There was nothing, and then there was everything, and then there was a seven-year-old's car sickness.

Haojun's first coherent thought in this new life was: I am going to throw up on these leather seats. His second was: I read the whole novel for this. His third, following rapidly on the heels of the second: I didn't even like it that much.

He hadn't, really. Jingyi had shoved the link into their group chat at 2am with seventeen crying-laughing emojis and the message you NEED to read this you will DIE and Haojun, who had been awake anyway because his thesis wasn't going to write itself, had made the critical error of clicking it. Six hours later, he'd been late to his 8am seminar, had opinions about fictional people he hadn't asked for, and was genuinely unsure how to feel about the fact that his best friend had been describing Muze as "the most unhinged love interest in the genre" and meaning it as a compliment.

The car hit a speed bump. His stomach lurched. Outside the window, Beijing blurred past and then straightened out into something that was not Beijing , broader roads, older trees, the kind of quiet that happened when you were far enough from the city that the city forgot about you.

He was seven years old.

He was, presumably, also dead.

He was , and this was the part he was having the hardest time integrating , Ren Haojun. The other Ren Haojun. The one who had grown up in this car, heading toward this estate, with these parents in the front seat who were not quite talking to each other and not quite not talking to each other. The kind of careful not-silence that meant something was being not-said.

He knew this because he had read the novel. He knew the car ride. He knew the silence. He knew exactly where this road ended and what was at the end of it, and he knew what happened after that, across fifteen years of plot that had made Jingyi scream into a pillow at 3am and had made Haojun himself feel something complicated that he'd mostly resolved by closing the tab.

He pressed his forehead against the cool glass of the window and thought: okay.

It wasn't a great thought. It was the kind of thought you had when the alternative was screaming, which he couldn't do because he was seven, and also because screaming would require explaining, and there was nothing he could say. He had no explanation. He had a dead man's memories and a child's body and a plot he already knew, and none of this was something he could tell anyone. Not Jingyi, who didn't exist here. Not these parents, who weren't really his. Not anyone.

Okay, he thought again. So. The estate.

The estate was the way the novel described it: enormous, and trying not to look like it cared.

That was the thing about old money. It built things that were supposed to look settled, inevitable, like they had simply always been there and weren't making any particular statement about it. The Shen family estate was three stories of gray stone and careful landscaping and a front gate that opened before the car reached it, which meant someone had been watching for them, which meant things were already beginning.

Haojun climbed out of the car and stood in the gravel driveway and tilted his head back to look at the front of the house.

It looked like a place where warmth went to get measured.

That wasn't fair. He was seven, he was nauseous, and he was pre-prejudiced by a novel he'd read six hours before dying. But still. The house.

"Come," said the woman beside him. His mother. His mother in this life, he corrected himself. Liang Feifei, or Shen FeiFei now, thirty-eight, professionally warm in public, privately tired in a way that wasn't anyone's fault in particular. He knew all of this. It sat in his chest like something borrowed.

He came.

Shen Guowei was exactly as described.

That was the thing about meeting fictional people , you kept waiting for them to be different from the version in the text, because people were always different, that was the whole point of people, and instead he was just... there. Tall, careful, the kind of handsome that had started converting into distinguished without anyone's permission. He shook Haojun's hand like Haojun was a small business associate and said something about being glad to have him here, and Haojun said something back, he wasn't sure what, and meanwhile his brain was doing the thing where it knew too much and couldn't say any of it.

He knew what Shen Guowei thought about Omegas.

He knew it the way you knew things from a book: abstractly, at a slight distance. Which was fine, because the whole Omega thing was , look. Haojun had tried, when Jingyi first started explaining the genre to him, to engage with it seriously. He had asked clarifying questions. Jingyi had answered them. He had listened, genuinely, and had then said, "but why," and Jingyi had looked at him with the expression she reserved for when he was being particularly unimaginative.

"It's a secondary gender system," she'd said. "It's a whole societal structure."

"Based on pheromones," he'd said.

