Ch. 003| Not the You of Now

October 22, 14:15.

Ren Yi left early.

She didn't bring her wrist terminal—the letter had said not to. The terminal stayed home, lying beside the notebook on her desk, powered off. Her backpack held only that notebook, a fountain pen, the letter, and a thermos.

She didn't take the bus. She walked. From home to the museum was thirty-five minutes; she'd worked it out.

As she walked, she went back over what she'd recorded these seven days. The broken-ring watermark at the foot of the letter rotated a little around its break each day—about 1/24 on the first day, another 1/24 on each of the days after, and by this morning the running total was 8/24—exactly 1/3 of the circle.

She had done as told. Her father had called twice; she hadn't picked up. Her mom had texted asking whether she'd come home for dinner this weekend; she'd replied "next week," with no explanation.

She'd also noticed one more thing—over these seven days on duty, whenever she walked through the museum's Greek vase gallery, the pieces there were all reproductions, yet a very faint echo would reach her ear, like someone tapping something hollow gently from very far away. A reproduction shouldn't whisper at all. Each time she passed she would slow for a beat, then keep going, and she hadn't written it in the notebook.

On the street the afternoon sun had just begun to slant, with a touch of late-October cold. She wasn't wearing earphones.

---

14:50, she reached the alley behind the museum.

The back alley was the staff passage, the museum's loading dock. Normally only the cleaning team came and went, pushing the recycling cart; now it was empty. There were a couple of tire tracks on the ground, and against the wall stood a rusted iron warehouse door.

She stopped about five meters from the warehouse door, took the notebook out of her backpack, turned to the page where the letter was tucked, and glanced at the watermark.

8/24. It hadn't moved.

She closed the notebook and held it under her arm.

---

14:58.

Wind came from the far end of the alley, carrying a faint smell of gasoline.

The warehouse door opened. Not pushed open—the iron door's hinge was bad; normally it took some effort to push. This time the door opened on its own.

A man stepped out.

Around sixty, with short gray hair, a dark wool suit jacket over a gray turtleneck. No tie. On his left hand he wore what looked like an antique bronze-ring watch—not the Rolex sort, more like the kind of thing in a museum display case that gets labeled "X century BCE."

He looked more like the kind of man sent to handle the things that couldn't be written into the news.

He saw Ren Yi and gave a slight nod of his chin. Not a greeting. More like "I recognize you now."

"Miss Ren Yi," he said. His voice was calm, his pace a beat slower than most people's. "You're ten minutes early. Good."

Ren Yi didn't answer.

He came over, stopped about a meter away, and pointed to the end of the alley. "We won't talk here."

At the end of the alley sat a black sedan. An ordinary civilian plate; it looked like a car any middle-aged man might drive.

She followed him.

---

15:08. The car left the back alley, turned onto the main road, and blended into the rest of the afternoon traffic.

He didn't ask how she was, didn't ask how her seven days had gone. He drove for about three minutes, then asked:

"Did you bring your notebook?"

She took it out of her backpack. He drove with his left hand and reached out with his right. She set the notebook in his palm.

He turned the pages. One, two, three, stopped at the "Don't look into it" page, looked at it for about two seconds. Turned to the next, "See you in seven days," looked another two seconds. Closed it, handed it back, asked nothing.

"You can hear the sarcophagus," he said. Not a question.

Ren Yi didn't answer.

"This ability has a formal academic term," he said. "But you're not at the stage where you should know that word yet. For now you only need to remember—it's a kind of abnormal hearing. People who can hear it, by global count, are fewer than one in ten thousand. People who can make out complete sentences—in the past three hundred years, there have been only four. We believe you may be the fifth, but so far it's only happened to you once, and the Academy needs more verification before it can be formally entered into the record."

Ren Yi gripped the notebook a little tighter on her lap.

"This ability is passive; it won't harm you. But when you come into contact with high-grade artifacts, you leave something we call a curse-mark on the nearest paper medium. That broken-ring glyph in your museum inventory book the night of the count—that's one. The 'Don't look into it' in your notebook is too."

"And 'See you in seven days'?" Ren Yi asked. She heard her own voice come out a little hoarse.

"That too."

She thought for a moment, then asked: "'Don't look into it'—who wrote it?"

"We're not sure," he said. "The easiest explanation is that you wrote it yourself and don't remember. It may not be. This is one of the things about you that most needs verifying right now."

"I don't remember writing it."

"I know. That's why I say it needs verifying."

She didn't press further.

He drove a stretch without speaking. Then he added, on his own: "In the short term, stay away from three kinds of places—the museum's storage vaults, auctions, and overseas sites."

