That night, the rain did not fall gently and poetically; it slashed horizontally, driven by the spiteful wind that whipped the Huangpu River into snarls of foaming white. Neon signs on the Bund flickered like dying fireflies, and their reflections writhed along puddles that looked like small lakes.
At precisely eleven-oh-seven, a midnight blue Maybach sailed past the wrought-iron gates of Cloud Crest Manor. Built on a private peninsula and ringed by twenty-foot hedges of imported English boxwood, the estate itself was a veritable fusion of three French colonial mansions into one impossible palace. After expertly parallel-parking the car beneath the porte-cochère, the chauffeur shut off the engine with a polite cough.
Xu Xiao did not wait for the umbrella and stepped right into the tempest outside; his cashmere trench coat flared like a Batman cape, and his Italian loafers were immediately drenched. The face recognition system identified him, and the limestone doors rolled open with a whisper. Inside, the foyer was a mausoleum of marble and gold leaf, lit by a Murano chandelier with teardrop-shaped bulbs.
Just back from Singapore after having completed a hostile takeover that would confer upon Xu Group three cargo ports and half a billion of annual cash flow, the board had raised a toast in his honor, drinks of choice being 1982 Château d'Yquem. He had drunk none. His thoughts were already churning on the negotiations for tomorrow: an Australian lithium mine, a bunch of Japanese banks, the delicate chess of moving pieces no one else could see.
And then the housekeeper, Mrs. Liu, appeared by the foot of the grand staircase. Her face assumed an old-parchment-like coloration.
"There is a… situation," she said, regarding the situation with the weight of a grave medical diagnosis.
Xu Xiao raised one eyebrow. In the six years since Xu Xiao had seized control of the family conglomerate, situations at Cloud Crest had involved malfunctioning pipes or vacuous visiting politicians.
Mrs. Liu looked toward the security monitor, her finger trembling. The grainy footage showed the front gate. Crouched beneath the marble archway, like a discarded rag doll, was a girl. Her clothes had become soaked rags; her hair plastered to her face as she wrapped her arms around a cardboard sign whose ink had run into pink streaks:
HOMELESS. HUNGRY. PLEASE HELP.
It read 22:53. She had been there for fourteen minutes.
Xu Xiao's first instinct was to remain clinically detached. There were about 230,000 homeless people in the city by the last count; patrolling perimeters of Cloud Crest were armed guards and Dobermans. How had she passed through?
But just then, the girl raised her head. The camera immediately caught her eyes-tremendous, stark green, a color more of oxidized copper. Something in those eyes was not defeated. It was defiant, almost accusatory, as though she was judging him.
"Call security," Xu Xiao uttered. His voice had been soft. Mrs. Liu flinched. She had seen that soft tone before, and it was always followed by the termination of entire departments.
But she didn't reach for the intercom. She whispered, "Sir, she's... she's just a child."
Xu Xiao looked again. The girl could not have been older than twenty. Her collarbones jutted forward like wings. One wrist was wrapped with dirty gauze.
He felt something terribly strange between irritation and gravity- as though the elevator had dropped one floor too quickly.
"Bring her to the guest wing," he said. "Get Dr. Chen."
Mrs. Liu blinked. "Sir?"
"You heard me."
In five minutes, the girl stood in the middle of an Aegean-blue guest suite, dripping rainwater onto a Persian rug that was more expensive than most people's houses. The overhead light haloed her in gold. Seeing her up close was worse than how she had looked on camera: lips blue with cold, a bruise starting to form on her left cheek like spilled ink.
But her spine was straight, and she stared at Xu Xiao as if he were the intruder. "Name," he said. It was not a question, but a demand.
There was a slight hesitation. "Manning. Xu Manning."
This struck him like a keynote concert; the name Xu was not one that could just drift around the place. It represented "slow," "dignified," a similar character that was engraved into the jade seal his grandfather had left him.
"What is your age?"
"Nineteen."
"Parents?"
"Dead." The word was flat, almost rehearsed.
Xu Xiao studied her. The girl had regal, almost delicate features: high cheekbones marred only by a stubborn chin. Xu Xiao perceived her glance as she assessed the Louis XVI writing desk, the Baccarat vase, and the Koons balloon dog sculpture. Not awe but evaluation.
Dr. Chen came in with a clinical detachment, finding her pulse as he shone a penlight into her pupils. "Malnourished; mild hypothermia; possible fracture of the right wrist. Nothing life-threatening."
Xu Xiao nodded. "She stays tonight."
Her eyes returned to him: the girl should have been easier to deal with had she asked for charity.
"No," he agreed. "You asked for help. Two different things."
He turned to leave. She stopped him with her voice at the door.
"Why?"
He paused for a moment, light from the chandelier refracting in the crystal decanter on the sideboard, scattering rainbows like shrapnel.
"Because," he said, "I can."
It should have ended there: a nobly forgettable act before breakfast.
But Xu Xiao woke at 3:42 a.m. from the dream of drowning, the rain finally easing down. The penthouse bedroom, with its glass walls and 360-degree view of the city, was silent save for the dull bubbling of climate control.
Pouring himself a glass of water, he recalled that the guest wing was three levels below. Without consciously deciding, he subsequently found himself descending the staircase.
The hallway was illuminated by motion sensors that consumed all light in a lunar blue hue. The door to the guest suite stood slightly ajar. He pushed it open with creeping dread.
