Chapter 34

Pingchuan People's Hospital.

Ji Ran sat on a cold chair in the corridor with both hands propping up her forehead, saying nothing.

Her black hair was not tied back the way it usually is. It fell as it liked, following the set of her body, and hid her face, so that anybody going past saw only the crown of her head.

In a hospital it is a very common sight.

Ji Changfeng sat beside her with his collar folded in on itself and his hair roughly pushed into order, two strands of it still sticking stubbornly up.

Half an hour earlier he had been asleep and had been woken by something close to a scream from his sister. He pulled a coat on, opened the door and found Ji Ran wild-faced and barely able to finish a sentence. He asked nothing, and got her and Liang Shuo into the car and to the hospital.

Liang Shuo's mother works at Pingchuan People's.

In his mind Ji Ran was a very strong person, and the strength had nothing to do with how she looked or where she came from. She has a toughness nobody sees, like a sunflower that has been through wind and rain and still lifts its head and goes on growing.

He did not flatter himself that he and his father had grown a conscience overnight, or suddenly worked out how to get on with the youngest in the house. It was Ji Ran who had quietly, the way water soaks in, turned a building back into a home.

They had never seen her low, and had taken it for granted that nothing could break her.

And Ji Ran is sixteen. Her seventeenth birthday is months away.

She can be happy and she can ache and she can be lonely. She can cry, and be frightened.

She was frightened that Liang Shuo, who a minute earlier had been running about and pulling faces and haggling over his homework, had come to harm because she looked away.

It was all right now. But if it had not been.

Who would bet on that?

Liang Cheng came out through the door.

Ji Ran did not move, as if she had not heard a thing.

Liang Cheng signalled Ji Changfeng to move, sat down beside her and put a broad hand on her back.

Ji Ran's body went visibly stiff. She had no idea how long she had been sitting like that, and it was a while before she lowered her hands and slowly turned her head.

"Our Ranran's cried her face into a mess." Liang Cheng is on the plump side with a round face and a great deal of warmth about her, which suits her work. "That boy of mine is asleep in the rest room. Not a thing wrong with him. He'll probably wake up and play the poor child at me to get a sweet."

Ji Ran's eyes were red and there were no tears left, though you could see the tracks. Her voice was hoarse. "I'm sorry. If I hadn't looked away."

"You will not say that." Liang Cheng cut her off, straightened her back and looked her in the eye properly. "You did very well. Extremely well. If I had been there, I could have done about that much and no more."

She is a doctor and she knows it too well. Most people have no idea how to deal with an emergency, and what they do know stops at rescue breaths and chest compressions. For Ji Ran to use the Heimlich manoeuvre straight off and get the position of the thrust right was a very fast response indeed.

Ji Ran looked into eyes that had seen every kind of thing, and found no blame in them and no complaint, only approval. She bit her lip without meaning to. "Really?"

"Really." Liang Cheng was quite certain about it. "Will you tell me where you learned the Heimlich?"

Being told so by a doctor was particularly steadying, and her shoulders came slowly down out of their tightness. "When I was tutoring Shuo you gave me a book about first aid. The method was in it. I didn't know what to do at the time. I didn't think at all. I just did it."

Liang Cheng remembered. The swap had not yet come out, Ji Ran was Liang Shuo's tutor, and Liang Cheng had simply taken to her and asked a few polite questions about where she was at school and what she might want to study, and when she heard the girl was thinking of medicine she had been pleased in a way she could not account for. Later Ji Ran had asked shyly whether she might borrow a book, and Liang Cheng had been glad to, and gave it to her outright.

The book was put together by a number of well known specialists, with pictures throughout and every step set out in detail and nothing dry about it, and Liang Cheng's own marks in the margins and her own notes. Being given it outright alarmed Ji Ran, who refused several times and said she would bring it back when she had read it, and Liang Cheng went deaf and said she had no use for it and pushed it on her.

And round it had come, and the book she had given Ji Ran had been used on Liang Shuo.

Is there something arranging all this after all?

A great deal went through Liang Cheng's mind. She smiled and tucked Ji Ran's hair behind her ear. "Ranran, if you do become a doctor one day."

Before she could finish, a video call rang.

It took Ji Ran a moment to understand that the noise was coming from her. She got the phone out in a fluster and looked at Ningning is calling you and the accept and decline buttons, and without thinking pressed decline, sent one moment at speed, and put the phone down.

Liang Cheng patted her shoulder. "Go home if you need to. I'll message you when Shuo wakes up."

