When the doors had closed behind him, a man came out from beside the screen with a folder under his arm.
"Miss Chu."
"Keep him under close surveillance," Chu Xin said, without turning around. "Everywhere. Everything. I want to know which shops he goes into."
Later that night she sat beside a hospital bed on the top floor of a private wing, holding the hand of an old man who no longer woke up for more than a few minutes at a time.
Don't disappoint me, Chen Yang, she thought. I have never in my life bet this much on a stranger.
"Well?" Xiaoya was on him before the door had finished opening. "What happened? What did she want? What did you agree to?"
Chen Yang put his hand on her head and stroked it.
"It went well," he said. "Genuinely. Nothing bad happened and nothing bad is going to."
"But—"
"Relax," he said, beaming at her. "And say yes to the role. Call him tonight and say yes."
She looked up at him, still worried. "You're sure? You're absolutely sure?"
He put his arms around her.
"Do you really think," he said into her hair, "that I'd cheat you?"
"No," Xiaoya admitted, small-voiced. "I always knew you could be relied on. I just—"
The door banged open.
"SO." Dandan stopped in the doorway with her keys in her hand and her eyebrows somewhere near her hairline. "Am I interrupting?"
Xiaoya sprang backwards and cleared her throat about six times. "No! No. What's — what's wrong with you, why are you making that face?"
"Because I ran into another weirdo today," Dandan announced, dropping onto the sofa. "On the train. He asked me for my number and then asked me to guess his star sign. Guess it. Out loud."
"Honestly," Chen Yang said, "Xiaoya is like a magnet for strange people, and I think it's contagious. It's spread to the whole floor."
"That is EXACTLY what I've been saying," said Dandan.
He left them to it and went through to his own room, waving over his shoulder.
He got two steps past the door before his legs went out from under him.
He landed on his knees with both hands clamped over his chest, and a red glow came up through his shirt, bright enough to throw his shadow on the wall. He stared down at it.
Absorbed. The second dose was completely absorbed.
He got up slowly and threw a few punches at the air, and they came out fast — faster than his eye could follow his own hands, the air cracking on the third one.
Then he stopped, because something was wrong.
Three days. Leelu had said more than a week between the second and the third, and the gap was supposed to get longer with every level, and his level two had finished absorbing in three days flat.
He looked at the case where the next dose sat in its foam and made himself put the lid down.
Not until I know why, he told himself. Whatever this is, I find out what's happening before I put another one of those in my arm.
The next morning he came out of the light at the gates of the old industrial site the base had taken over, and a red-haired blur hit him in the chest at full speed.
"BOSS!"
"Every time," Chen Yang wheezed. "Every single time."
Leelu let go, grinning. "You're early. What's happened?"
"I came to ask you something." He held up the ampoule between two fingers.
"About the serum?" She tilted her head. "What about it?"
"Why did my second dose absorb so fast? You said more than a week. It took three days."
Leelu's grin faded into a frown.
"That's—" She scratched her head. "Honestly, boss, I've never come across that. Not once. Not in anybody."
She thought about it, chewing the inside of her cheek, and then her face cleared.
"Actually — I might have an idea."
"Go on."
"The serums don't start by making you stronger," she said. "That's not the first thing they do. The first thing they do is repair. They go through your cells and fix the radiation damage, all of it, and only when that's finished does the enhancement itself begin to take. That's what the waiting period is. It's the repair work."
She looked up at him.
"And the worse the damage, the longer it takes. Which means..."
She stopped.
"Which means," she said slowly, "that yours finished in three days because there was almost nothing to repair. Your cells weren't damaged. You've never been harmed by radiation at all — not a little, not at all."
Then her face went strange.
"But that's not possible." She took a fistful of his jacket and shook it. "Everyone was exposed. Everyone alive was exposed, after the catastrophe there wasn't a person or a plant or a fish on this planet that wasn't. So why are you the exception? What are you? Where did you actually come from—"
Chen Yang started laughing.
Radiation protection, he thought, delighted with himself. All those years of clean air and dull food and living in a world where nobody has ever set off a warhead, and it has finally paid off in a way I can measure.
"My organization takes radiation protection very seriously," he said, gently unhooking her fingers. "Very, very seriously. That's all it is, and it isn't dangerous, and there's nothing in it for you to worry about."
"...Really?"
"Really. So stop worrying." He tapped her forehead. "Now here's your next job. Go and exchange for more of the medicine — the pink one. Same terms. I'll collect it tomorrow."
"Understood, boss!" She was smiling again already.
"Good. I'm going to see Uncle Wei about the game."
Uncle Wei's house looked like a landslide of shipping containers that somebody had then decided to live inside. Chen Yang picked his way through the gap that served as a door.
"Is it ready?"
"Ready, boss." The old scientist turned around with red eyes and an expression of enormous satisfaction. "Everything's ready. We were only waiting for you."
He held up a hard drive.
