The Quiet Algorithm of Us

19 The Bridge to Daylight

He called Dr. Zhao with the tone of a man who knows when he is about to be scolded by a benevolent dragon. She arrived with a little kit and the expression of someone who rescues foolish geniuses for a living. “Hydration,” she decreed, pricking a finger and satisfying science with a number. “Two hours horizontal. Lower your ambition in that time and we will reconsider your right to stand.”

“Then the launch,” Miran said.

“You can be present without standing,” Zhao replied. “Sit. Blink when appropriate. Nod when truth occurs. I will be nearby wielding eyebrows.”

So she obeyed. Sitting did not kill her. It is not fatal to be human for a third of a day.

And while she sat, the positions harvested themselves like fields she had planted properly. Gains stacked politely, not obscene, like well-raised children lining up after a ceremony. The grid basket paid; the bank sleeve clicked into second gear; the pair trade’s last slice slid into cash with a sigh as if it had always intended to. By five o’clock, the invisible counter in her book had lit itself up like a lantern on a night that had finally believed in weather. Ren net worth, an annoying scoreboard she ignores, had acquired a new digit in the part of the number that changes how boards behave. She did not tell him. She was saving it for a table later with a plant listening.

The launch completed itself as these things do: speeches, receipts, a child on a stage who said thank you without being coached, the sound of aunties failing to pretend they do not cry. Reporters yawned in the polite way and wrote about “boring stability” with an admiration they think they hide. The chair closed with three sentences that felt like architecture: “This fund is a bridge. We will not paint the bridge in neon. We will inspect it monthly. We will publish when it creaks.”

In the afterlight, when people loiter because normal feels dangerous to leave, Yichen leaned against a column and watched her move from chair to chair like an engineer examining bolts. She smiled at two donors, declined a photograph, made sure a scholarship clause about service hours had been written in language a seventeen-year-old could love, then disappeared into the corridor with Zhou and a cup.

Greed in a person like him isn’t just money. It’s jurisdiction. He wanted whatever she was using to keep light from turning feral. He wanted it because it worked, and he wanted it because it refused to notice him. He texted an underling to “map her,” which, translated, means waste a week trying to infer a ghost. He told himself this was professional. Men lie to themselves to make their hobbies legal.

That evening, in the living room, the house went back to being a house. The plant went back to being a plant. The bodyguards practiced stillness. Fang and Zhao traded jokes about receipts as literature. Aunt Meifang assessed pasta futures. Aunt Lihua took jasmine from her hair and put a sprig on the altar for overtime. Reporters fled to rooms where adjectives still went to feel important.

He took her hand because he could. Not performance. Not patent. The kind of hand-taking that says you stood when you didn’t have to, so I will stand now. “Temperature?” he asked, thumb lightly at her wrist, precisely, politely taking inventory again. “Down,” she said, which was true by a tenth. “Book?” he asked. “Up,” she said, and her eyes did the impossible thing a fever should not let them do: sparkle like insolent coins. She added, because she pretends to be immune to pride and fails, “Significantly.”

“How significantly,” he asked, because numbers make him feel like an honest citizen.

“Enough to buy the rest of the bridge,” she said. “Enough to make the league table threaten to invite us to dinner.” She leaned in a whisper closer, reckless with glee. “If we wanted to be vulgar, we could be the top wealth in the country by Christmas. We won’t be vulgar.”

“Never,” he said, the smile he saves for private use making a brief and destructive appearance. “We’ll be competent.”

“Competence is a love language,” she replied, and then flushed, perhaps from fever, perhaps from treason.

They sat at the small table and treated the day like a patient who had done well in rehab. He poured tea for her and included a bribe of honey. She rolled her eyes at being managed and drank. They added a pebble for the launch and another for the wins and a tiny third for the moment in the study when she allowed herself to be mortal.

“Ranran,” he said later, walking her to the study door as if doors require delegations. “Promise me we’ll publish a schedule for your immune system.”

“Fine,” she said, which in this house is a vow with a small ribbon. “But you owe me soup.”

“I’ll cook,” he said, reckless with joy.

“You will watch while Chef Peng makes it and claim credit,” she corrected, generous.

He leaned slightly, checked the bandage he no longer needed to check, evened a wrinkle in her sleeve with a care that would embarrass men who still believe in statues. “Good night,” he said, and then added the part that doesn’t belong to anyone else: “Thank you for today’s daylight.”

“Good night,” she returned. “Thank you for chairing boring.” The dimples returned from leave and filed paperwork. The shelf recognized her wrist and opened the way secrets open when they are loved.

Inside, the fan-that-never-had-a-childhood made its gentle song. She sat. She breathed. She did not open every tab. She placed a sticky on the frame: Bridge launched. Fever minor. Wins banked. Sleep, fool. She obeyed the sticky more than any reasonable person should.

Across the courtyard, he lay down with the satisfied terror of someone realizing that competence might accidentally be joy. He sent the liturgy.

Jinchao: Lamp.
Miran: Lamp.
Jinchao: Bridge stands.
Miran: Receipts posted.
Jinchao: Fever?
Miran: Down.
Jinchao: Sleep.
Miran: Yes, sir.
Jinchao: Do not call me that unless you intend to…
Miran: Good night.

He laughed, quietly, with his face against a pillow, and told the ceiling that restraint is a sport he plans to keep winning because prizes keep getting better.

Somewhere else in the city, Yichen scrolled through photographs of a launch he told himself he had attended to understand daylight. He zoomed in and memorized the edge of a sweater and the way a woman’s hand hovered over a page. He told himself this was due diligence. He asked a junior to get him a list of “everyone who ever wrote anything about Ren procurement,” which is how he thinks ghosts show up, in citations. He didn’t sleep well, which is what happens when you try to seduce a hinge.

The house, once the carriages had all turned into domestic vehicles, settled into its usual excellence. Luo Qiang filed launch uneventful; reporters yawned; aunties cried and drew a second smiley he would later pretend was dust. Zhou put a bottle of electrolyte drink where only a fever would find it. Xiao Ning stuck a label on the fridge that said Soup for Strangers (Pilot) and got away with it because Fang secretly wanted that, too. Dr. Zhao texted NO HEROICS FOR 48 HOURS and Kai put it on the calendar as if it could be enforced by gravity. He Shun told Capital to stop conducting photosynthesis in a suggestive manner and the plant ignored him in a way that felt like affection.

The cranes at the river drew clear hieroglyphs. The bridge to daylight did what bridges do, which is exist without applause. The league tables fidgeted. The city did its pulse. The woman in the room behind the bookshelf closed her eyes and practiced acting like a person. The man in the west building did the unheroic thing and slept before midnight.

Morning would arrive with a thermometer and a schedule and a plate of pears and perhaps that soup for strangers starting to exist in a small kitchen with a pilot sign above it. The fund would publish another receipt. The market would test her patience again and perhaps be rewarded or punished according to published policy. Yichen would show up in a mirror and mistake it for a window. Capital would refuse to die. The house would refuse to disappoint. And the pact, still secret and somehow louder every day, would keep passing weight back and forth until love, unannounced, realized it had been living here all along under another name: boring excellence.