Chapter 29

In the middle of March, a blogger known for being good at gossip put up a post full of hints and not one name.

"Heard something amusing at a drinks thing the other day. A domestic sportswear label wanted to open a new line and brought in a designer who's won a prize abroad to do the lead design. Heavy metal, alternative, nothing whatever like the brand. When we heard about it we laughed at them for having more money than sense. People in the trade warned them and they wouldn't listen. And now the designer has gone and leaked the new drawings in the most carefree way imaginable. Honestly I had to laugh. A domestic label hiring a prizewinner from abroad. There's no need to fawn on foreigners like that, and they can live with the consequences. Don't ask me who it is. Whoever's summer range falls over, that's who."

The blogger has a great many followers, and within minutes there were close to a thousand comments.

"Let me pull out the key words for everyone. Domestic, sportswear, leaked drawings."

"There are only a few domestic sportswear labels. Cross them off one at a time."

"Are you ill? Hiring a designer who won a prize abroad is fawning on foreigners? Are you handing in your passport if you own an iPhone?"

The blogger replied: "Here's your fare. Now get off my post."

"Hang on, it's not Anzhi, is it? They put out a summer concept film and then nothing."

"I went straight to Anzhi's official account and looked. It's true. Nothing but the concept film."

"Give us a straight answer. Is it Anzhi?"

The blogger replied: "No straight answers. You bring these things on yourself. Wait and see."

The blogger stayed ambiguous, and the gossip public never minds a bigger fire, and they settled it among themselves that it was Anzhi. They charged over to Anzhi's latest post and started asking.

"Is it true Anzhi's new designs have leaked?"

"Give us a straight answer about whether the summer range is happening."

"Stop playing dead."

Anzhi monitors this sort of thing, and whoever runs the account reported it at once. The press people were entirely unbothered. "It's fine. Leave it. Don't reply. It'll trend in a bit."

The account manager had no idea what was going on.

Competition between brands is not very interesting. It is poaching each other's deals and staff, running each other down in public, kicking the other one while they are down. You do not often get people climbing walls to steal files or cornering somebody in a lift.

Industrial spies, shorting a stock, hacking. You almost never see any of that either.

Anzhi's image has always been on the conservative side. It picks athletes who have won things for the country and stays away from the entertainment world, which has given it a good name and also got it labelled, whether it likes it or not, as dull.

Which is exactly why Ji Ran's father wanted a new trend line.

Sure enough, less than two hours after the first post, the words Anzhi design leak were hanging off the bottom of the trending list.

---

Her father sat in his office with his glasses on, scrolling and complaining as he went, and reading a couple of bits aloud when it got good. "Have these people nothing to do? I can almost recite which marketing account belongs to which company. It's the same few lines going round and round."

The internet being what it is, keep a hundred or so marketing accounts and hire some paid commenters and you can throw mud at anybody. Anzhi sued a few bloggers early on to make the point, and the rest got clever and stopped naming names and went on being unpleasant.

It is not that Anzhi has no friendly accounts. It is that Ji Ran's father is old-fashioned and will not knife anybody from behind. He prefers to answer in the open.

Ji Changfeng had been running flat out for a fortnight and had been back to Jinhua Gardens only a handful of times. He slept in the car or on a camp bed in the office. He was dozing on the sofa in his father's office, and said hoarsely, "They've called you a foreign bootlicker and you're this cheerful?"

"Why wouldn't I be? The higher they jump, the more it stings when they land." His father was enjoying himself. "And you can keep that broken voice to yourself. There's medicine in your bag that Ranran bought you. Go and take two."

He cleared his throat. "I have."

A change of season will give anybody a cold. He had worked himself blind, thrown himself on the camp bed for two hours and woken with his tonsils up, and the cold had followed. Talking hurt, so he wore a mask to keep it off everybody else and said as little as possible, and after a few days of this the whole company was saying that young Mr Ji was getting more like the chairman every day.

Young Mr Ji did not want to be. He wanted to stage a coup and become the chairman.

"If you've taken it, drink plenty. The water cooler's over there and you can pour it yourself. Don't expect me to wait on you." His double standards were on open display. If Ji Ran or Gi Changning had a cold he would not merely pour water, he would boil ginger tea himself, whether anybody could drink it or not. He scrolled on, then slapped the desk. "It's trending. Tell the press office to get ready."

Anzhi had never actually meant to hide the leak. It was already in the courts, and once it came to a hearing the recording would be public and anybody could look the judgment up.

Hiding it had only ever been about buying enough time to get the publicity ready.