"The whole thing is on here. Client, server package, projection layer, assets, all of it." He nodded at the row of young people asleep at the benches behind him. "And I'll say this in front of them — with the youngsters helping, development went considerably faster than I promised you. They learn frighteningly quickly."
Chen Yang looked at the sleeping crew and felt something in his chest go warm.
"Then everyone on this project gets an extra month's ration," he said. "On top of the bonus. Tell them when they wake up."
Back in Dijing, Dandan came into his office holding a printout and looking like a woman braced for bad news.
"The licence," she said. "We submitted the application on time and we've heard nothing since. If it doesn't come through in the next fortnight we cannot launch on schedule, and I don't have a way to make it move."
"Don't worry about the licence," Chen Yang said. "Leave that one to me."
She blinked at him. "You? Do you know the people who handle that?"
"I recently met somebody important," he said, smiling mysteriously.
He handed her the hard drive.
"This is the source. Take it to testing — I want the whole department playing it today, not tomorrow. Tell them to rate it honestly and tell me exactly what can be improved."
"On it," she said, and went out with the drive in both hands like it was a relic.
Alone, he took out his phone and dialled the number he had been given.
"Chen Yang," he said. "Could you put me through to Miss Chu? I have a favour to ask her."
A moment later Chu Xin was on the line.
"I need a publishing licence for my company's game," he said. "It's stuck in verification and I don't intend to pay anybody to unstick it."
"Consider it done. Wait for a call."
He was still grinning when she added, in a cooler voice: "And understand this is the only help you get from me until you keep your side of the arrangement."
"Understood."
He hung up, and became aware of a noise in the corridor.
He got up and put his head out.
Two of the girls from testing were creeping around the open-plan floor in a crouch, looking under desks.
"Anything?"
"Nothing. Check behind the plant—"
"It's not behind the plant, I've checked the plant twice—"
"FOUND HIM!"
One of them shot upright, pointing in triumph at the printer, where something small and hunched was jammed in the paper tray, glowing faintly and refusing to come out.
"He's in the printer—"
Behind her, a bird made of fire dropped out of the air and landed on the shoulder of a young man from the art desk, who yelped, and then went very still with delight. The bird stretched, launched itself upward, and burst into flame halfway to the ceiling, wheeling above the desks in a long slow arc.
"SHE LEVELLED UP!" the young man howled. "LOOK AT HER, SHE LEVELLED UP—"
"I see we're all having a wonderful time in here," said Chen Yang, leaning in the doorway.
The room froze.
"Boss." One of the testers turned to him, and she was not embarrassed at all; she was overwhelmed. "How did you do this? How is this possible? I've been in this industry six years — how did you make an effect like this?"
"It came out of the phone," the art-desk boy said, still staring up at his bird. "I opened the app to check a texture and it came out of the phone and flew at my face. I screamed. I'm not ashamed. I screamed."
Chen Yang grinned at all of them.
"It only gets better from here," he said. "Now everyone come here for a minute — I have two announcements."
They gathered.
"First: Li Qianyu is leaving us at the end of the week. She's had a better offer, she's taken it, and she goes with my thanks and no hard feelings — it will not affect the launch, so nobody panic."
He waited for the murmur to settle.
"Second." He smiled. "The game has an official name. It's called Unknown World."
He looked around the room. "And I need a legal consultant in my office at two o'clock. Do we have one yet, or is that still a chair?"
"Luoqing!" somebody called. "Luoqing started Monday!"
A red-haired young woman in glasses put her hand up. "That's me. Legal consultant. I started Monday."
"Then you're with me at two." He rocked back on his heels. "And while I have you all — this company has taken an investment of one hundred million yuan. So there will be no skimping on salaries here, not now and not later."
The noise that went up drowned out the printer entirely.
The Chu family's lawyer arrived the next day with three people behind him.
"He Shei," he said, shaking hands. "I represent Miss Chu's interests."
"Chen Yang. This is our legal consultant."
"Then let's review the agreement for this financing round."
Chen Yang slid the folder across. "Check it, please."
Luoqing took it with visible trepidation, adjusted her glasses, and began to read.
She got about a page and a half in before she stopped moving entirely.
"Is something wrong?" Chen Yang said, watching her face.
"No." Her voice came out thin. "No, everything's perfectly fine—"
She leaned over and whispered against his ear, so tense her hands were shaking: "Boss. They are putting in one hundred million yuan. For five percent of the shares. Five."
"Ah." He nodded. "Are there any legal problems with the document?"
"There are no problems," said He Shei from across the table, pleasantly.
"There are no problems," Luoqing agreed, and then, in an urgent undertone, "sign it. Sign it and stamp it and do it now before anybody in that family changes their mind."
He signed without hesitation and pressed the company seal beside his name.
"The funds will be deposited today," He Shei said, standing. "It's been a pleasure."
They shook hands all round. Chen Yang saw them down to the lobby himself, apologizing for the disturbance in the corridor, which by then involved four people and a small dragon, and watched their white car pull out into the traffic.
Then he went back upstairs, where the noise had somehow got louder, and wondered what on earth they were all shouting about now.