“Our generators are dying,” Guan Yu admits, like it’s this terrible revelation.

  “Wow!” Jiang Jin says. “You still had functioning generators? Shi Yan had backup generators installed in his house too, but they refused to even start when he needed them. He was so pissed.”

  “‘Shi Yan,’” Guan Yu mouths, looking around as if a fourth member of their crew is going to materialize. No way in hell.

  “Her ex-boyfriend,” Wei Shengyuan clarifies. “This building should’ve had a backup generator too, but it also refused to start. How come yours worked at all?”

  “It just did,” Guan Yu says.

  Whatever is different, clearly this guy is too out of the loop to know.

  “So, you’ll just have no lights,” Zan Xinyi says. “Our lights also don’t work. What’s the big deal?”

  “Our refrigeration, our communications, our chargers -- if we don’t have electricity, then how are we going to feed everyone?”

  Ah.

  With her water, and her snacks, and her casual scavenging, not a one of them has gone hungry.

  But that isn’t the case for the rest of the world, is it.

  But perhaps even more important--

  “That’s right,” Zan Xinyi murmurs. “People do need to charge their phones, don’t they.”

  Behind her, Wei Shengyuan breathes out a big sigh.

  “That’s right,” he says, agreeing with much more than what Guan Yu will understand. “People who aren’t us do need to charge their phones.”

  “But phones definitely don’t work anywhere,” Guan Yu says, confused. “Even if we kill the monster--”

  Even the rustling of Qingguang’s leaves stops as every head in the room snaps in his direction.

  “The monster?” Jiang Jin parrots.

  Guan Yu clamps his mouth shut.

  “No, let’s let that slide,” Zan Xinyi says. “There’s no hurry, since the game still comes first. I think we’ve been pressuring him too much.”

  If they pressure him to reveal something actually urgent, she might genuinely have to do something about it.

  “It isn’t good to force others to reveal secrets,” Jiang Jin agrees. “Okay, that’s enough for now. Wei Shengyuan, can I see your character designs again? I promise I won’t have anything else to say. I love it all!”

  “That’s what you said last time,” Wei Shengyuan says, tucking his drawing tablet further away from Jiang Jin. “Zan Xinyi, I’ve sent you the new card designs so you can start doing the battle set up. I know that takes you the longest.”

  She really needs to recruit another coder and offload all of this onto them.

  She looks back at Guan Yu.

  “There’s no chance you know anyone with extensive software coding experience, is there? Because if you do, I will prioritize whatever task you want.”

  Guan Yu looks genuinely sad.

  “I don’t,” he says. “Even all the new recruits... it’s like no one wants to talk about what they did before. How much they’ve lost.”

  “You’re too honest for your own good,” Zan Xinyi says. “Just think. If you’d lied just now, I wouldn’t have found out until after I helped you.”

  “I wouldn’t do that!” Guan Yu says, affronted.

  His eyes drift to Jiang Jin.

  “Though...couldn’t she tell...?”

  “Nope!” Jiang Jin says. “People’s hearts are both wonderful and complicated. Some people become nervous when they even think they are stating a mistruth, and some people are soothed by their own lies. You can’t hear inside someone’s thoughts just because of outside tells-- all you can ever do is believe them, or not.”

  “Don’t you always believe people?” Wei Shengyuan says.

  “No!” Jiang Jin says. “Otherwise, I’d still be dating Shi Yan.”

  Oh? Did Shi Yan lie to Jiang Jin? It wasn’t just a difference of opinion?

  Jiang Jin claps her hands together, banishing that line of dialogue.

  “I’ve also got things to do today, and some zombies to herd away from the building. They’ve been getting more prone to doubling back, lately, so I think I need to start changing up my sounds.”

  Wei Shengyuan doesn’t give an elaborate goodbye, wheeling himself out of the room as soon as Jiang Jin’s feathers stop blocking the doorway.

  He’s been hanging out in the plant’s room whenever he wants a bit more distance from Zan Xinyi’s own space.

  Well, it makes sense. The bathroom is still under construction, after all.

