Chapter 2: The Tour and The Ghost

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.

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