That day was not different from any other day.
That was the thing Zhao Wei would keep coming back to later, in the strange new life that followed. Not the moon, not the park, not the girl with the blade, but that specific ordinary morning, the Number 57 bus, the weight of coins in his jacket pocket, and the simple fact that nothing about it had felt like a beginning.
The bus lurched through the Tongzhou traffic with its usual indifference. Bodies pressed together in the way of morning commuters everywhere, half-asleep, staring at phones, tolerating each other with the silent patience of people who had accepted that this was simply what mornings were. Zhao Wei stood near the back, one hand gripping the overhead rail, swaying with the motion of the bus just as he had done every school day for two years. Outside the window, Beijing moved past in its grey winter coat: low buildings, bare trees, and the occasional flash of a red lantern left over from the last festival.
The fare box beeped near the front.
Then came a pause that lasted slightly too long.
"I put in three yuan," announced the boy ahead, loud and committed—the voice of someone who had decided confidence was a substitute for honesty.
Zhao Wei's eyes shifted slowly, the way a calculator processes an input before returning an answer.
"You put in two fifty yuan, jerk," said the girl beside him flatly, without looking up.
"That guy is always like this," someone else muttered.
Zhao Wei said nothing. His fingers moved inside his jacket pocket, counting the coins he had sorted by denomination before leaving the apartment. He knew exactly how much was there. He always did. Money had a texture to it when you handled enough of it, a weight and a language, and Zhao Wei had been fluent in that language since he was fourteen years old and understood for the first time what the numbers in his family's account actually meant.
He turned back to the window and let the city scroll past.
By the third period, the back corner of the classroom had become a small arena.
Wei Dongbin, the largest boy in Year Two with forearms like a dockworker's and the gambling instincts of someone who had never quite learned the right lessons from losing, was shaking a coin inside his pencil case with the full conviction of his considerable body weight. Around him, half the class had abandoned any pretense of studying.
"I'm going for it!!" Wei Dongbin announced.
The room erupted. Two boys climbed onto their chairs. Someone knocked over a water bottle. A chant started near the window. The coin clattered and spun inside the pencil case with a sound that Zhao Wei, three rows back, listened to with his eyes half-closed and his arms folded across his chest.
He was not listening to the chanting. He was listening to the coins.
Their weight. Their speed. The particular density of the sound made when coins of different denominations struck each other at certain angles. He had been listening to coin sounds his whole life—in bus fare boxes, in change trays, and in the thin envelope his mother used to leave on the kitchen counter on the first of every month before she stopped leaving it.
The coins settled.
"Seven hundred and sixty yuan," said Zhao Wei.
Silence.
"…Correct," said Wei Dongbin, in the voice of a man watching a storm approach.
The room exploded. Wei Dongbin made a sound of genuine anguish. Zhao Wei was already sweeping the money across the desk toward himself with one arm, efficient, unhurried, sorting by denomination even as he gathered it.
"You're like a monster."
"It's mine, it's MINE!"
"Since I won," Zhao Wei said pleasantly, "it's all mine."
Chen Hao watched from the doorway, his usual expression of resignation mixed with reluctant admiration on his face. "I can see you're greedy," he said, "but I have no desire to take your money."
"PC cafe?" someone offered hopefully.
"Can't." Zhao Wei was already standing, bag over one shoulder, winnings in his pocket. "Part-time job."
He was out the door before any protest could form. Behind him, Chen Hao pushed his glasses up and looked at the boy beside him.
"Give it up," the boy said. "You know he's crazy about money."
"I know." Chen Hao looked out the window at the courtyard below, where Zhao Wei had already emerged and was crossing the concrete at a full sprint, uniform jacket open, bag bouncing. "I just wonder where he spends it all."
What Chen Hao did not know and what most people at school did not know, because Zhao Wei had never mentioned it and had no intention of doing so, was the true shape of his mornings.
Five o'clock. The alarm on his phone was set to the lowest volume that would still wake him, because Zhao Ming slept lightly on bad nights, and bad nights had become more frequent. Newspaper bundles at the corner of South Street, heavier than they looked, were loaded onto the bicycle with the bent front wheel. Then came the milk crates. After that, the route was memorized down to which buildings had steps and which had ramps. Back to the apartment by six-fifty. Change. Run.
Then school. Then the bets, which were not really gambling but a kind of applied mathematics that nobody else in his year had bothered to learn. Then the afternoon shift at the hot-pot restaurant on Xinghe Road, where the boss communicated primarily through volume and the kitchen smelled permanently of chili oil and dish soap.
