The form had four blank lines on it, and Jian had been staring at them for eleven minutes.
"It's your name," Ren said. "Just write your name."
"It's not just my name." Jian held the permission slip like it might bite him. "Look. 'Signature of Guardian.' What if I sign it wrong and they think I forged it, then I get arrested before the trip even starts and die in a holding cell instead of at the science museum like a normal person?"
"You're not going to die in a holding cell."
"You don't know that. You don't know anything about holding cells, Ren. Some of us think about these things."
Ren Wu did not, in fact, think about these things. He thought about whether the canteen still had the good chili sauce, whether his grandmother would notice if he skipped afternoon tea for the third day in a row, and whether the girl two rows up was actually taking notes or just drawing the same flower over and over, which she'd been doing since September.
He did not think about forms. Forms were Jian's entire personality.
"Give it here." Ren took the slip before Jian's nervous sweat finished dissolving the ink and signed it himself.
Guardian: Antish Wu.
The handwriting looked nothing like an adult's and exactly like a kid forging his grandmother's signature for the ninth time that year.
"That's not legal," Jian said, sounding instantly relieved.
"It's extremely legal. I looked it up."
"You did not look it up."
"I looked at it. Same thing."
The bell rang — at this school, that meant something halfway between a fire alarm and a dying animal — and the hallway immediately filled with the roar of three hundred teenagers trying to leave a building at once. Ren let the crowd carry him toward the gate with minimal involvement from his legs. As far as he was concerned, this was the correct way to be eighteen: mildly competent, mostly unbothered, allergic to paperwork by association.
Jian caught up with him at the gate, already building his next catastrophe.
"What if the museum has metal detectors?"
"It's a science museum."
"Science museums have replica swords, Ren. I've seen the brochure. There's a whole exhibit called 'Blades Through History.' If that thing goes off because of my belt buckle, I'm going to have a heart attack in front of Ms. Okafor, and you're going to have to explain to my dad why his only son died of embarrassment."
"Your dad would probably understand. He works for the government."
"He works for Civic Records. That's different."
As far as Ren had ever been able to tell, it really wasn't. Jian's dad kept impossibly long hours doing something involving "filings" that nobody was allowed to ask about at dinner, and came home smelling faintly of old paper and something colder underneath it, like a freezer left open somewhere down the hall. Around age twelve, Ren had decided some families just had jobs like that — some had a father who farmed, some had a father who worked at the docks, and the Liu family did filings. It was probably fine.
They split at the corner the way they always did, Jian toward the apartment blocks and Ren into the narrow lane past the noodle stall and the shuttered print shop, toward the house his grandmother had lived in since before his parents were born.
The house smelled the way it always smelled: stale incense in the corners, old paper that had survived several decades and saw no reason to apologize for it, and underneath all of it, the sharp green scent of whatever his grandmother was burning that week. Today's had a bite to it. She only used that one when she was anxious.
"You're late," she said, without turning from the stove.
She was a small woman who had spent sixty years compensating for her size by being correct about everything, loudly and at full volume whether anyone agreed with her or not.
"Practice ran long."
"Practice for what."
"Standing around while Jian panics over a permission slip."
"Mm." She set a bowl in front of him without measuring the distance, the way she always did — the food landing exactly where it should without her ever looking down. "Eat. Then incense. Then homework. In that order. Not the order you think is more convenient."
Ren ate. He did the incense — three sticks, a short bow, the thing she called respect and he privately thought of as cardio for the soul, since it was the only part of his day that reliably raised his heart rate. He did not do the homework yet, because homework immediately after eating was, in his professional opinion as someone who had never once finished homework immediately after eating, a myth invented by people who didn't actually have homework.
His grandmother watched him through all of it with the focused attention of someone counting. She was always counting something. Ren had stopped asking what around the same time he'd stopped asking about the lane behind the house that she swept every morning even though nothing ever grew there, and the small bronze bell by the door that she touched every night before she touched the lock. It was a comfortable kind of strange — the sort you grow up inside and stop seeing, the same way you stop noticing your own ceiling.
The knock came at seven.
That was unusual. Nobody knocked at the Wu house at seven. Mail came at ten. The neighbors didn't knock at all, not since the rooster incident nobody discussed. Seven o'clock belonged to nothing.
Ren reached the door first.
The courier was younger than him, sweating through a uniform two sizes too large, carrying a crate that should have needed two people and was instead balanced in the arms of one exhausted teenager who clearly hated his job and everyone connected to it.
"Package for—" He checked the label, mouth working through the unfamiliar transliteration. "—Wu residence. Sender's listed as a Dr. and Dr. Wu, archaeological survey, currently—" He squinted. "—currently somewhere I can't pronounce. Sign here."
Ren signed. Correctly this time, since it was an actual legal document, and despite what he'd told Jian, he'd never once looked up the legality of forging his grandmother's signature.
The crate was heavier than it looked, packed in straw and old cloth, stamped with customs marks from four different ports. His parents did this twice a year — sent something home from wherever the current dig was, usually a postcard shoved into a box of supplies they'd run out of room for, sometimes something stranger. Once it had been a single sandal, eight hundred years old, wrapped in enough padding to survive the trip better than most modern shoes survived a rainy season.
He carried the crate inside and set it on the kitchen table, where it sat between the rice cooker and a stack of unpaid bills like it belonged there.
His grandmother came out of the back room already talking. "Is that the courier? Tell him we don't want the—"
She stopped.
Not the way people stop when they're surprised. She stopped the way a held breath stops — all at once, completely, the kind of stillness that takes effort to fake and therefore almost never is.
Her eyes went to the customs stamp first. Then the shipping label. Then, very deliberately, to Ren's hand resting on the lid.
"Don't," she said.
It wasn't loud. That was what was wrong. Everything his grandmother said was loud as a matter of policy, on principle — volume was how she made sure people listened. This wasn't loud at all, and it went through Ren's chest like the floor had tilted beneath him.
"It's just Mom and Dad's stuff," he said. "They send stuff all the—"
"I know what they send." Her hand was already moving, fast for a woman her age, faster than he'd ever seen her move toward anything that wasn't a misbehaving stove. "Get your hand off it."
He did. Mostly because the alternative involved finding out what happened if he didn't, and some animal part of him had already decided it didn't want to know.
She stood over the crate for a long moment without touching it, the way you'd stand over a sleeping dog you weren't entirely sure you trusted. The bitter-green incense smell seemed thicker now. Or maybe the quiet was just making everything feel closer.
"Grandma."
"Go do your homework."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one you're getting tonight." She finally looked at him, and for one unguarded second, beneath the irritation she wore like a second skin, there was something uncomfortably close to fear. And beneath that — something even more uncomfortable. Relief. "Go, Ren."
He went. Not because he believed her, but because he'd lived eighteen years in this house and learned, somewhere along the way, that there were exactly three subjects his grandmother never joked about. The look on her face right now belonged to all three at once.
He did his homework badly and without focus, sprawled across his bed with the door cracked open, listening.
He heard her drag a chair to the kitchen table. He heard her sit. He didn't hear her open the crate — she didn't, not that night — but he heard her stay there a long time, long after the stove had gone cold, long after the bitter-green smell had faded into something closer to ash, murmuring something too soft to catch, in a rhythm that sounded less like prayer and more like a woman negotiating.
Ren fell asleep before he heard her stop.
He did not yet know that the box on the kitchen table contained the only other thing in the world that knew his name before he did.