  Zan Xinyi waits for Guan Yu to make his own way out, but he doesn’t, still staring at her It Will Work tag stuck to the now silent radio.

  “We’ve done our best to survey the whole city,” Guan Yu says. “And there’s only one power plant that has any electricity still pulsing through it-- which doesn’t make sense. If they’re all not working, this one should be broken too.”

  Why did he wait to tell her, and her alone?

  It’s an illusion of privacy. Wei Shengyuan and Jiang Jin could’ve stayed. And he doesn’t really want her help, he wants their powers, their help.

  All he wants from her is to say that his problems are of a higher priority than hers.

  Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

  And they simply aren’t.

  “So what?” Zan Xinyi says.

  Guan Yu takes a deep breath.

  “We need to retake the plant. The only issue is that inside of it is a giant mutated monster of some sort. My team was the point team, the scouts-- until it spotted us. It’s been eating the electricity, or at the very least it’s growing stronger from the electricity. It’s not just about retaking the plant for the sake of the humanity left in the city-- it’s about the threat itself. We can’t let a monster keep growing and growing unchecked. It will lead to disaster. It’s already strong to the point we’ll need to send in every High Risk unit we have, plus a ton of teams for backup. My information can’t wait, Zan Xinyi. I need to return quickly. Before it’s too late.”

  She shouldn’t have asked any questions. Her mistake.

  “None of that is my problem,” she says. It will be her problem, eventually, but if she agrees to put the game on hold and contribute to the fight now, it won’t mean anything to her when her deadline passes without everything being completed. She’ll die either way, and she hates the thought of dying alone. “You’ve outlined the problem as if, if you just explain it enough, I’ll suddenly develop a conscience. Well, I won’t. If it doesn’t impact the game, it doesn’t matter.”

  The expression of strangled despair and frustration is very familiar to her.

  Don’t you care about anything, Zan Xinyi? If you really cared, you’ve have told me. This could have been something we handled together!

  She’ll say that he’s not even as pretty as her girlfriend, so it sits even uglier on him.

  “Come back with a proposal I’ll agree with,” Zan Xinyi says, even knowing he won’t appreciate her generous offer.

  And, naturally, he doesn’t.

  He stiffly stands up, hands clenched at his sides and walks past her.

  She’s expecting him to storm away completely, but instead he goes right back to Wei Shengyuan’s bathroom repairs.

  No one’s told him that working harder doesn’t mean anything when your employer doesn’t intend to hire any more full time staff.

  Military job security making him too relaxed. She supposes it’s different, getting paid to die on the job versus knowing you’ll die if you leave the job.

  Or maybe there’s just something specifically wrong with Guan Yu.

  She likes that explanation better.

  Guan Yu doesn’t speak to her at all over the next few days, which suits her just fine. She’s got her own problems, after all.

  Number one.

  “Isn’t the dress too...detailed?” Zan Xinyi says, looking at the final character mockups she’s gotten.

  A lounge singer with short, coiffed hair wearing a classic 1930s blue qipao and an orange feather boa scarf draped around her elbows. She’s holding an old fashioned standing mic in her hands.

  On her back is a pair of brightly colored wings.

  “I’m not animating all of that.”

  “You can tell Jiang Jin that, then,” Wei Shengyuan mutters. “I already told her you’d finalized the design so she couldn’t add any more ideas.”

  Really forcing her to be the bad guy because he’s too much of a pushover. Classic. But also useless, because talking like this still means that of course Jiang Jin can hear and know. He’s so stupid sometimes.

  Wei Shengyuan is not paranoid enough.

  “Especially not the wings,” Zan Xinyi emphasizes. “I’m not dealing with that. I don’t have any of my animations set up for it.”

  “I get it, so just take them off.”

  He doesn’t even know that their whole apartment is a stage for an audience of one.

  “We’ll leave in the banner art,” Zan Xinyi says. “It just won’t be visible on the character model. No need to redraw anything.”

  It would be irresponsible marketing, but who cares?

  “Banner art,” Wei Shengyuan repeats, looking ill. “You’re going to...just slap this art. As is. Into the game.”

