"She explained some of it," Chen Yang said. "Let me ask it the direct way. What volume of orders does this plant need to keep operating?"
Mr Liu sat back and did the arithmetic he had done every night for a year.
"Three hundred thousand a month," he said. "That covers wages, power, maintenance. That's the line where we stop losing money."
"Then will four hundred thousand a month keep you afloat and leave you a profit?"
Nobody said anything.
Then Liu Churan took her father by the sleeve and pulled him three steps away.
"What are you doing?" she hissed. "Say yes—"
"Churan." Her father's whisper was tight with worry. "That young man came here on business. That is a businessman's face. Nobody offers a stranger four hundred thousand a month out of charity, so what exactly—"
He stopped. His eyes went round with horror.
"Did you sleep with him? Did you sleep with that boy to save my factory—"
"DAD!" She shoved him in the chest, scarlet to the hairline. "How dare you! How dare you say that out loud in our own—"
Mr Liu returned to his guest and cleared his throat several times.
"So," he said, awkwardly. "Your requirements. For the orders."
"Simple packaging," Chen Yang said. "No logo. No production date. No ingredients panel."
The older man's face changed. "Mr Chen. Forgive me, but goods packaged like that don't meet a single regulation on the books. If they were ever found on a shelf—"
"They will never be on a shelf. They aren't for sale." Chen Yang met his eyes. "The product is for internal use. I need this plant producing for me, monthly, and nothing that comes off your lines will ever be sold to the public."
Mr Liu considered that, and then considered the state of his order book.
"And this is a minimum," Chen Yang added. "Four hundred thousand is the floor. As things develop, the orders only go up."
He stood and put out his hand. "So let's sign today."
In the office, Mr Liu laid the contract on the desk and slid it across. "Read it through. Anything you want changed, we change it, no argument—"
Chen Yang picked up the pen and signed it without reading a word.
"I trust my partner," he said.
Then he took out his phone and transferred the entire payment on the spot.
Mr Liu watched the notification arrive on his own screen, and had to sit down. The whole amount. Instantly. Before a single crate had come off a single line.
The two men shook hands over the desk, both of them grinning like idiots.
In District D, a crowd had gathered in the open ground at the centre of the settlement, more people than had stood in one place there in years.
"They're all here, boss," Leelu reported. "Everyone in the district who's still breathing."
She climbed the steps of the platform ahead of him, and behind her a man muttered to his neighbour that he was not at all sure he was ready to trust a stranger who looked that well fed.
Chen Yang walked to the front of the platform and looked out at them.
"I'm going to build a base here," he said. "On this ground. And from today, I'm your new boss."
Silence.
Not hostility. Not laughter. Silence — hundreds of faces looking up at him with no expression at all, because they had heard men make announcements from platforms before.
"Everyone who works for me eats," Chen Yang said into that silence. "That's the offer. Food and support, for you and for whoever you're feeding. And I'll say the rest of it plainly, so there's no confusion afterwards: from this day on, nobody in this district goes hungry again."
A young woman near the front lifted her chin. "Is he serious?" she said, to nobody. "Is he actually serious?"
"Course he isn't," the man beside her said.
Chen Yang sat down on the edge of the platform with his feet hanging over, as if they were all in somebody's kitchen.
"Then let's not argue about it," he said. "Everybody who came here today gets an egg. One egg each, free, right now, whether you sign anything or not."
The noise that went up was not a cheer. It was a sound people make when something they had decided to stop wanting is put in front of them.
Perfect, Chen Yang thought, watching it happen. That is exactly the reaction I wanted.
They were chanting his name before the first crate was open. Boss Chen. Boss Chen.
"Then listen to the plan," he called over them, "because I want you in it. This district is going to be a real base. Those wire fences—" he pointed at the sagging perimeter — "come down. They get replaced with concrete. Solid concrete walls, thick enough to matter."
"And these?" He swept his hand across the shacks. "Rebuilt. Clean houses, warm in winter, doors that shut. You will live like people. Not like rats in a hole."
The murmur that ran through the crowd was doubt, and he could hear it.
"I know," he said. "I know exactly what that sounds like from a man you met eleven minutes ago. So here's how we do it. Everyone who signs a contract today takes a week's supply of food home with them, in advance, before a single brick gets laid."
"WHOEVER'S IN, LINE UP!" Leelu bellowed beside him, punching the air. "BOSS CHEN! BOSS CHEN!"
The whole crowd took the cry up, and then the whole crowd came forward at once, and there was pushing, and there was shoving, and two men nearly came to blows over a place in a queue for a job that had not existed that morning.
Registration began at a folding table.
"Li Hua," Leelu read off. "Seventeen. Good with machines — he's the one who fixed the pump last winter."
"Then you'll work under Uncle Wei," Chen Yang said. "Twelve kilos of food a month, plus three kilos of meat."
The boy said yes so fast he tripped over the word, and behind him Uncle Wei, wearing an actual white coat he had produced from somewhere, nodded in vigorous approval of both the terms and the candidate.
Chen Yang handed over a copy of the contract. "Next."
The next was enormous. He filled the front of the table.
"I don't understand technology," he said, a little defensively. "Not one bit of it. But I'm strong. I'm very strong."
"Zhang Chi," Leelu read. "Level one enhanced."