The sudden call seemed to have broken her mood, and she looked much better. "It's all right. I'll go down and call Ningning back and come up again."

Liang Cheng stood and watched her turn the corner towards the lifts, and stood shoulder to shoulder with Ji Changfeng, except that this nephew of hers is a good deal taller. She sighed. "What a doctor that girl would make, and your father wants to drag her into business management."

He put his hands up. "Auntie, he asked twice. Not long ago he told me Ranran can study whatever she likes, or nothing at all."

Liang Cheng clicked her tongue. "What's the matter with your father? Why can't he think of something nice?"

"That's not fair. What we mean is that she studies whatever she wants."

---

Outside the hospital building, Ji Ran found a quieter corner and rang Gi Changning back.

Gi Changning must have had her phone in her hand, because it connected at once.

On that small screen were two heads crowded in front of the camera. Ji Ran held the phone further away without meaning to and narrowed her eyes at the two of them. One was certainly Gi Changning. The other was. Hm. Very familiar.

The very familiar other one kept waving. "Ji Ran. Ji Ran. Do you remember me?"

Ji Ran looked properly, and between the shape of that face and the fact that Gi Changning would be back in the village, and the easiness of the voice, her eyes lit. "Fang Xiaomu?"

Fang Xiaomu was for a while the only bright thing in Ji Ran's middle school years. When Xue Miaomiao had driven off everybody else by one means or another, Fang Xiaomu stuck to her regardless, and if Xue Miaomiao came looking for trouble she swore straight back at her.

After the high school exams Ji Ran went to Pingchuan and Fang Xiaomu went to the best school in the county, and since in those days they were all as poor as each other and nobody had a phone, Fang Xiaomu took down the number of Ji Ran's mother. Then the Gis moved to Pingchuan and changed it. Ji Ran had taken down the number of the landline at Fang Xiaomu's grandfather's house, and afterwards the landline would not connect, and that was the end of it.

Two years since the exams, and Ji Ran looked at a Fang Xiaomu who had got fatter. Not fatter. A great deal healthier. And though they were a thousand miles apart, and though it was only a phone screen, seeing that face with no shadow on it, exactly as it had always been, some of the weight sitting on Ji Ran went quietly off, and something like gladness got out.

"There. I said she'd know me." Fang Xiaomu finally got back from the camera a little and elbowed Gi Changning, and said to Ji Ran with enormous satisfaction, "Changning didn't believe me. She said Uncle Gi and Auntie Shan hadn't known me and you might not either. I win."

The app sets it automatically, so a video call on the front camera gets a beauty filter, light, and you can turn it off. From where Ji Ran was, the Fang Xiaomu on the other end had cut her hair short to the ears, had good colour, and black bright eyes, and bore almost no resemblance to the girl who had been all height and as thin as a monkey.

Fang Xiaomu has always been easy in herself. Even when she was going hungry she would tell Ji Ran cheerfully how hard it was on her grandfather looking after her grandmother. When she laughs she laughs loudest, and when she cries she cries loudest too.

The smile caught, and Ji Ran's mouth went up. "The two of you have got on well."

Fang Xiaomu lifted her chin. "Your friend is my friend."

Yes. That is how Fang Xiaomu's mind works.

Gi Changning shrugged beside her. Fang Xiaomu is warm and takes to people instantly, and very few can refuse that much sincerity and that much grinning, and Ning is no exception. "Was something wrong just now? That doesn't look like Jinhua Gardens behind you."

Ji Ran nodded and did not deny it. "I'm at the hospital."

The hospital?

Both of them sat bolt upright and said it together. "Are you ill?"

"No."

"That won't do." Fang Xiaomu's head came back at the screen. "You've got to show me. You can hold a phone up, so your arms and hands are probably fine. Show me your legs. Show me your feet."

Gi Changning was carried straight along with her. "And her back. Her back."

Ji Ran had no way out and waved the phone about, and to prove there was nothing wrong with her at all she even jumped up and down on the spot. "Shall I take my temperature and show you the reading?"

Fang Xiaomu clapped. "Yes please, let's see it."

Ji Ran had nothing to say.

She looked quietly at Fang Xiaomu.

Fang Xiaomu sensed danger and drew her head back inch by inch. "All right, all right. I know you're fine."

Gi Changning caught up and hauled a conversation that had gone several hundred miles off course back where it belonged, wondering privately what it is about Fang Xiaomu that makes a person follow her reasoning without noticing.

Frightening, honestly.

She looked at Ji Ran and asked, as if idly, "Is it those two who are ill?"

