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Xia Qing turns the key over in her hands, shifting her weight from one foot to the other.
The street’s mostly deserted aside from her. This was never an affluent area to begin with, and the uptick in crime over the last four years has driven it further into decay. The occasional person loiters outside the convenience store two doors down for a moment, shuffling through their bag for cigarettes or an energy drink, before crossing the street and rounding the corner.
She’s been standing here for twenty minutes already.
This isn’t her first time here since—
This isn’t the first time she’s been back here, that is. After the funeral, after Yang Cheng…left, Shang Chao’s father approached her one day while she was leaving class. She hadn’t known what to expect—they’d never spoken before, and Shang Chao hardly ever referenced him in conversation. So when he solemnly handed her a key—the key biting into her palm now—and told her the warehouse was hers to do with as she wished, her only reaction had been to cry.
Yòuzî insisted on coming three years ago, and Xia Qing wouldn’t let him go alone. They undid the padlock, rolled up the door, and took in the dust that coated every table, every piece of equipment. Her brother cleared off a few chairs and stubbornly planted himself there, arms crossed tight over his chest, staring mulishly at the half-open door. Waiting. Expectant.
He hadn’t said as much, but she knew he thought Yang Cheng would show up.
It was the first anniversary of Shang Chao’s death. He had to come here—the last place they’d all been together.
(Privately, Xia Qing thought it was a stretch that Yang Cheng would even visit his grave. The moment that battle between him and E-Soul—the old E-Soul, the original, the man they stripped of every last ounce of Trust he had—ended, he broke off contact with her. With them. With everyone who’d known him before he took on the E-Soul mantle.
But she didn’t want to voice the thought, not to her brother, not to anyone. She didn’t want to be the one who made it real.)
So they sat there together, and they waited.
And waited.
And waited.
And waited.
Until, finally, Yòuzî was nodding off in his chair, and Xia Qing could feel the heat building behind her eyes becoming unbearable. She nudged him awake, shook her head gently when he turned a pleading look on her, and let him sob into her sweater as they took a cab home.
When she went to check on him the next morning, she found his room in disarray. His beloved posters torn down from the wall, his shelves swept clean of the figurines he’d so proudly displayed. The photograph of the four of them she’d had printed and framed was facedown on his nightstand. Yòuzî was in bed, his back to her, curled up in a tight little ball that made her heart lodge itself in her throat.
He didn’t ask to go back with her next year. He stopped asking about Yang Cheng altogether.
She could have left it there. She could’ve tossed the key into a drawer in her room and never looked twice at it. She could’ve mailed it back to Shang De, thanked him for his generosity but told him firmly that it wasn’t something she could keep. She could’ve sold the property for whatever small amount it was worth and done something productive with the money, like put it aside for Yòuzî’s schooling, or her future home.
Maybe she should have done that. Any of it.
Instead, she looped the key first onto her school lanyard, and then the keychain with her apartment key on it. And every year, she’s come back here, and done exactly this.
Stand outside an empty warehouse and wonder if this time should be the last.
(She tells herself she’s long given up any hope that this will change anything. That it will mean anything to anyone but her. She tells herself she’s here for Shang Chao—that she feels closer to him here than the cold, manicured memorial that pops up around his grave year after year.
The imprint of the key’s teeth in her palm spells out liar in a language she can never unlearn.)
With a shaky inhale to steady herself, Xia Qing unlocks the door and lets herself in.
Inside, she can count the passage of time in the centimeters of dust that pile up on every surface. Everything is exactly where she left it last year, and the year before, and the year before that. Walking in the first time, she’d noticed signs of life, even with the dust: The broken chain on the punching bag, the charred edges of the target hanging on the wall, the tools—once so neatly arranged in the top drawer of the work bench Shang Chao favored—scattered across the floor, along with the drawer itself.
Now, she leaves footprints as she steps carefully around overturned chairs and discarded, half-broken prototypes, weaving her way further into the warehouse.