"Yes."

"And the Omegas," he'd said, slowly, "are considered , inferior? Socially? Even though they're just regular people who happen to have certain biological characteristics?"

"Yes."

"And this is a modern setting."

"Yes."

"Jingyi," he'd said. "That's just sexism. With extra steps."

She had pointed at him very seriously. "That's kind of the point."

He'd thought about that a lot, in the hours he'd been reading. It was the thing that bothered him most, actually, more than the possessiveness or the kissing-without-permission or any of the things that were supposed to be alarming , it was the way the world of the novel treated the whole system as settled. Like it had always been this way and therefore was fine. Like a person could be categorized at birth and that category could determine their education, their marriage, their autonomy, their entire life, and everyone would look at this and call it tradition.

It wasn't that different from things that had actually happened. That was what Jingyi was always saying. It was a metaphor, Haojun. You're very slow about metaphors, Haojun. Yes, I know you got a 3.9 GPA, that's not what I mean.

He had, at the time, told her that he wasn't slow, he just needed everything to be spelled out. She had agreed that this was what being slow was.

Standing in Shen Guowei's entrance hall, with its marble floors and its careful art and its particular quality of chill that had nothing to do with the temperature, Haojun thought: I understood the metaphor. I just didn't expect to live in it.

Shen Guowei was still talking. Something about the family, the house, the schools in the area. His mother was nodding. Haojun was nodding. Everything was going the way the novel said it would go, except that the novel had never had to account for Haojun's nausea or the fact that his feet didn't quite touch the ground when he sat in the living room chair, or the specific strange loneliness of knowing a story well enough to feel sad for it.

He was going to change things. That was the reason he was here, or at least the reason he was choosing to assign to being here, because the alternative , that the universe was deeply irrational and he was simply a victim of it , was less useful to operate under. He had the plot. He had the foreknowledge. He was going to be smarter than the original Haojun, who had not read any novels and had therefore not known what was coming, and he was going to fix the things that could be fixed.

He had a plan.

He was seven years old and he'd had a plan for about four minutes, so it wasn't a very detailed plan yet.

He was going to refine it.

Shen Guowei's housekeeper showed them to their rooms. Haojun's was on the second floor, at the end of a hallway that turned left before it reached the west wing , he knew the layout, he'd read the description three times , and it was a good room. Large, well-furnished, impersonal in the way of guest rooms that are expected to be permanent but haven't committed to it yet.

He set his bag down on the bed and stood in the middle of the room and thought about the estate's second floor, and about who else lived in it.

There was a room at the end of the hall. The door would be closed.

He went to look.

The hallway was quiet in the way old houses were quiet: not empty, but held. Like the walls were listening. Haojun walked to the end of it, past two closed doors that were not the door, past a small painting of a mountain that no one had chosen recently, past a window that looked down onto the back garden.

The door at the end was closed.

It was just a door. Dark wood, a plain handle, a small scuff at the base where it had been opened too fast too many times, or possibly kicked once, by a small foot. Haojun looked at it.

He was not prepared for what came next, which was the door opening three centimeters.

A pair of eyes looked through the gap. Dark, careful eyes , not wide the way a young child's eyes were supposed to be wide, but settled. Watchful in the way of someone who had learned early that watching was safer than being seen.

Haojun stood in the hallway, seven years old and full of all the wrong memories, and looked at a small face he recognized from a novel that had not yet been written, and had the very specific experience of a plot becoming real.

Muze was five. Maybe six , the novel had been slightly vague. He was small in the way of children who had been, perhaps, not quite nourished the way they should have been, though he didn't look sick, just , precise. Even standing in a doorway, he was precise. Dark hair cut practically, dark eyes that were doing something very complicated in a face that was giving away almost nothing.

He was looking at Haojun the way you looked at something new in your space: cataloguing.

Haojun, who had read about this child for six hours, who knew the ending and the middle and the worst things in between, who was a twenty-four-year-old man operating a seven-year-old's body with insufficient context about what pheromones were supposed to do and whether he was producing them correctly, said the first and worst thing that came to mind:

"Hi."

