Chapter Text
Lin Ling stood motionless before the wall of frozen glass, a lone figure adrift in the white-noise of the 24-hour convenience store. The freezer door hummed against his eardrums, a low, constant vibration that felt less like machinery and more like the building's tired circulatory system. The glass itself was a canvas of contradictions. On the surface, a thin crust of frost bloomed in delicate, fern-like patterns—ice crystals that had crept inward from the edges like a slow invasion. Behind that cold sheet lay rows of identical ice cream boxes sat in perfect, color-coded alignment. Strawberry pink. Matcha green. Vanilla white.
And in the center of it all, Lin Ling's own reflection.
It was a blurry image. The frost rendered him impressionistic—a smear of pale skin and dark hair. He tilted his head slightly, just enough to catch the shadow of the dark circles that had taken up permanent residence beneath his eyes. They looked deeper in this light. Almost purple. Like bruises that had forgotten how to heal. His shoulders, which he remembered squaring so proudly in his graduation photos just eight months ago, now sloped downward in a permanent shrug of defeat. The collarbones that had once framed a confident posture now seemed to cave inward, as if his own ribcage was trying to protect his heart from the next blow.
The hum of the fluorescent lights overhead was the store's only heartbeat. A steady, anesthetic buzz that filled the space between the shelves like cotton wool. It was the kind of sound that erased thought if you let it. If you stood still long enough and stared at nothing, the buzz would climb inside your skull and push everything else out. Lin Ling was very good at standing still and staring at nothing.
A soft, electronic chime pierced the hum.
Ding-dong.
The automatic door at the front of the store slid open with a pneumatic hiss. A gust of cold night air curled around the endcap display of discounted energy drinks and licked at Lin Ling's ankles. He didn't turn around. He heard the footsteps—quick, purposeful, the click of heels on linoleum. A woman's voice, low and tired, asking the clerk for a pack of menthols. The crinkle of a receipt being printed. The hiss of the door again. Gone. Somewhere to be. Someone with a destination that wasn't the frozen food aisle at eleven forty-seven on a Tuesday night.
The phone in Lin Ling's left hand was heavy. Not physically—it was a cheap model, two generations behind, the kind that came free with a two-year contract he had signed when he still believed in the concept of "two years from now." But emotionally, spiritually, the weight of it dragged his arm toward the scuffed linoleum floor. The screen, a spiderweb of hairline fractures radiating from the top right corner where he had dropped it on the bathroom floor three months ago, glowed weakly.
Dear Applicant,
Thank you for your interest in the Junior Data Visualization Specialist position at Apex Analytics Group. We were impressed by your academic credentials and portfolio submissions. However, after careful consideration, we regret to inform you—
The screen dimmed. Auto-timeout. The phone, in its infinite mechanical mercy, decided Lin Ling had suffered enough. The words collapsed into blackness, one pixel at a time, the phrase "we regret to inform you" the last thing to fade before the glass went dark. He could still see it, though. Burned into his retinas like the ghost of a bright light. He could always still see it. There were thirty-seven variations of that phrase living rent-free in his head. We regret to inform you. We have decided to pursue other candidates. We do not have a position that matches your qualifications at this time. We wish you the best in your future endeavors.
Future endeavors. What a polite way to say go away.
He rested his forehead against the cold glass of the freezer door.
The shock of it was immediate and clarifying. The cold bit into his skin just above his left eyebrow, a sharp, localized sting that radiated outward through his skull and seemed to quiet the buzzing for just a moment. He closed his eyes. The darkness behind his lids was red-tinged from the fluorescent lights bleeding through. He counted his breaths. One. Two. Three. Four. The glass grew warm where his skin touched it.
A deep breath in. He held it until his lungs ached, then let it out in a slow, deliberate stream that fogged the glass. The condensation bloomed outward from his lips in a circle of gray-white mist, obscuring the blurry ghost of himself completely. Good. He didn't need to see that guy right now. That guy was a problem for tomorrow morning, when the sun came up and the rejection emails started rolling in again like clockwork.
