Chapter 11

The next day Ning Shu went shopping with her aunt. Her grandmother had made a point of telling her aunt that since they so rarely got into the city, she was to get Ning Shu several sets of new clothes.

Shopping was something Ning Shu was good at, having spent the last life in the entertainment industry, and she used her own money to buy her aunt a set of skincare and face masks that had not been cheap. Her aunt was startled that Ning Shu suddenly had so much money, and Ning Shu did not keep it from her. She had been setting up a stall down by the river and reading fortunes.

"You put a cloth down and read a few fortunes and you can make that much?"

Ning Shu shrugged. "There's no help for it. There are too many rich people now."

There were too many rich people, but once they had money they started worrying and thinking about everything, so they wanted masters who could count it out and keep them safe. At the least they wanted to feel settled about things.

Her aunt took Ning Shu into a children's clothing shop. With the small body she had now, children's clothes were all she could wear.

They went round the shop a few times. Her aunt's eye for this was not good, and the several outfits she picked out for Ning Shu were not to her taste at all.

They were in the shop a long while and not one assistant came over to them. Ning Shu even wanted a smaller size to try on and could not find a single assistant free.

At first Ning Shu thought the assistants were busy and had no time for them. Then a well-dressed, well-off-looking mother and daughter came in, and assistants went round them straight away, falling over themselves to show them things and fetch them clothes to try.

Her aunt took a small dress over to one of the assistants and said, "Young lady, could you get me a smaller size in this for my girl to try?"

Her aunt spoke in a thick country accent, and the assistant gave her a look of open contempt and said coldly, "Can't you see I'm busy?"

The assistants were all taken up with the fashionable mother and her daughter, and left her aunt and Ning Shu standing there.

Her aunt came back and spat out, "Snobs."

Ning Shu had seen more than enough of that sort in the last life.

"Auntie, don't be cross. We'll look round on our own and have a bit of peace." Ning Shu took her aunt's arm and comforted her.

Her aunt was in fact a proud woman, and being looked down on out of nowhere like that did not sit well with her. But she did not want to spoil Ning Shu's day out, so she grumbled a little and let it go.

Ning Shu found several things that fitted and tried them on and picked out two sets she liked, and at the till her aunt asked, casually, "Could you do anything on the price of these?"

Her aunt was used to haggling for everything she bought in town, so she asked without thinking, and it was not that she would only buy if the price came down.

But the assistant glanced at her and said, with no patience at all, "If you can't afford it don't buy it. What are you haggling for? Look at where you are before you come in. We're an international brand, not a little shop at the vegetable market."

Her aunt heard that and was furious. "What sort of way is that to talk? Who says I can't afford it? I only asked. Why look down on people like that?"

The assistant looked her up and down. "From the countryside, aren't you? Did you look at the tag? One thousand eight hundred. Can you afford that?"

Ning Shu had the anger stopped up in her and would have liked to throw the money in the woman's face. She did not do it. If she scrapped with somebody like that she would only turn into the same thing, and there was nothing in it.

Ning Shu threw the clothes down on the counter and pulled her aunt away. "We'll go to another shop. I've never seen business done like this."

The assistant tidied the clothes and said after them, "Try the market stalls round the corner. Really. No manners, these country people."

Ning Shu stopped where she was. She turned and looked the assistant over carefully, and the assistant did not like being looked at by that pair of black eyes and said awkwardly, "What do you want?"

Ning Shu moved her eyes away and said, quite calmly, "Your color is floating and your nostrils stand open. The year is sitting square over your head. If it isn't a disaster it will be a calamity."

"What did you say!" There was something uneasy in the assistant's voice. "Are you putting a curse on me?"

"Apologise to my aunt and I'll tell you how to settle it. Otherwise, within two days, something will happen to you."

The assistant seemed to be put off by the look on Ning Shu's face and went a little wary. Then she saw that it was only a small girl who could not possibly know anything, so she made a lot of noise and called security over. "Get these two troublemakers out! They're interfering with our business."

Two guards came over at once and began to push Ning Shu and her aunt out of the shop.

"Let go!" Ning Shu pulled hard out of their hands. "We can walk out ourselves!"

Her aunt put herself in front of Ning Shu. "Don't you touch a child! You've gone too far. I'll report you!"

Ning Shu was pushed out of the shop door, lost her footing and nearly fell, and went straight into somebody's chest. He had not expected it either and put a hand out to steady her without thinking.

A smell she knew came at her, and something in Ning Shu's chest dropped.

She looked up, and the first thing she saw was a pair of black eyes with no bottom to them, like ink that will not thin. There was still something unfinished about the face, but the coldness in the brows, and the distance, were the same as his, exactly the same.

Lu Zheng.

It was Lu Zheng.