The eyes blinked.

The door closed.

Haojun stood in the hallway for a moment. Outside, through the window, a bird passed. The house settled. Somewhere downstairs, his mother was still talking to Shen Guowei about schools, or the house, or the future, or something equally theoretical.

He looked at the closed door. Then he looked at his own hands, which were very small, which he was going to have to get used to.

Okay, he thought, for the third time that day.

He had a plan. The plan involved knowing how the story ended and preventing it, because he'd seen the ending , not metaphorically, in the text, but in that cold formless place between the novel's last page and whatever this was, where all the conclusions had already been drawn and they were not good ones. He'd seen the shape of what this story became if no one changed it. The family, gone. Muze, alone. Victorious in all the ways that cost everything.

That was not a good ending. Haojun had not liked it. He was a fixer, constitutionally, in both lives, and this was something that could theoretically be fixed.

Also , and this was the part he was being very careful not to examine too closely, because he was seven and it was his first day and there would be time later for examining things , he had just looked at those eyes through three centimeters of open door, and something that might be called feeling and might be called recognition and might simply be the novel's plot sitting too heavily in his chest had done something inconvenient in the vicinity of his ribs.

He did not have words for that.

He walked back to his room.

He would come up with words later.

At dinner, there was a chair that was slightly further from the table than the others.

No one moved it.

Haojun ate his meal and watched and did not say anything, and filed that away with everything else, and reminded himself that the plan existed and the plan was good, and tried not to think about the fact that somewhere upstairs there was a five-year-old who had looked at him like he was something worth remembering.

He was going to fix this.

He'd read the novel. He knew how it went.

He had no idea how it was going to go.

The housekeeper's name was Aunt Chen, and she had the face of someone who had decided, at some point in her fifties, that she was too old to be surprised by anything and was now simply managing consequences.

She showed him around the estate the next morning with the brisk efficiency of someone who had given this tour before and had a full day afterward. Here was the kitchen, here was the second parlor, here was the library, Haojun mentally noted the library for later, here was the east garden, here was the back gate that was always locked, here was the gymnasium that Shen Guowei used at six in the morning and therefore no one else should be in before seven.

Haojun kept up. He was small and his legs were short and he kept up anyway, because the estate was not going to be smaller just because he found it inconvenient, and also because he was learning things. Aunt Chen's tour told him more than the words she said. She lingered in the kitchen. She moved faster through the west parlor, the one Haojun had already identified as Shen Guowei's preferred evening space. She had opinions about rooms, and she expressed them in pace.

"Your room," she said, when they reached the second floor, "is here. You have a private bathroom. The wardrobe has been stocked. If you need anything adjusted, tell me directly."

She opened the door. Haojun stepped in and looked around in a way he hoped looked like a seven-year-old being impressed rather than a twenty-four-year-old doing geometry.

The room was, large. He knew it was large because the novel had described it and because he could see it with his eyes. But he knew it in a different way when he was standing in it, when it was his actual floor and his actual ceiling, when the bed was a real bed that took up maybe a quarter of the available space. He had grown up, in this body's memories, in a dormitory that slept six. Six beds, six narrow wardrobes, six children who had learned the math of shared space.

This room had a window seat.

It had a window seat, and a desk that was not shared with anyone, and a wardrobe he would not have to negotiate, and he stood in the middle of it and thought: the original Haojun must have stood here and felt the floor tilt.

He didn't feel the floor tilt. He felt something else, which was the novel's plot pressing against the inside of his chest, which was the knowledge that this room and its window seat and its unshared wardrobe had come with a cost that hadn't been presented up front.

"Thank you," he said to Aunt Chen, and meant it, and also: "Can I ask, who's in the room at the end of the hall? I tried to say hello yesterday."

Aunt Chen's face did something.

