"MOVE."
He pushed past both of them—past Xue Lian, past Bai Feng—his shoulder connecting with Bai Feng's arm hard enough to send him stumbling.
"That punk! Again, so rude!!"
He did not look back. He hit the exit door with both hands and burst through it into the Beijing night. Cold air met him like a wall, and the distant city sounds suddenly became real and immediate after the enclosed stairwell. He ran.
His legs were working again, though unevenly. The left one was still half-numb but functional. He pushed them harder.
Those things might actually kill Zhao Ming.
The thought repeated itself as he ran, keeping pace with his footsteps—neither louder nor quieter, just present.
They said it like it was nothing. It was a practical solution. Like, Zhao Ming was a problem to be sorted rather than…
"Because they're monsters," he said out loud to the empty night street. "Because they're monsters who don't have blood or tears!" His voice was rough. He did not care. "I'm going to make sure they can't lay a finger on Zhao Ming. I'll make sure of it."
He crashed.
He did not see the low wall at the edge of the path. His eyes were not on the path; he was running on something other than attention right now. When his shins connected with the concrete edge, he went over it completely, hitting the grass on the other side with his shoulder, rolling, and coming to rest with his face against the cold earth.
For a moment, he lay still.
Footsteps. "Kid, are you alright?" A man's voice—a bystander's voice—carried the specific alarm of someone who had witnessed something unexpected. "Kid?"
Zhao Wei pushed himself up. His hands were shaking, not only from pain.
"I'm fine," he said. He was already getting up.
Around him on the path, he became dimly aware that things were wrong. A woman was leaning against a railing with her eyes closed, her companion holding her arm with an expression of confused concern. A man three meters away had stopped walking and was pressing his hand against his temple. A child was crying for no apparent reason.
Why am I suddenly so dizzy?
Honey, are you alright?
He had done this. He understood that somewhere below the surface of everything else. The injury, the undead body trying to repair itself, was drawing on the nearest available life—the people around him—bleeding energy they did not know they were losing. He was a drain on everything close to him.
To get better, he's sucking up the life in his surroundings.
He started walking, then running again, because he could not stop.
Xue Lian's voice came to him even out here, even as he moved away from her, clear and quiet as if she were standing at his shoulder:
And because of that, seeing his younger brother right now will end in tragedy.
He stopped.
He was at the bottom of his building's staircase. The light in the third-floor window was on—the warm yellow light that meant Zhao Ming was awake, that meant he had been home all evening doing whatever twelve-year-olds do when they are alone in a too-small apartment. Probably talking to the plants, probably arguing with the television.
Today, we will have fried eggs, Zhao Ming had said that afternoon. The image of his little brother at the single gas burner with the pan, concentrating like someone executing a plan, hit him somewhere beneath everything else.
Zhao Wei stood at the bottom of the stairs and looked at the light in the window. He understood what Xue Lian had meant. His body was pulling life from everything near it. If he went upstairs right now, into that small apartment, with his brother only three meters away all night—
He pressed his forehead against the wall.
"I will protect you." His voice was barely a sound. "How dare they even think—"
He was trembling. His hands against the wall were shaking. He looked at them and tried to make them stop, but did not quite succeed.
"I'll protect you. No matter what."
He went up the stairs anyway. He went up because there was nowhere else to go and because the alternative—standing outside in the cold while Zhao Ming waited on the other side of that door—was not something he was capable of. He climbed one step at a time, each footfall deliberate, and knocked on the door.
"Zhao Ming! Zhao Ming, I'm back!"
Inside came a pause, the sound of a chair scraping, and then Zhao Ming's voice, slightly confused: "Oh, brother's here."
The door opened.
Zhao Ming's face brightened instantly—the automatic brightness of someone whose day had just improved without warning. "Zhao Wei! You came home early! I made some—"
He stopped.
He looked at his brother.
"—Gasp—"
"Zhao Ming." Zhao Wei stepped forward, one hand already reaching for his brother's shoulder, trying to pull him back from whatever he was seeing on Zhao Wei's face or in the air around him. "Zhao Ming, snap out of it—"
But Zhao Ming was already there, wide-eyed and frozen in the doorway, the fried egg still in his hands. He looked at his brother with an expression that held none of the usual cheerfulness and all of something else entirely.
"What's wrong, Zhao Wei?"
The question was very simple. It did not sound like a twelve-year-old asking about a bad day at school. It sounded like someone looking at something they did not yet have words for, and asking anyway—because asking was the only thing left.
Zhao Wei looked at his little brother in the warm light of their small apartment. Outside, the city moved on, and somewhere across Beijing, Xue Lian stood on a rooftop with the Semani stone in her hand, thinking about what came next.
And Zhao Wei had no answer.