He pulled back. The fog on the glass began to recede from the edges inward, shrinking like a time-lapse of a dying star. Before his reflection could fully return, he grabbed the cold metal handle of the freezer door and pulled.
The seal broke with a soft, sucking sound. A cloud of frozen air spilled out and washed over his face, carrying with it the faint, sweet scent of artificial vanilla and cardboard packaging. His eyes scanned the rows. Premium brands on the top shelf—the ones with the gold foil accents and the words "Organic" printed in cursive. He let his gaze drift down. Middle shelf. Store brand. And there, on the bottom shelf where the true comfort foods lived, he found them.
A box of ice cream bars. The cheap kind. The kind where the chocolate shell wasn't real chocolate but a "chocolate-flavored coating" that contained more palm oil than cocoa. The kind that cracked in just the right way when you bit into it—a sharp, satisfying snap that gave way to the soft, bland sweetness of vanilla beneath. A sweet anesthetic for a bitter night. He pulled the box free. The cardboard was cold and slightly damp with condensation, and it stuck to his fingertips for just a moment before releasing.
Freezer door closed. The hum returned, undisturbed.
He turned and moved into the aisles with the efficiency of a man who knew exactly how much money he didn't have. The convenience store was laid out in a grid of narrow corridors, each one lined with shelves that rose just above his head. The lighting here was harsher than at the front of the store—no soft glow of the drink coolers, just the brutal honesty of fluorescent tubes that made every chip bag look washed out and every candy wrapper look slightly sad.
His basket was one of the red plastic handbaskets, the kind with the metal handle wrapped in a thin tube of black rubber that had long since started to peel away at the seams. He hooked it over his left forearm, letting the weight of the ice cream box settle at the bottom. Then he began his pilgrimage.
Aisle Three: Instant Noodles.
This was his church. The ramen section stretched before him in a wall of crinkling plastic and bright, optimistic packaging. Pictures of steaming bowls with perfectly arranged slices of pork and vibrant green scallions—images that bore absolutely no resemblance to the pale, salty broth he would actually consume in his tiny kitchen at two in the morning. His hand moved on autopilot. Shrimp flavor. Spicy beef. The black garlic tonkotsu that was fifty cents more expensive but made him feel like he was treating himself. Four packs. Then, a moment of hesitation, and a fifth. Tomorrow might be worse. Better to have a buffer.
Aisle Five: Chips and Savory Snacks.
He bypassed the name brands—the ones with the bright yellow bags and the mascots that smiled at him from the shelves like old friends who had never once rejected his job application. His fingers found the store-brand potato chips, the ones in the plain white bag with the blue lettering that just said POTATO CHIPS in a font that looked like it had been chosen by a committee of accountants. He grabbed two. Then a bag of off-brand cheese puffs that left orange dust on everything they touched. Then a cylinder of stacked sour cream and onion crisps, because sometimes you needed variety in your disappointment.
Aisle Seven: Candy.
This required more consideration. He stood before the rainbow of cellophane and foil, weighing his options like a general planning a campaign. Gummy worms? Too cheerful. Chocolate bar? Too likely to melt before he got home and then he'd have to eat it with a spoon like some kind of animal. His hand hovered over a bag of fruit chews, then pulled back. No. What he needed was something with texture. Something that fought back. His eyes landed on a bag of sour gummy rings, the kind coated in a fine white powder of citric acid and sugar that would make his jaw ache and his tongue feel raw by the time he finished the bag. Perfect. He grabbed two.
Aisle Nine: Beverages.
The cooler doors here were glass like the freezers, but they glowed from within with a soft, welcoming light. Rows of bottles and cans sat in perfect formation, their labels bright and confident. He opened the door and the cold air spilled out. His hand reached past the energy drinks—too much caffeine, too much optimism in a can—and found the flavored water. A six-pack of the cheap stuff. Lemon-lime. It tasted like a chemistry experiment, but it was wet and it was cold and it cost less than two dollars. Then, from the shelf beside it, he grabbed three cans of iced coffee. The kind with the minimalist black and gold design that made it look more expensive than it was. The official fuel of the perpetually overlooked.