It was a small something. A person who wasn't watching wouldn't have caught it, a slight reorganization around the eyes, a fractional settling of the jaw, the expression of someone adjusting to a weight they carry all the time and therefore no longer name. Then it was gone and she looked at him with the same professional composure she'd had all morning.

"Young Master Muze," she said. "Master Shen's son."

"Oh." Haojun let himself look appropriately seven about it. "Is he going to show me around too?"

"Young Master Muze," Aunt Chen said, after a pause that had a shape to it, "keeps to himself."

She said it the way you said the weather is what it is or some things don't change. Not a complaint. Not quite not a complaint. A fact that had been a fact for long enough that it had developed its own particular texture.

Haojun filed this away. He filed it next to the chair from last night, next to the tour that had taken him through every significant room in the house and had not, he now realized, included the door at the end of the hall.

"That makes sense," he said. "New person. It's probably weird."

Aunt Chen looked at him for a moment, he had a feeling she was revising her estimate of him, slightly, though in which direction he couldn't tell. Then she said, "Come. I'll show you the garden," and the tour continued, and Haojun followed, and he thought about what keeps to himself meant when you were five years old and you lived in a house where no one thought to mention you.

He found out at dinner.

Not from Muze, who he hadn't seen all day, which was its own data point, in a house where there was nowhere particularly far to go and Haojun had been home all day and the most invisible person in the building was a five-year-old child. He found out by watching.

Dinner was at seven. He knew this because the novel had said so and because Aunt Chen had told him and because there was a particular quality to the house at 6:45 that felt like preparation, a holding of breath, everything settling into position.

Shen Guowei sat at the head of the table. Haojun's mother sat to his right, which was right for a new wife still finding her footing. Haojun sat beside her, which put him across from an empty chair that was not, he noted, the chair from last night, this was a different chair, at the far end, where the table's light didn't quite reach.

Muze appeared.

There was no other word for it. He did not come down to dinner in any way that announced itself. He was simply not there, and then he was, in the chair at the far end, already seated, already unfolding his napkin, in the practiced way of someone who had learned to occupy space as quietly as possible. He was wearing the kind of clothes that were perfectly fine and had been chosen by someone who thought perfectly fine was sufficient. His hair was slightly damp at the ends, like he'd washed it quickly, efficiently, without fuss.

He was five years old and he had the table manners of someone who understood that manners were armor.

He did not look up when he sat. He looked at his plate.

Shen Guowei said something to Haojun's mother. She laughed, soft and appropriate. Haojun watched Muze take his first bite and thought: he's timing it.

He was. Haojun clocked it over the next four minutes, because Haojun had always been good at noticing patterns and this one was not subtle once you were looking: Muze ate at a particular pace. Not fast enough to be rude, not slow enough to stay long. He was calibrating. He was calculating the exact speed at which he could finish his dinner and leave before anyone had completed enough conversations to turn attention his way.

He was five years old and he was calculating exit velocity at the dinner table.

Haojun ate his own food and said the right things when his mother said things to him and smiled when Shen Guowei made an observation that expected a smile, and watched Muze from the end of the table where he could do it without turning his head.

Muze glanced up once.

Just once, a brief inventory of the table, the kind of automatic checking that happened when you were used to tracking whether something had changed in your environment. His eyes moved across Shen Guowei, his mother, Haojun's mother, and landed on Haojun.

Haojun did not look away in time.

For approximately one second, they looked at each other across the dinner table.

Then Muze looked back at his plate and finished his final three bites with the exact efficiency of someone completing a task, folded his napkin, and said, "Excuse me," to no one in particular and everyone in general, and left.

Shen Guowei did not pause his conversation.

Haojun's mother said, "Ah," softly, more to herself than anyone.

Haojun cut another piece of his fish and thought about the novel, and about the specific chapter where Jingyi had sent him a string of increasingly distressed messages at 2am about things that had not yet happened, and ate his dinner, and was fine, because he was seven years old and panicking was not going to be useful.

He lay awake at eleven.