It was, by any reasonable measure, too much. Zhao Wei had never once said so.
He was at a full sprint across the school courtyard when he turned the corner by the east gate and stopped.
She was standing near the wall, half in shadow, half in the thin winter light that filtered through the bare courtyard trees. Dark hair pulled back. Dark uniform. An expression that suggested she had evaluated the world and found it acceptable but not particularly interesting. Around her, dry flower petals lifted on the cold wind and drifted past her face, yet she did not blink.
Zhao Wei stared.
Three full seconds.
Whoa, said some part of his brain that had not gotten the memo about being late. Pretty.
Then the rest of his brain caught up, and he lurched forward, yelling, "EEK! I don't have time for this!" as he sprinted past her toward the gate, not quite managing to look away until the wall was between them.
He did not know her name.
He would, soon enough.
Evening arrived the way it always did, without ceremony, with a mounting list of things still unfinished.
The restaurant closed at ten. Zhao Wei untied his apron, counted his tips as seventy yuan, and chose the forty-minute walk home over the three-yuan bus fare. The night was cold enough that his breath came out in steady clouds, and the streets of Tongzhou were quiet in the way of places that worked hard during the day and rested completely afterward.
My friends think I'm crazy about money, he thought, turning into the familiar lane. But even working this hard, it's barely enough to pay for the apartment.
The apartment was a single room on the third floor of a building that had once been considered acceptable and had settled, over the decades, into a comfortable shabbiness. The window didn't seal properly. The walls were thin. The rent was fourteen hundred yuan a month, and he had been late twice in the past two months.
He pushed open the door.
"You're here!" Zhao Ming looked up from the small table, where two bowls were already laid out with careful, deliberate precision. He was twelve, small for his age, with wide dark eyes and the particular brightness of someone who had decided consciously or not to be cheerful as a matter of discipline. "I laid out the dishes."
Zhao Wei dropped his bag. The modest warmth of the room hit him like a wall after the cold outside. "Have you been to the hospital today?"
Zhao Ming's smile wobbled at the edges. "I didn't go because I wasn't hurting today."
"I told you, you have to go every day." The words came out sharper than he meant. He saw Zhao Ming's expression and softened slightly. "If you start hurting in the night, I can't always come home in time. You know that."
"Rather than that, brother," Zhao Ming said quickly, with the practiced deflection of a younger sibling who had learned exactly when to change the subject, "you're hungry, right? You haven't eaten dinner. Come on, today's your favorite, fried eggs!"
"Don't change the subject." Zhao Wei sat down. "And I told you not to use the gas unless I'm here."
"I was careful."
BANG. BANG. BANG.
Three heavy knocks on the door. The kind that carried a specific gravity, the kind that announced itself not as a question but as a statement.
Zhao Wei and Zhao Ming looked at each other across the table.
"Stay here," Zhao Wei said quietly. "Don't come out."
The landlady stood in the doorway with her arms crossed, her expression already that of a woman who had climbed these stairs many times on this particular errand and had stopped softening it. "Last month's rent is late," she said. "When are you going to pay it?"
"Last month's hospital fees were a little high." Zhao Wei kept his voice level. "Can you wait a few days?"
Her face reddened. "What? How many times is this now? Hospital fees or whatever, you still have to pay the rent on time. Why is it always like this?" She leaned forward. "If you don't like it, then move out!"
Behind the door, pressed flat against the wall so she couldn't see him, Zhao Ming stood with his hands balled at his sides and his jaw tight.
"Lady."
One word. Quiet. The landlady stopped.
Zhao Wei looked at her with a steadiness that was neither aggression nor submission but something that belonged to a person who had been measured by harder things than this. "I'll pay in a few days," he said.
Something in that look made her take one small step backward.
"O-okay. But by the end of the month, you're out. Remember that."
Her footsteps retreated down the stairs. Zhao Wei closed the door and stood for a moment in the small silence that followed. Then he crossed the room, sat down on the floor beside his little brother, and put one hand on Zhao Ming's head.
Zhao Ming looked up at him, trying very hard to keep his face neutral and not quite managing.
"Bro…"
"It's okay." Zhao Wei smiled the easy, uncomplicated smile that he kept for exactly these moments, the one that cost him nothing to give and always seemed to cost Zhao Ming something to receive. "Tomorrow's payday for my part-time job. We're fine."
Zhao Ming nodded. He leaned slightly into his brother's hand and said nothing.
Outside their window, the winter night deepened. And somewhere above the hutongs and the apartment blocks and the bare-branched trees of Tongzhou, the moon was beginning to rise brighter than usual, and growing brighter still.