eyes. He barely saw the figure in front of him in time not to collide.
“No further, Xiao Xie,” said the familiar definitive voice.
Wu Xie wiped his face on his sleeve, seeing flecks of blood stain the white fabric, and jerked his chin up. “Ershu.”
Wu Erbai stood foursquare in the middle of the corridor, arms folded over his chest. “You won’t find him here, Xiao Xie. Stop tearing yourself to pieces looking.”
“Ershu, I’m so close.” Wu Xie turned his head to cough into his shoulder. “He was here. There are records here.” He thought of the yellowed old papers Xiao Bai had been clutching. They had to be real somewhere. “I’m so close.”
“Yicun zhichui, riqu yiban…”
“…wanshi bujie,” Wu Xie finished along with his uncle. He swallowed, reflecting that his search for Sanshu had indeed often felt like halving the distance endlessly, never reaching the endpoint. “It’s different here. It has to be,” his voice cracking on the last words.
“And if you did find him, then what? Do you think he’d want to watch you die any more than I do?”
Wu Xie’s head swam. The shifting light flickered off Wu Erbai’s glasses, making his face hard to look at.
“Xiao Xie, think about what you have, not what you don’t have. Don’t lose yourself.”
“If I’m dying anyway,” hoarsely, “what does it matter what’s left of me?”
His uncle’s voice was still so calm. “Lao San’s specialty was coming to bad ends. Even now, Xiao Xie, you can do better.”
Wu Xie couldn’t see his face at all. Light spilled unevenly from the corridor beyond. “Which way? Ershu, which way?”
There was a rushing sound. The water was coming at last.
Wu Xie looked up and down the passage for an alcove, a ladder, a trap door, a way out. He was drowning in his own lungs already, it would be all too ironic to end up swept away in this passage to nowhere…
“Tianzhen, hey, Tianzhen!”
Pangzi was behind him, larger than life in his pink T-shirt and battered leather jacket and wide grin. “The boat leaves from here, young master, all aboard that’s coming aboard!” It was a real boat, a weathered, timeworn sampan in miniature, waiting at Pangzi’s feet.
“Where did you…?”
Pangzi winked big at him, stepping onto the boat himself. “Warehouse 11, Tianzhen. You wouldn’t believe what they’ve got squirreled away here. You haven’t seen the half of it. Now you want to get on here, or you want to drown?” Behind his voice, the water roared closer.
Wu Xie stepped blindly up onto the boat, near the bow. The wood felt fragile and flexible under his weight.
“That’s it. Here we go! Hold tight, eh?” But it was Pangzi who was holding on, his hands firm on Wu Xie’s shoulders from behind. Before Wu Xie could turn to look at him, the water struck them.
Their boat rode the flood effortlessly, racing down the long dim passage as if it were a white-water raft, swaying from side to side but never capsizing. Pangzi seemed to steer it by shifting his grip on Wu Xie’s shoulders, now right, now left. Wu Xie leaned back against him, dizzy, tasting salt as flying droplets splashed his lips. But this could not be seawater, they were nowhere near the sea…the NanhaiWang’s tomb, sea flooding in to wash it all away…there was blood in his mouth.
“Ready, Tianzhen?” Pangzi’s voice asked, close against his ear. “You’ll have to jump.”
“…how far down?”
“Only as far as you make it,” Pangzi said cheerfully.
“What about you?”
“Now you ask?”
Wu Xie closed his eyes.
Pangzi’s right hand cupped the back of his neck for a moment, close cousin to Xiaoge’s hand at his throat. “Not to worry, Tianzhen. I’ll be with you as long as you’ll let me, we all will. But you have to jump.”
The passage had widened into a vast dim space, lit by a pale golden glow too far overhead to see. The boat rocked on the water. Pangzi said once again “Ready?” and Wu Xie jumped down.
It was a long fall—another irony, hadn’t he come down this passage to stop himself falling in the first place?—a drift rather than a plunge, seeing clusters of pearls, warehouse item tags, sometimes faces sinking past him. His hair floated around his face, oddly enough remaining dry. There was no air to be had, but his body could not remember this from one moment to the next: he kept trying and trying to take a breath, and failing.
The impact, when it came at last, was velvety soft and all-encompassing.
Inevitably, Wu Xie came back to himself coughing. He twisted sideways and let the spasms shake him, choked and painful and hatefully familiar. It was a long time before he could catch his breath.
The light over him was golden: the constellation-riddled sky of the grand warehouse. He was lying on the top of a shelf there, not so far from where he and Xiao Bai had spent their down time such a short while ago. His mind automatically placed the coordinates amid the projected stars, working out where he was.
In the jacket tied at his waist, his phone pinged: ten minutes until his next shift.
Wu Xie got slowly to his feet and negotiated the climb down to the floor. There was blood on his mouth and on his chin and on the front of his shirt; he wiped his face roughly on his shirt sleeve and put his jacket back on, buttoning it to his collar. If there were handprints marking his throat, no one would see them.
Warehouse 11 lay all around him, dark and dense with possibility, and he had a job to do. You haven’t seen the half of it, said a voice in his ear, closely followed by For you it’s never over.
Not yet, Wu Xie thought. He straightened his back and waited for his head to clear and went on.