The sweat came out cold on Ning Shu's back and she went several steps away from him as though she had seen a ghost.

The Lu Zheng in front of her was a boy of ten or so. But that steady, unhurried way he held himself was already the grown Lu Zheng.

He stood where he was, straight and tall, and ran two long fine fingers down his collar to settle it, and looked down at her.

Then it came to Ning Shu that he did not know her at all. This was a child Lu Zheng. What was she afraid of? Was he going to drag her back somewhere? There was nothing to be afraid of, nothing whatever.

Except that at exactly that moment the corner of his mouth lifted in a small smile, and was gone as he turned.

It put a crawling feeling through Ning Shu.

She knew that expression far too well. It was Lu Zheng's own smile and nobody else's.

She took two more steps back, on her guard.

A middle-aged man beside him said to Ning Shu, without any courtesy, "Can't you look where you're going? You've walked into the young master."

"I'm sorry. We didn't mean to." Ning Shu apologised to Lu Zheng. She had his character measured. He had never taken hard treatment, only soft. Come at him hard and he would go down with you in his teeth. Give way to him and he would soften, and when he was tender with somebody, one look from him could kill you with sweetness.

"Did I walk into you?" Ning Shu asked him, soft about it.

Lu Zheng pressed his thin mouth and said nothing, and had no expression at all, like a cold-faced statue. "Whether you did or you didn't. Don't you know yourself?"

Even the way he said it was exactly the Lu Zheng of the last life.

There was a great deal going on in Ning Shu's chest. Grief. And, damn it, something not far off missing him.

Lu Zheng gave her one long look, turned and left.

She let her breath out. Good. He was gone.

Ning Shu finally breathed properly, and counted it out on her fingers. Today really was a bad day to go anywhere.

She went over to her aunt. "Auntie, are you all right?"

"I'm all right." Her aunt waved it off. "These city people are too much!"

Ning Shu looked back at the children's shop once and said coldly, "Don't bother yourself over her. Trouble's coming down on her anyway."

On the way her aunt asked, "Can you really see it?"

Ning Shu said, "I can. Though it depends on the person. Some I can see, some I can't, and for some I'd need their birth characters."

The heavenly eye had not opened yet, so this was something like a warming-up. It came down to luck, and she took whatever she happened to catch.

There was no telling when the eye would open.

That evening Ning Shu fetched food from the canteen and came up, and when she went into the ward her uncle and her cousin were watching the news.

The moment her aunt saw her she said, "Ah-Ning, come and look. Isn't that the children's shop we were in today?"

Ning Shu put the food down and sat on the edge of the bed to watch. The news was reporting that a children's clothing shop in the commercial centre had caught fire, and the flames had taken the whole shop. The strange part was that the fire had taken only that one shop and had not touched any of the premises around it.

The first finding was a fault in the wiring.

As to casualties, there had only been one assistant still in the shop at the time, who had been about to finish for the day, and that assistant was the very woman who had been so free with her mouth to her aunt and Ning Shu that afternoon.

She had been taken to hospital. She was not dead, but she was badly burned, with ninety per cent of her body affected.

Her aunt told her uncle and Gouwazi what had happened that afternoon, sighing over it, and kept saying, "Ah-Ning read that exactly right. She said the woman had the year against her and something would happen to her, and it did. That's the wicked getting what's coming to them. That's what she gets for looking down on us."

But Ning Shu's brows had drawn together.

It was wrong. That afternoon she had plainly seen black light under the woman's brows, which is a sign of losing money. It is nowhere near serious enough to touch a life. So how had it gone as far as the shop and the woman both burning?

Ninety per cent of her body. That was horrifying.

Ning Shu could not make it come out right.

That evening she played checkers with her cousin, and it got late, so she stayed at the hospital. At about half past eleven she took her toothbrush to the public bathroom to wash.

The inpatient wing was in an old block from the nineties, and the public bathroom looked its age, the walls stained yellow, the light grey and giving off a cold white.

Ning Shu brushed her teeth without thinking about anything much. It was late enough that there was nobody else in there, and all she could hear was the water running.

She cupped water in her hands to wash her face, and for some reason the water at that hour was icy enough to go through to the bone.

And in the second she lifted her head after washing, she saw in the mirror that a small boy was standing behind her, grim as the grave.

The boy had no whites to his eyes. Black pupils filled the whole of them. The vicious black air came off every part of him, and the white light from the ceiling falling on him only made him look worse.

Everything around her was dead silent.

Ning Shu felt herself held and pulled tight, as though a great invisible hand had closed around her heart and she could not get out of it.

She turned round quickly, but behind her there was nothing at all.

In the mirror the small boy slowly raised his head and looked at her.

His voice was low, and he said it quietly.

"Hello, Mother."