  That’s absolutely what she’s going to do.

  “People need something to look at to distract them from the fact they’re just clicking on a button that doesn’t like them back,” Zan Xinyi says. “Alright. She gets a handheld mic, not a standing one, and the scarf has to go around her neck instead of hanging from her elbows if she’s going to be moving her arms for any of her moveset.”

  “I considered that,” Wei Shengyuan says. “The scarf is better where it is, she can bring the mic closer to her face without overly clipping through it, but if it’s around her neck the mic will definitely clip into it whenever she starts to sing.”

  What they should do is completely get rid of the giant orange boa scarf.

  But if she’s not going to suggest it because it will hurt Jiang Jin’s feelings, and Wei Shengyuan isn’t going to suggest it because he’s tired of saying no, then who’s going to be the one who nixes it?

  No one.

  “I’ll see how it works out,” Zan Xinyi says. “Though there’s a high chance I'll scrap it.”

  Wei Shengyuan looks guiltily relieved. Coward.

  “Are you going to name it, then? It’s all done?”

  She’d thought Jiang Jin would name it, since she’s done so much ideaworking.

  But this is Jiang Jin’s chance to speak up through the walls, and she isn’t taking it. Even though the music has stopped, so she is absolutely, definitely paying attention.

  There’s more pressure now than when it was just her and Wei Shengyuan and she was genuinely spitting out whatever came to mind. Not caring beyond the moment what it represented.

  Now, names have meanings.

  Terrible. Zan Xinyi shifts through a couple of ideas. Oriole that Hunts in the Fog? Songbird Who Echoes the Breeze?

  They just aren’t suitable. Sure, Jiang Jin has feathers, but this isn’t only about Jiang Jin. It’s also about the type of character who sings for empty auditoriums, and the type of person who still dreams in an empty city.

  “Let’s call this one Secretive Echo of the Wind’s Laughter,” Zan Xinyi says.

  The title settles as she says it.

  “Secretive Echo,” Wei Shengyuan says, confused. “But Jiang Jin isn’t really....she doesn’t keep secrets.”

  “She doesn’t keep her own secrets,” Zan Xinyi corrects.

  She cracks her neck.

  “You know she can hear whatever we say in the building, right? Since you were nagging at me about not paying attention to the abilities of my subordinates.”

  “I-- I mean it makes sense, but--”

  He hadn’t realized, because Jiang Jin had probably been more careful with him. Let him have the illusion that she can’t hear them when she’s working, or when she puts in her earplugs, or when he says something and she doesn’t immediately respond.

  Even though it’s simply a comfortable lie, it’s easy to believe things that aren’t true. And Wei Shengyuan loves believing in things that are easy for him. He’d even believed her whenever she lied about why she was missing so much school.

  How sad, that he’s still stuck in that same old rut.

  “And besides, this is about the character,” Zan Xinyi says. “This one’s going to be the banner ad, and one with a reasonably high summon rate. Everyone will have Echo as part of their early group, and since Jiang Jin wants to voice characters, she’ll be doing a lot of whatever dialogue I write in the future, too. Any tutorials, if I decide that we’re doing those. We might not. I think it’s all intuitive enough.”

  Wei Shengyuan makes a noise of disagreement, which she ignores in favor of tracing her hand over the sketch.

  Zan Xinyi stares at the lounge singer who’s soon to lose her pretty wings.

  “The Lantern-Bearer is looking for people willing to help them try and leave Night City,” she says. “The Witch and the Siren aren’t permanent party members, at least-- not for the vast majority of players. Our summon odds are too low.”

  Wei Shengyuan nods.

  “Echo is willing to help the Lantern-Bearer purely because she believes in them,” Zan Xinyi says. “She doesn’t need a strange promise. And she’ll be doing all of the early exposition.”

  It’s useful.

  “And the second level is wind,” Zan Xinyi says. “How convenient for gameplay integration.”

  “That’s the real reason,” Wei Shengyuan says dryly.

  Ah, her blind and foolish subordinate.

  “Of course,” Zan Xinyi says. “You get it!”