---

Anzhi is known well enough by the public that the leak got a lot of discussion. Some people talked seriously about what a leak costs. Others were led straight along by the marketing accounts and said Anzhi was fawning on foreigners and had it coming.

The heat climbed, and at the very top of it Anzhi's official account posted.

"Anzhi: a look at summer. Is this the Fierce Flame, Blazing Sun you had in mind?"

The account was stingy with it. Three pictures only, and the middle one looked like a white background put in to make up the numbers. The other two were of models.

Two minutes after it went up the account linked itself to the trending topic, and crowds poured in, and before anybody could comment they were caught by the pictures.

In the first, the model sat anyhow in front of a white board with one leg bent up and an arm resting on it, a fan held across the cheek, so that the clothes were half shown and half hidden.

Out of a fierce red came the edge of an opera headdress, with the long pheasant plumes swept as though an invisible hand had pushed them aside, and you could almost hear opera somewhere nearby. A summer evening, walking by the river or along a road or across a square, and an old man's cassette player giving out that wailing sound you cannot follow and which is beautiful anyway.

It went straight through everybody, and they turned to the next picture, and the white background turned out to have something in it. Enlarged, it was a model too.

Nothing like the first. The model stood loosely, the jacket not worn properly, one shoulder bare on purpose and half the back covered. On the plain black of it an enormous crane climbed with its wings spread, taking up nearly the whole back, every feather of the embroidered wings distinct, so that in another second the bird would break out of the cloth and fly up into a cloudless blazing sky.

People who had come for the gossip were hit squarely by all of that and forgot entirely what they had come for.

"Anzhi's got something here. I'm interested now."

"Is this the new range? Is it? Is it?"

"I love the first one. How can opera and ordinary clothes go together that well?"

"Hurry up. I can't wait. I want to wear that out and stop traffic."

"Why is it only March? Fast forward to summer."

There were, of course, still the diligent ones who only wanted trouble.

"Is it true your drawings leaked?"

Anzhi replied: "Thank you for your concern. It's in the hands of our lawyers."

So it had leaked.

The rival labels' paid commenters rolled their sleeves up, and then a question went through their heads. What does a leak actually do?

Going by the account's tone, in the hands of the lawyers meant court, and after something that size Anzhi would not be letting it go. More to the point, Anzhi had found a designer who could carry a whole range, and all the invented nonsense in the world had just been knocked flat by a couple of photographs.

In the market as it stands, traditional and popular elements are two lines feeling each other out. Traditional patterns turn up everywhere as trim, and you rarely see them used across that much of an everyday garment. Traditional work is more loved every year, and while a lot of labels were still hesitating, Anzhi had taken the step and got to a market nobody had opened yet.

So, thought the commenters, we work the fawning-on-foreigners line. Work it how?

The clothes used traditional work you could not miss, opera and a crane, and the crane in a great expanse of embroidery that hit you in the eye. More and more people caught up.

"Is this fawning on foreigners? Does that look like fawning on foreigners? I'll hit anybody who says Anzhi fawns on foreigners."

"Who's the designer, please? The style is fantastic."

Anzhi replied: "A new designer called Shanqing, who is the lead designer for Fierce Flame, Blazing Sun."

People in the trade who had come for the fun looked at the name Shanqing and scratched their heads, and asked friends in the trade, "Do you know Shanqing? I've never heard of them."

"Have I been under a rock? Who's Shanqing?"

"Who in this group works at Anzhi? Give us something."

---

Gi Changning's mother had no idea she had begun to make a name in the trade. She handed in her notice at the end of February, and every hour off and every day in lieu went into Fierce Flame, Blazing Sun, grinding at the first drafts, making the patterns and changing them again and again, weighing every detail, and all of it against the clock, with time still to be left for production and getting stock into the shops. Gifted as she is with design and with colour, it nearly finished her.

And all of it was worth it.

In April the publicity for Fierce Flame, Blazing Sun began, and it came out loud. There were Anzhi posters and adverts on every street, and by the middle of the month the whole range was in the shops.

Tomb Sweeping was nearly on them.

The weekend before it, Meng Lai and Gi Changning finally settled on an arts coaching school. They had asked their form teachers at length, put it all together, and decided to start after the holiday.

Before that the three girls decided to have a proper afternoon, because Meng Lai still owed that hotpot.

It was Ji Ran's first time at the studio the other two rented. Standing under a wall that is nothing but mirror, she poked curiously at the person in it. "It feels a bit different."

She could not have told you how. Only that she seemed to have got smaller.

"That's normal. You get used to it." Gi Changning found a yoga mat and sat her down on it, pushed a phone into her hands, took Meng Lai's phone and set it on a stand and adjusted the angle. "Ranran, wait for me to say go, then start recording and then start the music."