This was not unusual for him, his sleeping had never been conventional, and apparently being reincarnated into a child's body did not fix that, but it was more pointed than usual, the specific kind of awake where the thoughts wouldn't organize themselves into anything comfortable.

The room was dark. The window seat had pale curtains and through them a gray sort of glow that was the estate's exterior lights. The wardrobe was where the wardrobe had been. Everything was where everything was. He was in a house he knew from a book and that was fine and he had a plan.

He had a plan.

He did the math.

This was the beginning of it, the novel had been clear: the beginning was the childhood arc, the years before anything became overtly dangerous, the years that readers often skimmed to get to the meat of the story. He'd skimmed them too, partly because Jingyi had kept sending him just wait and trust me messages that implied the interesting parts were ahead, and partly because the childhood arc was slow. The childhood arc was, in retrospect, not slow. The childhood arc was the childhood arc building the architecture of everything that came after, and he had read it at speed, at 3am, mildly caffeinated, and retained mostly the events rather than the texture of them.

The texture was: Muze. Five years old. In this house. Eating his dinner at the right pace so no one would notice. Sleeping at the end of a hall where the floors didn't creak as much. Wearing clothes that were fine, not chosen.

The texture was: this had been happening before Haojun arrived. This had been happening, presumably, since Muze was old enough to understand the particular geometry of a dinner table and who sat where and why.

Haojun stared at the ceiling.

He was in it. That was the thing. He'd read about it, he'd thought, the way you thought about things that happened in books, that's rough, that's sad, that's the backstory, and now he was in it, which meant it was not backstory, it was just story, it was just what was happening, and the child at the end of the hall was not a narrative device, he was a small person who had washed his hair tonight and eaten at the right speed and said excuse me to a room that hadn't looked up when he left.

Haojun's thumb pressed against his leg. Once, twice. He noticed himself doing it and stopped.

He had a plan. The plan was: be different from the original. The original Haojun had been a good person who had also, by the end of the novel, not been enough, not because he was bad but because he'd been working with incomplete information, which was the one thing the transmigrated Haojun did not have a problem with. He had the complete information. He had the whole novel. He knew the beats and the turns and the specific chapter where things became irreversible.

The plan was: prevent the irreversible parts.

He was seven years old and Muze was five and they had approximately ten years before the worst of it started, and he was going to use those ten years, and he was going to be very strategic about it.

He was going to start tomorrow.

He was going to start by figuring out what five-year-olds liked. He had historically not spent much time with five-year-olds, either in this life or the previous one, and the novel had not been a reliable resource on the subject because the novel's relationship with Muze's childhood was to summarize it from a distance and then fast-forward to the good parts. Haojun was going to have to figure this out himself.

He turned onto his side.

The room was the same. The window curtains were the same. The estate was large and cold and quiet in the way of places that had been built for impressiveness rather than comfort, and at the end of the hall there was a small person who had, so far, expressed himself entirely in closed doors and exit timing and one second of eye contact across a dinner table.

Haojun had read the whole novel. He knew how it ended. He knew the version of Muze who was methodical and certain and had organized his entire life around a single point, and he knew that that Muze had started somewhere, and that somewhere was here, in this house, in these years, in the particular shape of a childhood where no one moved the chair.

He was going to change the ending.

It was a good plan.

He was very tired.

He went to sleep.

Breakfast was at seven-thirty.

Haojun knew this because Aunt Chen had told him, and also because at seven twenty-two his body woke up on its own and refused to go back to sleep. He'd never been a morning person. This was apparently a feature of being seven — the body had opinions and they were non-negotiable — and he lay in bed for eight minutes being vaguely resentful about it before giving up and getting dressed.

The dining room smelled like congee and sesame oil and something frying in the kitchen. Very good smell. Haojun's stomach said so loudly and without shame. He was getting used to the indignities of a small body.

His mother was already there. Shen Guowei said good morning with the warmth he reserved for Haojun, the kind that felt genuine enough that Haojun kept having to remind himself it wasn't the whole picture. He sat down. Fresh orange juice at his place, condensation on the glass.