Basket full. Weight tugging at his forearm. Time to face the clerk.
The checkout counter was a long, white laminate surface that had seen better decades. A clear plastic barrier—a relic of some past public health crisis that no one had bothered to remove—stood between the customer and the cashier, smudged with fingerprints and the ghost of a thousand transactions. Behind it sat the clerk, a young man maybe a year or two older than Lin Ling himself. He had the look of someone who had been working the graveyard shift for exactly long enough to lose all sense of day and night. His name tag read LIANGHUI LUO in blocky, embossed letters. His hair was an unkempt nest of dark hair, and he wore the store's standard-issue red polo shirt with the collar popped in a way that suggested he thought it looked cool. It did not.
Lin Ling approached the counter and began unloading his basket. The ice cream box. The ramen. The chips. The cheese puffs. The sour gummy rings. The water. The coffee. Each item made a small, distinct sound as it hit the counter—a crinkle, a thud, a soft plastic rattle. Lianghui Luo watched this procession of sadness with the blank, unfocused gaze of a man who had seen everything and nothing.
"Find everything okay?" Lianghui Luo asked. His voice was flat. The question was not a question. It was a script.
"Yeah," Lin Ling said. His own voice came out quieter than he intended. He cleared his throat.
"Yeah. Fine."
Lianghui Luo's hand moved with the practiced speed of muscle memory. Beep. The ice cream. Beep. The ramen. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. The chips. Beep. The cheese puffs. Beep. The gummy rings. Beep. Beep. Beep. The water. Beep. Beep. Beep. The coffee. The register's screen lit up with a running tally of Lin Ling's poor life choices.
"That'll be 159.28," Lianghui Luo said.
Lin Ling reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet—a worn, brown leather thing that had belonged to his father and was now held together by hope and a single rubber band wrapped around the middle. He fumbled it open, thumbed past his ID, his library card, the expired gift card to a coffee shop he'd never visited, and found the thin stack of bills. Two tens. A five. Three ones. He counted them out carefully, his fingers moving with the deliberate precision of someone for whom every dollar was a small, hard-won victory.
He placed the bills on the counter. Lianghui Luo picked them up, smoothed them flat against the edge of the register, and slipped them into the till. The coins came next. Lianghui Luo counted them out into his waiting palm—two quarters, a nickel, three pennies—and then paused. He looked at the coins in his hand. He looked at Lin Ling. He looked back at the coins.
"You want the receipt?"
"Yeah. Sure."
The receipt printer chattered to life, spitting out a long, curling tongue of thermal paper. Lianghui Luo tore it free with a sharp, practiced motion and held it out.
"Have a good night," Lianghui Luo said. His voice was perfectly neutral. He had already moved on, his gaze drifting to the security monitor mounted beneath the counter.
"You too," Lin Ling mumbled.
He shoved the receipt into the pocket of his hoodie, grabbed the plastic bag by its cutting handles, and fled toward the door. The automatic chime dinged his exit. The cold night air swallowed him whole.
The world outside the 24-hour convenience store was a different kind of silence. Not the artificial, humming quiet of fluorescent lights and refrigeration units, but the vast, open quiet of a city that had finally decided to sleep. Late winter, early spring. That specific, transitional cold that doesn't freeze you solid but settles into your bones.
Lin Ling stood on the sidewalk just outside the door, letting the door hiss shut behind him. The plastic bag handles cut into the flesh of his fingers, deep grooves that would linger for minutes after he finally set the bag down. He could feel the cold creeping up through the worn soles of his sneakers, through the thin fabric of his socks, into the bones of his feet. He shivered—a full-body tremor that started somewhere in his lower back and traveled upward, rattling his shoulders and making his teeth click together.
He looked left. Empty sidewalk. A streetlamp flickering in that nervous, epileptic way that suggested it was on its last filament. A parked car with a thin layer of frost already forming on its windshield.