"Why?"

"Storage vaults, auctions, overseas sites—they all hold high-grade artifacts. You haven't been trained yet; getting close will leave curse-marks you don't want to leave, and sometimes others can read them."

Only now did Ren Yi notice that his left hand—the one driving, the one wearing the bronze-ring watch—sat on the wheel at just the angle for the bronze ring to catch the green glow of the dashboard, flickering on and off. She couldn't tell whether the watch had hands. Maybe it had none at all.

"Who's 'others'?"

"You'll know later."

He drove about fifteen minutes; the car passed a subway station and turned into the area around her apartment. She hadn't told him the address, and he hadn't asked—he drove straight to the foot of her building and stopped.

---

15:45. He cut the engine.

"Get out. That's all for today."

She opened the door, started to get out, paused, and turned to ask: "Who are you?"

"The academic world calls me Professor Sekhet. The Academy calls me Containment Coordinator No. 12. You can just call me Sekhet."

"Where is the Academy?"

"No need to know that now. When you're ready, we'll take you there."

"When will I be ready?"

"We'll let you know."

She got out, her hand on the door handle, about to close it. She paused again.

"Professor Sekhet. The letter in the mailbox."

"Mm."

"You didn't write it."

"No."

"Then who did?"

He looked at her for two seconds.

"One possibility is that you wrote it yourself—just not the you of now. But that's only one of the possibilities we're considering; don't take it as settled. Once the Academy finishes verifying, we'll tell you which one is true."

She didn't react right away.

He gave a slight nod of his chin. "Close the door."

She closed it. The black sedan started up and drove off, turned the corner, and vanished at the end of the alley.

---

She stood where she was for about a minute, then looked up at the third-floor window. The curtain had been open when she left in the morning, and it was still open now. No one had been inside.

She went up, came in, walked to her desk and sat down, took out the notebook, turned to the page after "See you in seven days," and wrote:

October 22, 2065. Professor Sekhet came in person.
There's a formal academic term; Sekhet didn't tell me the word. Calling it "abnormal hearing" for now. I may be the fifth in three hundred years; the Academy still needs to verify.
Short term: stay away from storage vaults, auctions, overseas sites.
He didn't write the letter. Sekhet said "one possibility is that I wrote it myself, just not the me of now"—gave no conclusion.

She closed the notebook, sat for about two minutes, doing nothing.

Then something came to her.

---

She took a brand-new sheet of A4 paper from the drawer—the kind she usually used to print receipts. She laid it flat on the desk and took out the fountain pen—the same one she'd used to write "Don't look into it" and "See you in seven days," the same one she'd refilled last Thursday.

In the dead center of the white sheet, slowly, at exactly the same size as the watermark at the foot of the letter, she drew a broken ring. The break was at the upper right, the line cut off between the third point and the fourth.

As she drew, her hand shook a little. She paid special attention to whether the ring she was drawing matched the watermark's in line weight. It did match. Her writing was usually on the thin side, but this ring—the line she drew came out as thick as the watermark's, as if her hand knew on its own how thick to draw it, and she was only letting it.

When she finished, she took a fine pencil from the pen holder and, at the dead center of the break, one centimeter to the outside, lightly made a small dot as a marker.

The time was 15:58.

She set the white sheet on the desk beside the envelope, directly in front of her.

She did nothing else. She sat there and watched.

---

16:33.

She hadn't left the desk. She bent her head and checked the relative position of the pencil mark and the ring's break.

Compared with 15:58—the ring had turned a little, counterclockwise.

Not an illusion. From the relative angle between the pencil dot and the break, she could estimate it by eye at about 1/24 of the circle.

Thirty-five minutes, 1/24 of the circle moved.

Same direction as the watermark at the foot of the letter.

She noticed that her finger had just tapped the desk once, then again, in an irregular rhythm. She didn't normally tap the desk without meaning to. She pressed down on her right wrist and forced it to stop.

This white sheet, she had drawn herself. The ink was from her own fountain pen. The paper was the kind her home used to print receipts. The pen, the ink, the paper, her hand—none of them had been ruled out yet. But she couldn't keep from thinking that there was one more variable: herself.

Professor Sekhet had been so calm just now, not the reaction of a man struck by something unexpected. He might have been suspecting this direction for a long while, only without verification, which was why he hadn't told her.

She picked up the fountain pen, left three blank lines beneath what she'd just written, and then wrote:

The one I drew myself turns too.

The ink was wet.

【Ch. 003 End · Alley Behind the Museum + Ren Yi's Apartment】