"Perfect," Chen Yang said with approval. "That's exactly what construction needs. Twenty kilos a month."
The big man's face broke open. "Twenty—yes. Yes, boss."
By evening the table was empty and the contracts were a brick of paper, and Chen Yang and Leelu sat on the platform steps and grinned at each other like two people who had got away with something.
"Right." He straightened. "Now tell me about this tax."
Leelu's grin faded. She got out the map and smoothed it on the boards between them.
"It's collected every three months. The city sends collectors out to all twelve districts on a rota, and every resident owes the same amount regardless of who they are — a head tax, paid in food. Children too."
"In food," Chen Yang repeated.
"There's nothing else to pay it in."
He looked at the districts on the map, at the twelve little rings around the city, and felt his temper rise.
"These people are already starving. They're paying tax in the one thing keeping them alive." He shoved the map. "Why doesn't anyone leave? Why does a single person stay?"
"Because this is how the whole world works," Leelu said bitterly. "There's nowhere to run to. Every district pays. Every one." She smoothed the map back down. "Here we have some chance. Rats, salvage, each other. Outside the districts there's no chance at all — outside, you die. That's not an opinion, boss. Everybody who tried it is dead."
"And the officials in the settlements? Nobody's ever pushed back?"
"With what?" She laughed, without any humour in it. "The government keeps a whole squad of high-level enhanced in the city. Not fighters like me. Real ones."
Chen Yang was quiet for a while.
The more food we have, he thought, the higher they'll set our assessment. That was how a head tax on visible wealth always worked. He was about to make District D the richest ground in twelve districts, and the collectors would notice within a season.
So a clash with the city was not a risk. It was a schedule.
"Then we move faster," he said. "The land purchase gets expedited — all of it, before the next collection. And we need superior power in place before the day comes to pay."
He stood up and dusted off his hands.
"There's no other option available to us. So we take the one there is, quickly."
Chen Yang came out of the arrivals gate at Dijing airport thinking about Dandan.
He had left her with a million yuan of registered capital, an empty company and a list, and she had been sending him status updates ever since, in bullet points, with attachments.
"HEY! I'M HERE!"
She was waving at him from beyond the barrier with both arms over her head, and when he got close enough she came the last few metres at a run.
"A big boss like you should have a personal greeter at the airport," she announced. "It's important for morale. Also, without me, you would never have found the new office, so really I'm indispensable and you should say so."
Chen Yang, at a complete loss, admitted that this was entirely logical.
They pulled up in front of a large modern building of pale stone and glass.
"Here we are."
"This is ours?" He got out and looked up at it, honestly impressed.
"I chose it myself," Dandan said, radiating pride.
Inside she led him down a long corridor. "Finance is through there, legal will be that side once it's furnished, testing at the end — and your office is right at the very end, corner, best light in the building."
She opened the door and stood back.
"Well? What do you think?"
The room was enormous.
"It's perfect," Chen Yang said, smiling. "I'm very happy."
He sat down behind the desk and stretched. "How's the hiring going?"
"Finance and legal are staffed. Both leads start Monday, both come with references I've actually checked." She flipped a page. "I've scheduled an all-hands so you can meet them. It's at four—"
"Cancel that."
"...Sorry?"
"I'll meet them individually. I don't need a meeting."
The truth was he had absolutely no idea what a man was supposed to say at an all-hands, and he was not going to find out in front of forty people.
Dandan's eyes went shiny. "You don't want to be involved? At all? In your own company?"
"Not like that." He waved a hand. "I'll take care of the product. Everything else is yours."
"So you're dumping the entire company on me," she said, going comically flat. "You've realized you can hand me the whole thing and go and play."
"I'm improving your skills in advance," Chen Yang said, with great dignity. Then he reached over and patted her on the head. "You're going to be my right hand. Might as well start now."
Dandan went scarlet and stepped back and pretended to be very busy with her folder.
"Fine," she said, recovering. "Fine. Then do me one favour and don't bankrupt us in the first quarter."
"There'll be no problems," Chen Yang said. "Not with the technology we've got behind us."
Then he sat forward, and his voice changed. "Now the serious question. Where are we with the distributors?"
She handed him a folder. "Signed, standard terms, nothing unusual. The problem isn't the terms, it's the verification — every store runs a manufacturer check on a new publisher and they take as long as they take." She hesitated. "And there's a specific problem with Fruit Phone."
"What kind of problem?"
"The kind where somebody drops a hint," Dandan said, watching his face. "That a certain payment would move our inspection considerably higher up a certain queue."
"No." Chen Yang said it flatly. "Categorically no. We don't pay bribes — not for speed, not for anything, not one yuan."
"Boss." She said it carefully, because she was right and she knew she was right. "Fruit Phone is an enormous share of this market. If our game isn't on that store at launch, we lose a huge number of users and we don't get them back."
"Don't worry about it." He crossed his arms and leaned back. "The product speaks for itself. Give it a month and they'll be the ones asking us for cooperation."
She looked at him for a second, then nodded and went back to work.
Alone in his office, Chen Yang swung the chair around to the window and let himself dream a little. If a store could hold a game hostage over an inspection, then the answer was to own a store — which meant owning a phone. His own brand. His own hardware. And once he had that, he would be the one taking a percentage of everybody else's games.
He stood up and stretched.
Too early to be thinking that far ahead, he decided. Better to go home first.