The girl was asleep, curled sideways like a comma. Dr. Chen had donned her with one of Mrs. Liu's spare nightgowns—flannel, faded strawberries. The bruise on her cheek had darkened to plum, and her bandaged wrist lay on the pillow like a broken bird.
On the nightstand lay the cardboard sign, now dried. Xu Xiao picked it up. Faint pencil lines told the story of words erased and written again, over and over, smudged beneath the inky traces. As if she had given up something vital with each alteration.
He noticed something else: her fingernails were clean. Not just clean. Manicured. Cuticles pushed back with professional precision. No homeless girl had hands like that.
A shard of suspicion lodged in his throat.
He laid the sign on the dresser. As he turned to leave, his sleeve brushed her shoulder. She stirred.
In her sleep, she whispered a name. Not his.
"Father…"
The word broke, ripped by yearning.
Xu Xiao froze.
He recognized that tone. He himself had used it once, at twelve in a hospital corridor, grasping his mother's hand when they tried to find his father's chest after a car accident. The surgery had failed. So had the Xu empire almost.
He pulled back out of the room.
He poured himself three fingers of Laphroaig downstairs, drinking it like medicine. The peat smoke wiped clean the taste of her grief.
Opening his laptop, the screen reflected his hollow-eyed, predatory face. He typed:
Xu Manning. Shanghai. Age 19.
Nothing. No social media. No school. No hospital. A ghost.
He tried variations. Manning Xu. Missing persons. Green eyes.
Still nothing.
Leaning back in the chair, he looked out through floor-to-ceiling windows at the city beyond, a circuit board for ambition and ruin. Somewhere in that maze, from nowhere, this girl had come to his doorstep; either she was exactly what she claimed to be or she was the most elaborate trap he had ever encountered.
Either way, she will stay until he knows which.
By dawn, Mrs. Liu had come upstairs with breakfast on a silver tray: congee with scallions, century egg, and youtiao still crackling from the fryer. The girl ate with mechanistic precision using only her left hand; the right wrist being now properly braced and protected in a splint.
Xu Xiao observed her from the doorway, not looking up again till she had swallowed the last grain of rice.
"Thank you," she said, "I will wash the dishes before I leave."
"There is a dishwasher."
"I don't take charity twice," she said.
He crossed the room within touching distance, so he could smell disinfectant on her skin.
"You said your parents are dead. How?"
Her jaw tightened. "Car accident. After three months. He was very… important. People wanted him dead."
"Important how?"
She paused. "He owned things."
Cryptic and purposefully so. Xu Xiao made a mental note.
"And you have been living on the street since?"
She nodded. "I had money. They took it."
"Who are they?"
She looked away. "You wouldn't believe me."
Try me, he thought. Instead, he said, "You're safe here. For now."
She caught his gaze, "No one is safe. Not from them."
A chill spidered up his spine.
"Stay for a week," he said. "Let Dr. Chen finish your treatment. And after that, if you want to go, I'll take you anywhere you want."
She considered him as painfully as one translating a foreign language understood by no one else.
"A week," she stated. "Then I disappear."
His hand extended; she took it. Her fingers were like ice.
When he released her hand, he found a scar going across her wrist: thin, white, perpendicular to the fracture. A bit old. Self-inflicted, or was it something worse?
He departed, seeing to the fussiness of Mrs. Liu.
In his office—a minimalist cube of steel and glass suspended over the garden—Xu Xiao summoned his head of security, a former MSS operative named Zhao.
"Everything about her. Birth records, school transcripts, hospital visits. Facial recognition first. Cross-reference against missing persons in Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Beijing. I want to know what she had for breakfast three years ago."
Zhao raised an eyebrow. "Boss, is this...personal?"
"All business, Zhao. Until it isn't."
After Zhao left, Xu Xiao turned to the window. Below, the girl was walking in the garden, Mrs. Liu's huge cardigan draped about her. She walked among the rose bushes with careful eyes and cautious lightness, like a cat fresh from the street.
She stopped by the koi pond, as the fish swarmed toward her, flashes of orange and white, expecting food. Instead, she carted her uninjured hand into the water, where the koi nibbled at her fingertips. She laughed—softly and with a slight gasp, as if she were recalling laughter from time long past.
Something tectonic shifted within Xu Xiao's heart, a plate he hadn't even known was there before.
He turned away.
That night, he dreamt of green eyes in the rain.
When he woke, the girl was gone. Her room empty, the bed made with military corners. All that lay on the pillow was a cardboard sign.
THANK YOU FOR THE WEEK.
No note. No forwarding address.
Zhao called at 7:15 in the morning. "Boss, you need to see this."
Attached to the email was a murky still from a CCTV camera from the Bund at 2:47 a.m. The girl, clad in jeans and a hoodie, was seen getting into a black Mercedes with no plate number. The driver's face was hidden in shadows and beneath a baseball cap.
Xu Xiao stared at the image until the pixels turned into a haze.
"Track the car," he ordered. "Through every camera up to Tibet."
Yet, deep down, he knew it would be futile; the girl, Xu Manning, had faded completely away as cleanly as she faded in.
He should have felt relieved. Instead, it had now transformed into a hollow space where suspicion had been, now filled with something sharper.
Regret.
Three days hence, the first package arrived. No return address. Inside was a silk scarf of oxidized copper color. Folded into its folds was a single line, handwritten in fountain pen:
I lied. My father isn't dead. He's just lost. Help me find him.
No signature.
Xu Xiao stood in the marble foyer, the scarf dripping from his fingers like liquid emerald.
And then he smiled: slow, predatory.
It appeared the game had just begun.