Ji Ran knew exactly who those two were. "Dad and Changfeng are both fine. It's Shuo, at my aunt's. There was an accident."

And she set the whole thing out from beginning to end. She leaned against the wall and said slowly, "I can't bear to think about it. If I hadn't read that book. If I'd been a second later."

"But there's no if." Gi Changning said it flatly. She switched off the app's filter, and the red round Ji Ran's eyes came up clearly. "The fact is that you saved Shuo. That's the result, it's here, and nothing can change it."

Fang Xiaomu had been listening with a hand on her chin, and said suddenly, "Ji Ran. Is something worrying you?"

Ji Ran stopped.

Fang Xiaomu rubbed her chin with her thumb. "I think this has shown you something deeper, and it's got something to do with your plans?"

Ji Ran smiled ruefully. "It has."

Gi Changning made a noise.

She turned to look at Fang Xiaomu with complete disbelief. "Do you read fortunes on the side?"

How else do you get from that to her plans?

"Why would you think that?" Fang Xiaomu was genuinely surprised, and once she understood the question she waved her hands about a bit and then tapped her own forehead with one finger, and answered honestly, "Instinct."

Gi Changning had nothing to say.

That told her nothing whatever.

Ji Ran had met Fang Xiaomu's frankly alarming instinct more than once. A week before her grandmother died, Fang Xiaomu told Ji Ran she might have to take a few days off for family reasons and asked whether Ji Ran would help her catch up afterwards, and said that if she was not herself, Ji Ran was not to be cross. Ji Ran did not follow, and Fang Xiaomu said, "Mum and Dad have come home, and Grandad's very sad. I think Grandma's going."

That instinct is built on how closely she watches the faces of people she knows. She falls in with people very easily and she takes against people for no stated reason just as easily, and the sharpness of the line between the two is startling.

Ji Ran was honest about it. "On the way here with Shuo, my hands were shaking the whole time. I nearly tripped going up the steps."

As she said it an ambulance siren wound down nearby, and from that distance all she could see was a doctor stumbling as the stretcher came out.

The staff pushed the patient through into emergency, telling each other the basics at speed. They were racing death.

In a corner nobody was looking at, Ji Ran drew circles on the ground with her toe and said quietly to her friends, "I'm frightened. I can't carry the weight of a life."

Those are living people, and not one careless moment is allowed.

On the way to the hospital, holding a Liang Shuo who was hiccupping from crying, she had asked herself whether she was fit to put on that white coat one day, with all the hope that is in it.

Gi Changning started to speak and stopped.

Fang Xiaomu had no such hesitation. "But that's something for the future you to worry about. All the you of now has to do is get the future you to where she wants to be."

"The sixteen-year-old Ji Ran is frightened. What about the twenty-six-year-old one? Is she supposed to lose her dream because the sixteen-year-old was frightened?"

For a second Ji Ran felt Fang Xiaomu's logic line up exactly with Liang Shuo's.

Fang Xiaomu seemed to notice she had said something she did not entirely follow herself, and scratched her head. "Look at me. First I want to be a pilot. Second I want to do aerospace. Third there's a military academy. So I train and I work hard, and if they're not taking women pilots the year I sit my exams, I'll go to the best aerospace school there is. Because."

Ji Ran finished it without thinking. "Because Fang Xiaomu was born to belong to the sky."

One summer in their second year, in a PE lesson, Fang Xiaomu sat on the parallel bars with one finger pointing up and said, "Xiao means daybreak and Mu means evening. A whole turn of the day is in my name, and that only means one thing."

And Fang Xiaomu, thin as a stick, opened her arms as if to take hold of something, her eyes shining, and said, "Fang Xiaomu was born to belong to the sky."

"You remembered." Fang Xiaomu could not have been happier. "And my job right now is not to let one chance go by, so I can get the future Fang Xiaomu up there."

Ji Ran tipped her head and looked at Gi Changning, who was thinking. "The way Ningning keeps dancing?"

"Mm?" Gi Changning pulled on her bubble tea and said breezily, "Maybe?"

Ning is a different case. Dancing holds more than ten years of what she loves. It holds the look on her grandmother's face. It holds how she once longed after her mother Liang Zhi. It holds the pleasure of defying her father.

All of it, sweet and bitter, goes into every movement and every routine.

Gi Changning used to think that if there came a day when the curtain fell on her, she would go down under the brightest light on the stage.

For Fang Xiaomu, holding on at sixteen may mean only wanting to see what the view is like at twenty-six.

And if the view is not what you hoped?

That is probably a problem for the twenty-six-year-olds.