Chapter 43

Ning Shu and Lu Zheng looked at each other across the length of the restaurant for a good ten seconds.

Gouwa, oblivious, dragged Lu Zheng over by the arm. "Sis, this is my big brother. His name's Lu Zheng. You remember him, right? We ran into him at the night market that time, and you worked out he was going to crash that night. You even worked out he's got a birthmark on his backside!"

Ning Shu: ...

What she wanted, very badly, was to hit someone.

Fu Nansheng looked at Lu Zheng. Lu Zheng happened to be looking him over at the same moment, and the two of them held each other's eyes, something stirring behind both.

"Sis, are you out with this guy?" Gouwa bellowed, as if he'd caught her at something. "Dating! At your age! I'm telling Grandma!"

Ning Shu very nearly got up and thumped him.

Fu Nansheng asked her, "Your brother?"

"Yep!" Gouwa, entirely at home, sat down and stuck his hand out to Fu Nansheng. "I'm her sister."

Idiot.

"You're her sister?"

Gouwa caught up with himself and laughed. "She's my sister. Slip of the tongue."

"Well, why don't you both sit with us."

Gouwa didn't need asking. He was already in his seat, and he turned to Lu Zheng. "Big brother, eat with us. My sister's really nice, you two should get to know each other. She's the one who saved you last time."

"..."

"Fine." Lu Zheng sat down next to Ning Shu, and Ning Shu moved smartly along the bench.

Gouwa, naturally, took the seat beside Fu Nansheng.

The waiter came for their order. Lu Zheng asked for a sirloin. Gouwa couldn't read the English on the menu, so he asked for the same.

"And how would you like it done, sir? Any particular sauce?"

"Done? Done all the way through, obviously, I'm not eating it raw. And the hottest sauce you've got," Gouwa said, as if this were self-evident.

Ning Shu fought down the urge to kick him across the room.

The waiter was about to go into detail when she spoke up. "Medium, leaning well done. Black pepper. Cut into three, please. Thank you."

Lu Zheng never ate a steak well done, and never medium rare either. Medium, a shade past it, with black pepper. It was how he had taken it for years.

Lu Zheng looked up sharply, and there was something new in the way he looked at her. Ning Shu didn't notice. She was busy glaring Gouwa into behaving.

A faint smile crossed Lu Zheng's mouth and was gone.

The steaks came. Lu Zheng ate quietly and without hurry, and didn't say a word from start to finish. Ning Shu, beside him, took her cue from that: if he wasn't moving, neither was she.

Gouwa asked Fu Nansheng, "Nansheng, are you better now?"

"Fully recovered."

"That was a funny night. My sister had just worked out that Lu Zheng was going to crash and told him not to race, and then Lu Zheng leaves, and it's you who comes off."

Fu Nansheng looked at Lu Zheng across the table, and his eyes held a little more than they showed.

Yes. A funny coincidence.

Lu Zheng went on eating as if nothing had been said.

After a while Fu Nansheng explained, "My stars were crossed that day. I should never have gone out. It was just that by the small hours I was so hungry I couldn't stand it, so I went out for something to eat."

"When your stars are crossed you don't go out, full stop," Ning Shu said. "Be careful next time. Especially with your luck."

Lu Zheng cut her off before she'd finished. "What's it to you whether his stars are crossed?"

"Save a life, build up a bit of hidden merit," Ning Shu said, nettled.

"Oh, Sis," Gouwa said, "this whole big-brother thing, don't tell my mum."

"It's not like that. He's not like Wang Yucheng. He's been good to me. When I first got to the class and people were picking on me, he stood up for me. Nobody picks on me now."

Ning Shu put down her knife and fork. "Who was picking on you? Why didn't you tell me?"

"What good would telling you do?"

"I'm your sister. Of course you tell me."

Gouwa grinned. "I've got Lu Zheng now. It's sorted. He looks out for me, and the whole class does what he says."

Ning Shu knew the type. Some city people had their eyes set in the tops of their heads and looked down on anyone from a village. She had worried that Gouwa would get that treatment in his class, but with the footsteps in the dormitory block taking up her time, she had never got round to asking him.

Lu Zheng shifted in his seat, one eyebrow slightly raised.

Ning Shu gritted her teeth and said it anyway. "Thank you."

She meant it.

"Thank me how?"

"Dinner's on me."

"Fine." Lu Zheng nodded and beckoned the waiter. "Truffle, foie gras, caviar, matsutake, one of each. And a case of the '79 Lafite."

Ning Shu: ...

He was going straight for the expensive end of the menu!

She felt a pang for her money. "That's a lot. Are you actually going to eat all that?"

