Chapter 23

Gi Changning, who was entirely up to this, marched to the gates of Jinhua Gardens and stopped dead.

Meng Lai was arm in arm with her and walking at a normal speed, felt the drag and took two steps back. She turned her head. "What's the matter?"

Jinhua Gardens is one of the most expensive villa districts in Pingchuan and the security is thorough. Residents are put into the face recognition system in advance, and when an outsider comes in the guards have to check with a resident before they open up.

Though most residents never need any of it, since their number plates are read as they drive through.

Looking at that familiar gate, Gi Changning drifted off somewhere.

It really had been a long time since she came here.

When Ji Ran messaged her last night her first feeling was that it was absurd. What was there she could not handle? She had lived at Jinhua Gardens for the best part of eight years. She could count the trees along the road, she knew the guards' shift rota by heart, she knew which path led to which gate, and she could walk from the gate to the Ji villa with her eyes shut. How could she not be up to it?

Then something awkward she could not name came down into her head like a falling rock. She turned the phone over and thought, before she knew she was thinking it, that it did not have to be Jinhua Gardens. They could go to the studio, or to Meng Lai's, or sit in the Gis' little front room. Three girls would fit.

When she said as much to Meng Lai, Meng Lai came back at her flatly. "She's coaching us for nothing as it is. It's bad enough that we didn't offer. Now you want her to come to us? That's a bit much, isn't it?"

Gi Changning had nothing to say.

A guilty feeling, all at once.

Sorry. It seemed she had been a bit much for a while now.

Since the day the air conditioner went in at the Gis' and Ji Ran spent an afternoon on her exercises, something had settled between the two of them that neither had put into words. When Ji Ran had nothing on she came over to the little attic and filled in the gaps, and she had never once suggested Gi Changning come to Jinhua Gardens.

This was the first time she had asked.

And Meng Lai was right. Ji Ran had behaved beautifully. Gi Changning had no standing to be asking for this and that, and even knowing Ji Ran would agree to anything she asked, she could not get the words out.

It was only that it was Jinhua Gardens.

She thought of a house in black and white and grey, a home so cold there was nothing human in it, where you could stand a bluetooth speaker in the middle of the living room and turn it up and dance, and nobody would ever come to the door about the noise.

The Jis did not own one house. The small flat where her mother had lived was swallowed up in the building of the new city and is now one of Pingchuan's shopping districts. The resale prices on her grandmother's estate climb every year, and that flat was shut up for good when the old lady died. Gi Changning was afraid of what the sight of it would bring back, and went only on the anniversary, to scrape the flyposted adverts off the door.

After that Jinhua Gardens was the house they actually lived in. Her father had a horror of live-in housekeepers, and Gi Changning did not like sharing a house with strangers, so there was only a cleaner who came on a schedule. Sometimes they crossed paths and the woman would kindly cook her a meal. When they did not, she ordered in, or went out to eat with friends.

Sometimes she was even glad the house was big enough and the two Ji men busy enough that nobody had to be awkward at anybody every day.

A family living together, and each of them living separately. There is not a lot in that.

So in her memory the house at Jinhua Gardens was a house and nothing more, and the play most often staged in it went like this. Gi Changning causes trouble, her father loses his temper, her brother smooths it over. Or her father makes an effort, Gi Changning ignores him and says something cutting, her father feels guilty, her brother smooths it over.

Round and round, as if that were how all three of them proved they were a family.

After the swap she curled up in the little attic, and everything at Jinhua Gardens went into the part of your memory you need not attend to.

Then one passing line from Ji Ran, and it came pouring out with nothing she could do about it.

Gi Changning's seventeenth birthday had not come yet. Sixteen and a half years at the outside, and sixteen of them lived with the Jis. She said cheerfully that she had been set free at last. What she actually thought, only she knew.

But if she were really a person with no feeling in her, she would not be a dancer.

A good dancer is grown in feeling, the way you keep a plant warm.

Outside the gates Meng Lai saw her staring at nothing. They had known each other for years and she had some idea what it was. She poked Gi Changning in the small of the back, and teased her in a voice that said she understood. "Our Ning, who puts the sky first and herself second. You're not going shy now you're nearly home?"

The memories broke up. Gi Changning is ticklish and dodged sideways, and then rolled her eyes. "Ning has never in her life known how to spell shy."

With that she got out her phone to ask Ji Ran to approve the request.

But Meng Lai took two steps forward, and since they were arm in arm Gi Changning was hauled off balance, and her face came down square in front of the recognition camera.

A ping. Accepted.

She stood holding her phone for a second or two. "What?"

After the swap, the Jis had not deleted her from the system?

"What, what." Meng Lai took her hand. "Come on. Don't keep my future teacher waiting."

Walking up to the villa, Gi Changning was still winded. She stared at that quietly expensive door, and her eyes went to the fingerprint lock.

Her heart gave a small shake. She had no idea what she was thinking. She put a finger on the sensor to see, and after a buzz of current the door gave a small click.

It was open.

---

Ji Ran checked her phone. About the right time. Gi Changning would be nearly here. She stretched in the study and went down to look.

If she was honest, she had made Gi Changning come to Jinhua Gardens on purpose.

She knew perfectly well how big the Gis' attic was and whether three girls would fit in it. She had meant to go there as usual, and in the second she began typing, the thought of bringing Gi Changning to Jinhua Gardens came to her instead.

Living with her father and her brother these months, Ji Ran could hardly miss how much they loved Gi Changning. It was only that the love was buried under offhand remarks and inside wordless standoffs, and it had begun to come unsealed only after she arrived.

She understood it. When she first came to the Jis and faced that huge empty living room and that house, opening her mouth to say one sentence felt like losing heat, so she shut her mouth by instinct and would not talk.

Nothing like the Gis'.

The little attic there had sunlight in it, and small bright-coloured things, and hot food, and no end of things to talk about.

You only had to be inside it to be warm all the way through.

Ji Ran has never been one to dwell on the past, and even so there was a long stretch when she ached for her old home. Which is why she agreed entirely with what Gi Changning had said. In that house, and with those two men, she had never been given enough to feel safe on.

Like a fledgling suddenly out of the nest, going forward and at the same time stumbling about trying to find its way back to somewhere it can sleep, under the wide wings of its parents.

Ji Ran was wearing a jumper Gi Changning's mother had made to her measurements, mostly a soft grey, with yellow flowers whose petals hung shyly down, like flowers opening in dust. When she had nothing on she sometimes went over to the shop to clean or work the till or carry plates, and when the rush was over she talked to Gi Changning's father about school and about how things were going.

Nothing seemed to have changed. She had only moved where she slept, and the little attic beyond the ash trees still held her mother and her father. And everything had changed. Her mother made clothes and was happy doing it, and her father had the thing he had wanted and a shop that was busy.

Gi Changning had brought that about. She had used her eye and her contacts to open a new road for the Gis, which Ji Ran could never have done.

And Ji Ran liked the change.

So might it be possible to let Gi Changning come and see what had changed at the Jis'?

Would she be surprised? Would she like it?

Ji Ran came down the stairs, and heard a small click at the door.

Gi Changning was here.