Wei Zhengnan left for the censorate before the city had fully woken.
I was up when he prepared to go, which surprised neither of us — I had not slept deeply, and the quality of the house in the hour before dawn had a specific alertness that was its own kind of wakefulness. We did not eat. He did not want to, and I was not going to pretend to an appetite I didn't have.
At the door of the study, he paused. He was wearing the formal clothes of a serving official — the correct clothes for a voluntary disclosure made directly to a senior censor, the clothes that communicated the seriousness and the voluntariness of the act simultaneously. He had chosen carefully. He had understood, without being told, that presentation was argument.
"How long will it take?" I asked.
"An hour with Tan Wei," he said. "Perhaps two. Depending on how many questions he has."
