"You won't even be able to protect yourself."
Xue Lian crouched beside him on the stairwell floor. Her voice carried the same flat evenness it always did, as if the words were simply information rather than the most infuriating thing he had ever heard. She held out her wrist. Something dark was already beading at the surface—not quite blood, darker than blood, with a faint shimmer to it.
"Drink this," she said. "If you don't get my blood, you won't be able to lift a finger."
"W-what—" Zhao Wei stared at her. His whole body hurt. His legs were just now beginning to return, pins and needles spreading from his hips downward. "What happened to me?! Why couldn't I move?"
"Because my magic is flowing through your body." She said it the way she said everything—plainly, as if it had been obvious all along and she was confirming it for his benefit. "I'm sorry. This happened because of that."
He stared at her. The apology landed wrong, the way her first apology had landed wrong—delivered without inflection, accompanied by absolutely no change in her expression, the same sort of "sorry" she might give for stepping on someone's foot.
"What do you mean by that?" His voice came out very quietly. "So you knew. You knew I was going to be attacked."
Xue Lian looked at him. She did not look away.
"I used you as bait," she said, "to get back the stolen Semani. Compared to me, you would be the easier prey for them."
The stairwell was very quiet.
"Saved?" Zhao Wei's hands closed on the floor beneath him, fingers pressing hard into the concrete. "Saved, my ass..."
He felt it building—not slowly, not in stages, but all at once, the way water surges through a cracked dam. He pushed himself upright with both arms, legs still unreliable, and turned to face her with everything he had been holding since he woke up in his apartment and found strangers on his floor.
"EVERYTHING HAPPENED BECAUSE OF YOU!"
His voice filled the stairwell. Above him, somewhere, a door opened and closed.
"WHO IS SAVING WHOM?!"
Xue Lian stood. She smoothed her uniform with one hand. "Now that my mission here is over," she said, entirely unmoved, "it's time to return to the Beyond Realm." She paused. "And I need to take you with me."
Zhao Wei blinked. "Why me?"
"Those who aren't human are not allowed to stay here on Earth." She turned toward the exit. "That is the rule. No exceptions." She glanced back. "Also, if you don't drink my blood every three days, you'll be no different from a corpse and won't be able to lift a finger. You should have realized that earlier."
He had not realized that earlier. He was realizing it now, standing in a stairwell with his legs half-working and his body covered in damage that was already healing at a rate that had nothing to do with biology. The realization sat in him like a stone thrown into still water, sending rings outward.
Face it. You're no longer human.
For a moment, he was not in the stairwell. He was in the apartment, and Zhao Ming was looking up at him across the dinner table with wide eyes and the careful bright expression he wore on bad days. The image was so clear and so ordinary that something in his chest—the mechanical tick, the borrowed heartbeat—did something that was not quite pain.
Zhao Ming.
"Let's go to the Beyond Realm together," Xue Lian said.
Zhao Wei looked at her. "No," he said. "I'm human."
Xue Lian's expression did not change. "Why are you being stubborn?" She stepped toward him. "What's so great about being human? Not being able to live past a hundred years, lacking in abilities, a species already left behind genetically—don't you agree?" She tilted her head slightly. "Wouldn't you rather be a resident of the Beyond Realm?"
Bai Feng appeared at the top of the stairs, nodding with the energy of someone who had waited a long time to agree with something. "Wouldn't you? I mean, really."
"DON'T MAKE ME LAUGH."
Zhao Wei's voice cracked the air. "I'M NOT A MONSTER LIKE YOU!!"
Bai Feng threw up his hands. "This punk still hasn't come to his senses!! What is it that you're even so obsessed about?!"
Xue Lian looked at Zhao Wei for a long moment. Something moved in her expression—not softening, exactly, but a shift in direction, the way a blade adjusts before striking somewhere specific.
"Is it," she said quietly, "because of your dying brother?"
The words hit him the way physical things had not—with a precision that bypassed the undead body and went directly to whatever was underneath it.
"SHUT UP." His voice was not loud this time. It was something worse than loud. "Zhao Ming is NOT DYING."
"Stop it." Xue Lian turned away. "You should know better than anyone that his illness is incurable."
The hallway blurred slightly at the edges. From somewhere in the back of his memory came the doctor's voice—careful, measured, the voice of someone who has delivered this kind of information many times and has learned the specific vocabulary for it. The progression of the condition… There are treatment options available, but they are beyond our current means; we will do what we can. Numbers. The kind of numbers that had kept Zhao Wei on three jobs for two years and had still never quite added up to enough.
"Zhao Ming is NOT dying." He said it again, lower. "He's going to get better. I have no one but him. I'm not going somewhere else and leaving him behind. Not for anything. NEVER."
Bai Feng snorted. "Ah ha ha, if that's the case, then there's no problem." He was grinning now, with the wide, easy grin of someone delivering what he thought was a clever solution. "We can just kill your brother as we did with you, right?"
Silence.
Zhao Wei went completely still.
The grin on Bai Feng's face did not change. The stairwell light buzzed faintly once and then fell quiet.
A single tear ran down Zhao Wei's face. He did not blink. He did not move. He looked at Bai Feng with an expression that was not fury and was not grief, but the specific thing that exists on the other side of both—a clarity, absolute and cold, the kind that comes when something becomes simple.
Then he stood up.