The Quiet Algorithm of Us

3 Moving Into the Fortress

"Sir," the man said, which, translated, meant I will die before asking questions.

Jinchao walked the perimeter with Kai. They spoke like two men who prefer silence and yet shared a language composed of nouns with utility. "Wing B," Jinchao said.

Kai nodded. "Bored."

"Utterly."

The engineer's logs would later show that he had renamed the surveillance node for Wing B Mops. This was bureaucracy with comedy, which is the only reliable form of anti-corruption.

They did not speak of the pact in rooms with air. They didn't need to.

In public rooms, their choreography was almost rude in its lack of spectacle. He arrived; she arrived eventually. She left; he had already quietly issued a we're-done signal that sent meetings home to their families. Aunties began to look well rested. Cousins stopped pretending they could feel the ground shaking. The household adjusted from performative to practical in increments of soup.

Conversations with aunties involved jasmine and ghosts and the correct ripeness of pears. Aunt Lihua mused on the merits of jasmine over osmanthus for finicky spirits. Aunt Meifang brought mercy disguised as dumplings and muttered, "Peonies are forgiven," as if the peonies had sent an apology email late at night. Conversations with uncles, when unavoidable, touched on cement and charity and the wisdom of boring investments with dividends you can count on two hands. The uncles nodded like men who wanted to argue with the word boring and couldn't find legal cause.

Ren Jinchao made himself scarce in her mornings like a gentleman in a novel that has no illusions about gentlemen. He left a habit in his place: a text at 8:01 containing evidence he was alive and had seen a plant.

Jinchao: Leaf, new.

The photo would show, always, a detail. A push of green against the map of veins. A curl. A shadow. The plant in question had been named Capital by a traitor to stoicism, and it thrived shamelessly as if validating the worst metaphors. She always replied with infrastructure.

Miran: Watered.
Jinchao: Fed.
Miran: Quiet.
Jinchao: Kept.

One morning, a bodyguard named Sun trailed her too closely on her canal walk. She stopped. Turned. Smiled because you should smile at men with earpieces when you intend to change their lives. "Would you like to walk in front," she asked, "so you can see danger before it trips on your shoes?"

Sun reddened, apologized to his job, and adjusted to a ten-meter distance that neither of them found humiliating. Two days later she saw him, hands folded, instructing a junior in the art of distance like a monk instructing a loud bird. If civilizations survive, it is because people like Sun become teachers on canal paths at nine a.m.

The clandestine channel grew a vocabulary faster than houseplants grow standards. When he texted Oven crowded, she shelved her more interesting ideas and parked cash in a posture that could endure politics. When she texted Peel the labels, he dumped a cousin's flashy project into a bin labeled later. He replied with Compost, and she treated the salvage like soil. None of this, if printed out, would look like anything but domestic nonsense. People have gone to trial over less interesting transcripts.

Kai noticed nothing and everything. He noticed she moved through the house without leaving opinions. He noticed the way Jinchao's shoulders took on half a centimeter less gravity. He noticed that the staff stopped jerking awake at corners. He noticed that board meetings had obtained a new efficiency that could be measured in minutes not squandered on men describing their own slides.

One afternoon, a contractor with inappropriate cheekbones arrived to "inspect HVAC." He wore crisp overalls and the guilty air of a person committing legitimate work. Zhou gave him a key with a lecture he agreed with. He carried a roll of wire that looked like a promise sealed in shrink-wrap. Engineer Wen appeared (as ever) like a principle of physics. They sat cross-legged in the "closet" with the bookshelf unlatched and did something to the panel that made the house sigh.