“It’s kind of like our secret base, isn’t it?” Shang Chao had said once, grinning goofily as he worked on finagling Yang Cheng out of the armor they’d been testing. “Like you see in those old comics.”
“I thought you wanted us to be a proper agency,” Xia Qing teased. “Secret base makes it sound like we’re in hiding.”
“We’ll be in the spotlight soon enough,” he countered with a laugh as he triumphantly pulled the helmet from Yang Cheng’s head. Yang Cheng, red-faced from the poor ventilation (and maybe a little because of Shang Chao’s hands on him), mopped the sweat from his forehead with a spare rag Xia Qing handed him. “For now, we’re the underdogs. We can have some fun! Chengcheng here is like our Batman!”
Xia Qing has to pause, bracing herself against the nearest table. Her stomach flips unpleasantly as memories flicker at the corners of her vision like darting shadows.
Every centimeter of this place was touched by them. All of them, together, twisting around one another like the individual strings of a Gordian knot.
Here, there’s the phantom touch of Yang Cheng’s hand covering her own.
There, the wall Shang Chao accidentally pinned her against when he tripped over Yang Cheng’s boot.
Beside her is the bench where Yang Cheng often sat, Shang Chao casually tucked in between his spread legs as he strapped Yang Cheng into the new bracers he’d just finished.
She remembers the warmth of a hand on her hip; the teasing tickle of hair against her cheek, heads tipped too close together as they bent over blueprints; laughter so close she could feel the vibrations of it in her chest.
This warehouse isn’t empty; it never has been. It’s full of them. Of what could have been. If she’d been more straightforward about what she wanted. If Shang Chao had pushed the envelope a little more.
If Yang Cheng had believed in himself even a quarter as much as they believed in him.
It isn’t empty, but it is—hollow. The warmth has faded. The vibrant colors dulled to sepia tones. The voices, the laughter, only echoes ringing out occasionally in the oppressive silence.
Xia Qing swallows, and stands up straight, and wipes her hand on her jeans. The sick feeling in her stomach doesn’t abate, but she pushes down the nausea rising in her chest, sucks in a sharp breath, and keeps moving until she reaches the set of chairs in the middle of the warehouse.
They’re the only things she’s personally moved in all this time, back when she helped Yòuzî keep vigil for the night. She takes out the rag she’d tucked into her back pocket and cleans the seat off as best she can, then gingerly settles herself on it.
She tells herself she doesn’t expect anything from this. And she doesn’t, really. She knows she’s never going to have Shang Chao pressed against her from shoulder to hip. She knows she’s never going to see Yang Cheng’s awkward, too-earnest smile again.
Shang Chao is dead. Yang Cheng is dead, too.
There’s only E-Soul now. The ninth ranked hero. The faceless man who appears on a scene quick as lightning and disappears just as fast.
She’s made her peace with it.
(Her thumb rubs idly across the faint imprint of metal teeth still stamped into her palm.)
Closing her eyes, Xia Qing bends forward, elbows digging into her thighs, forehead pressed to her clasped hands. She’s not very religious; hardly anyone she knows is, not since the advent of Zero four decades ago. But she likes to use the act of prayer—or the mimicry of it—while she’s here. To wish Shang Chao peace, wherever he is.
Some years, she wishes the same for Yang Cheng. Others, the words that she keeps trapped behind her teeth are closer to curses.
This year, she simply mourns.
“I love you,” she whispers, squeezing her eyes shut like that’ll stop the tears from catching on her lashes. “I love you. Both of you. I wish I’d been brave enough to say it then.”
There’s no answer, obviously. No shadow stretches out from beneath the half-open door. No footsteps approach her. No hands take hold of her wrists, gently prying her hands away so her face isn’t hidden away.
The warehouse isn’t empty, but it’s hollow inside. It’s just Xia Qing here. A lone heartbeat, sluggishly, foolishly trying to keep alive a body that’s nothing but metal bones and rotting sinew.
Maybe this year will be the last time she comes here.
(The key burning a hole in her pocket says otherwise.)