Lu Zheng's mouth curled into an easy smile. "What I can't finish, I'll take home for later."

Ning Shu's lip curled.

Hope you choke on it.

Over the second half of dinner Ning Shu told Fu Nansheng about the pen spirit. He looked at the red mark between her brows and said, "At your level now, you don't come cheap. If that little ghost wants something from you, it's not going to get you out that easily."

"It's not really about money," Ning Shu said. "It's that it goes around scaring people, which I can't stand. It hasn't shown up again lately, though."

"It wouldn't dare."

The two of them chatted along like friends. Lu Zheng couldn't get a word in, and said, sourly, "Of all the things you could be, you pick fraud."

"What's wrong with being a fraud?" said Ning Shu, bristling.

"You don't know how people in that trade end up?" Lu Zheng said stubbornly. "My family's hired a few of them. None of them came to a good end. The money's good, but you pay for it with your body."

For a moment Ning Shu almost thought he was worried about her.

"That's because the ones your family hires never do anything good." She snorted. "Look at my grandmother. A whole life spent putting down ghosts and demons and setting things right, and she's going to live to ninety-nine."

"Which is why your grandmother is still in a village."

"What's wrong with a village? Wasn't your family in a village three generations back?"

"It was not. In the Republic years the Lu trading houses were all over Shanghai, Guangzhou and Tianjin." Lu Zheng gave a cold laugh. "After '49 we went to England. Came back in the nineties and built it up again, and that's the Lu Group you see today."

"..."

Yes, yes. You're something, and so is your whole family.

She couldn't beat him. She could at least keep out of his way.

The conversation had finally collapsed, and everyone went quietly back to their food.

When they were done Ning Shu took her purse up to the front desk. Fu Nansheng came up behind her. "Let me get it."

"No, we agreed. It's on me," Ning Shu said. "And my brother turned up."

Turned up with his new sworn big brother, who had ordered a table's worth of food and was taking it home.

Whichever way you looked at it, this one was hers to pay.

Fu Nansheng dropped his voice. "There's a crowd here. Do me the favour. Next time, when it's just you and me, you can pay."

Ning Shu glanced over at Lu Zheng and Gouwa and understood what he meant. With men at the table, letting a woman pay didn't look right.

And besides, she was still at school, and Fu Nansheng was already working.

She hesitated, and then gave in.

Fu Nansheng took out his card. The girl at the desk said, with perfect courtesy, "There's nothing to pay, sir."

"Nothing to pay?" Ning Shu said. "Why not?"

"Because this restaurant also belongs to the Lu family."

Lu Zheng walked past Ning Shu and glanced at Gouwa. "Come on, little brother."

"Right behind you, Big Brother!"

Gouwa, clinging to the Lu money like a limpet, trotted after him.

Ning Shu and Fu Nansheng looked at each other and shrugged.

Money talks.

Ning Shu meant to call up the pen spirit once more, and this time she was going to help it, since it had kept itself out of trouble lately.

A few mornings later she dragged Gouwa to the door of the boys' toilets and handed him a bottle of Nongfu Spring.

"I need some of a boy's water."

A boy's water was full of living warmth, and there was nothing better for driving off evil and keeping ghosts down. When they were small, their grandmother was forever having Gouwa fill a bottle.

Gouwa went red. "I already went this morning."

There was a knack to collecting it. It had to be the first of the morning, when the warmth in it was strongest.

Ning Shu smacked him on the head. "Didn't I tell you last night to hold it until you got to school?"

"Who can hold it that long?"

"So what now?"

"Wait till tomorrow," Gouwa said. "I'll fill a bottle for you first thing."

"You're hopeless, you know that?"

While the two of them were arguing, Gouwa spotted Lu Zheng ambling over, with a glance in Ning Shu's direction that may or may not have been accidental.

"Got it!" Gouwa said. "I'll ask Big Brother if he's been yet!"

"Hey! Don't you—" But Gouwa was already bounding off before she could stop him.

Unbelievable. He was actually going to ask Lu Zheng for his water.

Ning Shu noticed that when Gouwa had finished explaining, Lu Zheng, for no reason she could see, went red.

She pretended to study the sky, feeling somewhat awkward herself.

And then Lu Zheng actually took the bottle out of Gouwa's hand and walked into the boys' toilets.

"See?" said Gouwa. "That's my big brother for you. Straight up. You ask, he delivers."

Ning Shu had no words. The fool had gone and asked Lu Zheng for that, of all things. The Lu Zheng of her first life would have had him trussed up and thrown in the river.

Lu Zheng came back out and handed her the bottle without a word.

Ning Shu took it, and decided she would never understand him.