He looked right. More empty sidewalk. A row of closed storefronts—a dry cleaner, a tiny bakery, a shop that sold phone cases and vape cartridges. All dark. All silent. All waiting for morning.
A taxi was a luxury he couldn't justify. He could walk. He had time. That was the only thing he had in abundance—time. Endless, shapeless, unclaimed time that stretched out before him like the empty sidewalk. He turned toward the direction of the apartment block. He's have to walk three blocks down and two blocks over, which wasn't terribly far.
His footsteps were quiet on the concrete. The rubber soles of his sneakers made a soft, scuffing sound with each step—shh. shh. shh. A rhythm. A metronome for his thoughts.
What was the point?
The thought drifted up, uninvited, like smoke from a fire he kept trying to stamp out. Top of his class. Graduated earlier than his piers. Portfolio sharp enough to cut glass—Marketing, commercial design and data visualizations that turned spreadsheets into art. He had presented his capstone project to a panel of professors and watched their eyebrows rise in unison, watched them nod and scribble notes and exchange glances that said, This one. This one is going places.
And for what?
For hiring managers to glance at his baby face. For HR representatives to note the early graduation date on his resume and assume it was a typo. For recruiters to smile politely and say, "We're looking for someone with a little more... experience." Experience. The word had become a stone in his shoe. How was he supposed to get experience if no one would give him a chance to get experience? It was a closed loop. A snake eating its own tail. A system designed to keep people like him—young, qualified, desperate—spinning in place forever.
They saw a kid. They saw a lie. They never saw him.
The spiral began to pull. It was a familiar gravity—the cold, dark center of self-pity that lived somewhere behind his sternum. He could feel it tugging at the edges of his thoughts, trying to drag him down into the place where everything was hopeless and nothing mattered and he might as well just lie down on the cold sidewalk and let the frost claim him. His feet slowed. The shh. shh. shh. of his footsteps became more distant, more deliberate.
Stop.
Lin Ling slapped his own cheeks. Hard.
His right hand came up and connected with his right cheek in a sharp, stinging impact that echoed in the quiet street. His left hand followed, the plastic bag handles swinging wildly, and struck his left cheek with equal force. The sting of it cut through the static in his head like a knife through fog. His eyes, which had drifted downward to stare at the cracks in the sidewalk, snapped back into focus. He was standing on a street corner. There was the world, still turning, still existing, still waiting for him to participate.
Self-pity was a luxury he couldn't afford.
He gripped his fists, the plastic bag handles digging new grooves into his flesh, and forced the thoughts down into the basement of his mind where they could rattle around with all the other things he wasn't dealing with right now. He had ice cream. He had FOMO. He had the travel vlogs of Moon waiting for him on his cracked phone screen—her chipper voice, her relentless optimism, her ability to find joy in a cup of street-vendor coffee or a sunset over a mediocre skyline. She was exactly what he needed right then and there. A voice that wasn't his own. A perspective that wasn't spiraling. Proof that the world contained things worth seeing, even if he couldn't see them yet himself.
The thought of her—of her bright, pixelated smile on his cracked screen—was a small, warm ember in his chest. He cupped his mental hands around it and let it grow.
Just as the strength returned to his stride—
Just as his right foot lifted from the concrete, ready to carry him forward into the three blocks that stood between him and his apartment—
He heard it.
From the alley to his right.
Not the sound of a rat scrabbling through trash. Not the drip-drip-drip of water from a leaky pipe or the rustle of wind through discarded newspaper. It was a groan. Deep. Pained. The kind of sound that came from somewhere primal—a place in the throat that only opened when the body was too exhausted to scream. It was wet and rough and so distinctly, unmistakably human that it rooted Lin Ling's worn-out sneakers to the concrete.
The plastic bag swayed gently against his leg. The ember of warmth that Moon's name had kindled in his chest flickered, dimmed, and held its breath.
Lin Ling stood frozen in the amber glow of a flickering streetlamp, caught between the warmth of his apartment waiting three blocks down and the dark, wet mouth of the alleyway. The groan came again. Weaker this time. A sound that was running out of air.
He didn't move.
