The glass facades of the business district reflected the office towers across the street.
I straightened my skirt. Dianzi walked beside me, her sheer skirt catching the light.
A few windows in the glass walls were open, their curtains sucked out and pulled back in by the wind, like breathing.
We crossed Modu's central business district on foot.
In the fire lane beside a side entrance to an office tower, two men in suits stood facing each other.
One pulled a kraft paper envelope from his briefcase—so thick the tape across the seal was straining.
He pinched one corner of the envelope, his thumb rubbing back and forth against the seal. A tiny scrap of shredded paper was stuck to the toe of his leather shoe, crushed flat and wedged into the tread of the sole.
His voice wasn't loud, but the fire-lane walls trapped the sound.
"Inside are the bidding floor prices and client quote ranges for the next three quarters from the competitor. Combined with the supplier chain pricing details you bring from within, they won't even have their underwear left for the next round of bidding."
The other man took the envelope, his fingernail scraping across the kraft paper surface.
"The last column of that supplier chain detail is still missing the schedules for three suppliers. I can fill that in."
The man who handed over the envelope said to contact this number directly after filling in the gaps.
The people above would handle the rest. A piece of gum was stuck over the camera lens above the fire-lane door, its red indicator light barely glowing through the silver foil.
The gum had dried, its surface cracked into fine lines, like a tiny dried-up riverbed.
The lookout squatted in the corner, eyes fixed on the alley entrance, his fingers tracing lines on the ground, his fingertips coated in a layer of dust.
At his feet, a few crooked scratches marked the ground, the characters unreadable, already smeared by the soles of shoes.
Dianzi pulled a filled cake from her bag and walked over to squat in front of the lookout.
"You've been squatting here keeping watch for so long and no one's paid you any mind. Have something sweet to lift your spirits."
The lookout froze, took the cake, and bit off a huge mouthful. He chewed twice, and his eyes instantly reddened. Tears welled up.
He opened his mouth to gasp, fanning his hand in front of his face.
"Ah, are you touched?" Dianzi tilted her head at him, her syrupy voice slipping through her fingers.
The lookout wiped his tears with the back of his hand, his mouth too full of cake to speak.
The man who'd handed over the envelope glared back at him. He hurriedly stuffed the rest of the cake into his mouth and wiped his lips with the back of his hand.
"It's nothing. Choked on it." A small crumb of cake still clung to the corner of his mouth, smeared into a pale yellow streak when the back of his hand passed over it.
I pulled my gaze back and kept walking. Dianzi's hand tightened in the crook of my arm.
Across the business district, the coffee shops along the street were filled through their windows.
Everyone faced a laptop screen, wearing headphones. Fingers tapping on keyboards were rendered as silent images behind the glass.
Someone was on a call, lips moving rapidly but no sound came through.
Someone held a coffee cup halfway to his mouth and stopped there, eyes fixed unmoving on the data spreadsheet on the screen.
The glass reflected the office towers across the street. Someone stood up and stretched. Someone carried a stack of folders down the hallway.
Someone in front of a whiteboard drew and erased, erased and drew with a marker.
Every window held someone busy, but through the glass, all the busyness had become a silent film.
In the second-floor conference room across the street, a person was erasing the same chart from a whiteboard and redrawing it for the third time.
Each time he erased it, he stepped back two paces and studied it for a few seconds, then picked up the marker and drew it again.
He drew, then erased. Erased, then drew. The coffee on his desk had gone cold, a film of condensation gathering on the lid.
At the street corner, on the edge of a planter, a security guard snapped apart a pair of disposable chopsticks, rubbed off the splinters, picked up a piece of meat, and put it in his mouth, chewing slowly.
He closed his empty lunch box, threaded the chopsticks through the plastic clasp, tossed it into a nearby trash bin, dusted off his knees, and walked back to his guard post.
A faded duty roster was taped to the glass window of the guard post—the schedule was still dated from last month.
I turned around, my back to the row of glass windows. Our shadows stretched across the stone pavement, long and thin.
——They think they're winning. The winners were never them.
We crossed the business district and returned to the hotel.
The navigation lights of cargo ships on the river were blinking on one by one, red pinpoints of light dragging into thin ribbons across the water.
Across the river, scattered windows in the towers of Saixing District lit up. In some windows, figures moved. Others went dark and never lit up again.
One window lit up briefly and then went out again, as if someone had turned the light on and immediately off, or the wiring had a loose connection.
Dianzi slipped her hand into the crook of my arm.
Outside the window, another cargo ship on the Moonochuan passed through a bridge arch.
The bridge's shadow cut the hull in two—the front half lit, the back half sinking into gray.
The ship slid completely out of the arch and floated whole again on the river's surface.
The white wake trailing from its stern glowed faintly in the night, pushed by the waves and slowly spreading, like a zipper being undone.