Ren did not fall asleep so much as lose an argument with himself about staying awake.
He'd meant to wait her out — lie there with his eyes open until she finally went to bed, then go downstairs and look at the thing properly, in a calm, reasonable, only-mildly-illegal way. Instead he woke up at 1:40 in the morning with his phone screen burning his retinas and the distinct, guilty feeling of having lost time he didn't remember losing.
The house was dark. The good kind of dark, where the shapes of furniture are still familiar even though you can't see them — not the bad kind, where every doorway turns into a stranger. He lay there a while longer, listening.
No chair scraping. No murmuring. Nothing.
He got up anyway.
The hallway floor had four boards that creaked, and Ren had spent eighteen years learning their exact locations — board by the bathroom, board by the linen closet, the one outside his grandmother's door that sounded like a small dying animal, and the one at the top of the stairs that he was fairly sure had been creaking on purpose just to spite him personally. He avoided all four without thinking about it, the kind of thing your body memorizes after eighteen years whether you mean it to or not.
The kitchen was empty.
The table was empty too.
He stood there for a second feeling unreasonably betrayed, as if the box had committed some kind of crime by not being where he'd left it, and then noticed the cabinet under the household shrine — the one that held spare incense and the good tablecloth and, as far as he had known for eighteen years, absolutely nothing else interesting — had a new padlock on it.
A padlock. On a kitchen cabinet. In a house where the front door itself didn't always lock properly.
He almost laughed. Almost. The laugh died somewhere around the second thought, which was: she put a lock on it before bed, which means she expected me to come down here, which means she knows exactly the kind of grandson she raised.
Which was, honestly, a little insulting, because it meant she was right.
He crouched in front of the cabinet and considered his options for exactly three seconds before admitting he'd already decided. Option one: go back to bed, be a good grandson, never know what was in the box, and spend the rest of his life wondering. Option two: find the key. Option three —
The key was on a string around the leg of the small wooden table by the shrine, hanging there with the kind of confidence that suggested his grandmother had never once considered that a teenager who'd lived in this house his entire life might know every hiding spot she'd ever used, including the time she'd hidden his report card from his own father for a week.
"Okay," Ren whispered to the empty kitchen, mostly so he could hear himself committing to the crime out loud. "This is extremely stupid."
He unlocked the cabinet.
The crate had been moved into it at an angle that suggested speed rather than care — like she'd shoved it in and locked the door before she could think better of it. That made sense. "Think better of it" had never once stopped his grandmother from doing anything in his entire life, but apparently almost had tonight. The straw padding had been pulled back already. She'd looked. She just hadn't opened it the rest of the way.
Inside the straw, instead of pottery shards or a fossil or whatever boring, dignified academic thing his parents usually sent home, was a smaller box.
Black lacquer, the kind that had gone slightly matte with age instead of staying glossy, bound twice around with cord that had rotted to the texture of old hair. A wax seal held the latch shut — dark red, nearly black, stamped with a mark Ren didn't recognize. Even so, looking at it gave him the same feeling as seeing a warning sign in a language he couldn't read.
He did not touch it immediately.
He sat back on his heels and looked at it the way you look at a stray dog that hasn't decided yet whether to bite you, and thought, with the specific clarity that only arrives at two in the morning: this is the part in every story where the responsible thing to do is put it back, and the thing that's actually going to happen is that I'm going to open it anyway, because I have never once in my life been the responsible character.
He broke the seal.
It came apart easier than it should have — not crumbling with age the way old wax should, but cleanly, like it had been waiting for exactly this. The cord came undone in his hands without him really doing anything to it.
Inside the lacquer box, on a bed of cloth gone the color of weak tea, sat a flat piece of pale jade, the size of his palm, carved with characters he didn't recognize. They tugged at something familiar anyway — the way the shape of a name can feel familiar a half-second before you remember whose it is. Next to it lay a small brass seal, tarnished nearly black, its face worn smooth except at the very edges, where something that might once have been a tiger's outline still clung on out of pure stubbornness.
Neither object looked like it belonged to an archaeological dig. Neither object looked old in the way old things in museums looked old — careful, catalogued, behind glass. They looked old the way a knife looks old after it's been used for one purpose, for a very long time, by someone who knew exactly what they were doing with it.
Ren reached out before he'd finished deciding to.
His fingers closed around the jade.
For one second, nothing happened, and he had time to think, with enormous relief, oh, thank god, it's just a rock —
— and then the world tipped sideways and didn't come back.