Ning keeps her word. The first time the routine was performed, Ji Ran was the first person to see it.

Ji Ran set the phone in front of her and looked over at Meng Lai in the corner, and asked quietly, "Is Lailai all right?"

Gi Changning had seen it before. "She's fine."

Meng Lai had the top of her head against the corner of the wall and was making small gestures with both hands and humming the music at eight times the speed. It is a habit of hers. She shuts down for a while before a performance so that once she is on she can let everything out.

Three minutes of that, two deep breaths, a few warm-up sets on the spot, and when her body had come up to temperature she turned round, nothing like she had been a minute before, her chin up and full of fight and pride.

Gi Changning stood back to back with her.

The music started.

The two of them walked forward at the same speed with the same stride, then turned sharply. They looked at each other. One tipped her head, and the other tipped her head like a reflection.

The piece is called Monster, and it is a mirror dance. The two dancers have to move exactly alike, as though each is facing herself in the glass.

They have been partners for years and there is no need to talk about how well they know each other. They played their parts, Meng Lai burning and loud and pressing forward, Gi Changning cool and steady and giving ground, and giving it again.

They are two people inside one body, and only by killing the other can either take proper hold of it.

In a bare studio, with no costume and no make-up and no lighting, the one person watching did not take her eyes off them, and had already gone down into whatever the dance was doing.

The music reached its wildest point, a run of harmonics pouring across two octaves, and both dancers took the beat and shook the muscle in time, and the madness came out whole.

After the harmonics, Gi Changning's character turned. She became the one attacking, taking ground and holding it, and Meng Lai fell back and fell back, and on the last beat of the drum she went down flat on the floor.

One of them had killed the other. Gi Changning looked down at Meng Lai on the ground, and her chin came slowly up, and her head whipped round towards the only person watching, and she let a grin spread over her face, exactly the grin Meng Lai had worn.

The drum stopped.

Monster had woken up.

Ji Ran's hand went to her own chest without her meaning it to. Her heart was going hard and would not stop. She had just looked straight into Gi Changning's eyes and been nearly pulled into them, and it was not the Gi Changning she knew standing there. It was that character out of the dance, entirely alive, carrying the memories of the one that had died. A monster.

"That's killed me. Worse than a three kilometre run." Meng Lai got herself slowly off the floor, breathing in great gulps. "I didn't dare breathe in case I broke it. My heart's about to go off. What kind of routine is that?"

Gi Changning blinked herself back and found her head short of air now she was out of it, and said feebly, "You make it sound as though you didn't help put it together."

She stood a moment to get her strength back, then came over and dropped onto the mat beside Ji Ran and put her head on her shoulder. "I frightened you, didn't I?"

"No." Ji Ran shook her head. She could feel the heat coming off her and the slight shaking, which told you how far into three minutes of dancing Gi Changning had gone. She paused, opened a bottle of water and handed it over. "The two of you were wonderful."

Wonderful beyond saying.

Gi Changning took it and had a small sip. She had just worked hard and too much water would be bad for her. She swallowed, and said lazily, "You can praise me on my own, Ranran. You don't have to bring Meng Lai into it."

Meng Lai was furious. "Gi Changning, have you no shame?"

"Sorry. None."

Meng Lai had nothing to say.

What a person.

When they had rested, the three of them sat in a triangle with Meng Lai's phone in the middle and watched it back.

Gi Changning and Meng Lai talked over what could be better and where they were not clean or not together, and explained to Ji Ran why it was built the way it was.

At the end Meng Lai rolled her neck. "With costumes it might land even better."

"Don't." Gi Changning's face said a great deal. "I haven't seen my mother at any hour but dinner."

She had meant to ask her mother to make the costumes, and one of the two was done and one was not, and then her mother had spent two months on Anzhi. The work was going wonderfully and you could see her lighting up with it, and Gi Changning could not bring herself to interrupt her with something so small.

"I can bear witness," Ji Ran said. "I haven't seen my dad or my brother in daylight hours for ages."

"Lucky you." Meng Lai, who is nagged daily, was sincerely envious. "My mother never works late."

Everybody has their own troubles. The three of them sighed together.

Meng Lai rallied. She had only just escaped a life of weekend coaching, and on the principle that today's wine is for drinking today she opened an app and found the hotpot rankings for Pingchuan. "It's nearly noon. Which one do you like the look of? Let's get hotpot."

"Hotpot nothing." Gi Changning waved a hand. "Come on. I'm taking you to our dad's place."