Full spread. Congee in the center pot, still steaming. Pickled vegetables, braised peanuts, soft tofu. A plate of scallion pancakes coming through from the kitchen, set down and retreated from.

Aunt Chen ladled him a full bowl. Generous, tucked a spoon in. The particular efficiency of someone who fed children as an act of care.

The seat at the far end of the table was empty.

Muze came in the same way as last night — not arriving so much as materializing. Dark blue sweater. The look of someone who'd been awake for a while. He sat, placed his hands in his lap, waited.

Aunt Chen came back with the ladle and gave him a portion that was — fine. Not mean. Just less. Like a calculation that had been made at some point and never revisited.

Muze didn't say anything. He picked up his spoon.

Then he looked at the pancakes.

It wasn't dramatic. It was the kind of look you'd miss if you weren't paying attention — not longing exactly, just attention. The specific quality of attention you gave something you'd already decided wasn't yours. His eyes tracked there for a moment, then moved away. He reached for the pickled vegetables instead, which were in the center and therefore neutral territory, and helped himself without looking at anyone.

Haojun looked at his own plate. Full bowl, good congee, stack of pancakes he'd been served without asking. He thought about this for about four seconds, made a decision, and slid the pancakes down the table to Muze's end. Slid his bowl too, just switched them out entirely, because the math was obvious and he wasn't hungry enough for the full portion anyway.

Muze stared at the pancakes that had appeared in front of him.

Then at Haojun.

Haojun shrugged in what he hoped was a seven-year-old kind of way. He ate a spoonful of congee. Muze looked at the pancakes again. Something in his expression was doing something complicated and carefully contained, and then he picked one up.

"Muze."

Liang Feifei's voice was light. Pleasant, even. She had the tone of someone making a small, sensible observation.

Muze stopped.

"You shouldn't eat too much." She lifted her own teacup, not looking directly at him, which somehow made it worse. "Omegas who let themselves go when they're young have a much harder time later. You want to be attractive, don't you? An unattractive omega will have a very hard time finding a good alpha."

She said it the way you said remember to wear a coat or don't forget your homework. Practical advice. A mother being practical.

Muze put the pancake down.

He did it without expression. No argument, no flinch, nothing that would make it into a moment. He just put it back on the plate and looked at the table and continued eating his congee in small, even spoonfuls.

Haojun sat very still.

He was processing several things simultaneously. The first was that his mother had just said that out loud, at a breakfast table, to a seve-year-old, in a tone that suggested this was normal. The second was that it was apparently normal, or at least normal enough that Shen Guowei kept reading something on his phone and Aunt Chen didn't look up from refilling the tea. The third was that Muze had put the pancake down like he'd been expecting this, like the pancake appearing in front of him had already contained its own correction somewhere inside it, like he'd known.

The fourth thing Haojun was processing was that he was, apparently, living inside the metaphor now, and the metaphor was worse in person.

An unattractive omega, she'd said. Like that was a category. Like that was the worst thing. Like a seve-year-old eating a pancake at breakfast was a future problem to be managed.

He looked at Muze's profile. Muze was eating his congee. He had gone very still in the particular way Haojun was starting to recognize — not sad, not angry, just — removed. Like he'd stepped back from the surface of himself to somewhere quieter.

The pancake sat on the plate between them.

Haojun looked at it. Looked at his mother, who was now saying something cheerful to Shen Guowei about the weather. Looked at Muze.

He picked the pancake up and ate it himself. Finished it in three bites. Helped himself to a second one while he was at it, because he was seven and he could eat as many pancakes as he wanted and no one was going to tell him about his future marital prospects.

Muze looked at him.

Haojun met his eyes. He didn't shrug this time or do anything that could be read. He just looked back, and after a moment looked away and ate his breakfast, and the table continued around them, and that was that.

Except — and he noticed this, catalogued it, filed it — Muze watched him eat the second pancake. Not with longing. With the same careful attention he gave everything. Like he was recording it.

Like he was going to think about it later