“I’m fine now,” I cut Lingyi off, then moved so she could see Daiyu over my shoulder. “I’ve got a guest.”
Lingyi clamped her mouth shut and stared at me. I could only imagine what I looked like and ran a hand through my hair. The ends stuck up. “Okay,” she said. “Call me later.” Lingyi broke our connection.
“New girlfriend?” Daiyu spoke in such a casual tone that I slanted my head, but her glass helmet only reflected the blue neon of the building.
Instead of answering her question, I said, “I really need to use the bathroom.”
She leaned over the side of the bed, then tossed my boxers onto the sheets. I probably looked stricken, because she said, “I didn’t undress you, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
I rolled to the other edge of the bed and pulled my boxers on, not bothering to cover my backside, too frustrated for modesty. I had the vague notion of tugging off my clothes in fever dreams, so hot it felt like the material burned my skin. Not a dream, then. My first step was unsteady.
“I’ve made rice porridge,” Daiyu said. “I thought you might be hungry.”
I stopped halfway across the apartment. She was a dark shadow lined in blue and silver, intimate and remote. I was pissed at her on so many levels—over her privilege, over her casual certainty that anything she wanted, she would get—but it finally sunk in that she had come because she did care for me. Heat suffused my neck, rose to my face. I blamed it on a low fever and tried to ignore the guilt that settled in my stomach.
“Thank you, Daiyu,” I said. “Really.”
“You saved my life too,” she replied in her rich voice.
“I didn’t realize we were keeping score.”
“No,” she said as she walked into the kitchen. “Friends don’t need to.”
? ? ?
I holed up in my rich apartment for five days straight, seeing no one except for Daiyu, who visited and brought me food while she stayed in suit the entire time. Arun had warned that I would be contagious and to remain quarantined. We played Chinese chess, and she won every game. She had school assignments and spent many hours reading or working on research projects. After a few days, I got used to seeing her in the late afternoons at the dining table, as the Taipei skyline began to glimmer behind her at dusk. It was so that I almost began to believe that this was my life.
I was glad for her suit, which separated us. Because every time our eyes met, something intense ricocheted between us. I was still weak, but that didn’t prevent me from climbing often in those five days we spent together. Anything to distract me from her tantalizing proximity and my own sexual frustrations. If she was named for the tragic heroine in Dream of the Red Chamber, then I would be the hero, Baoyu—and our relationship was doomed from the start.
“What do the bodyguards think of all the time you spend here?” I asked out of curiosity one afternoon. She was chauffeured to the 101 in a white airlimo, just as Iris had said from her surveillances.
“I gave them all a paid vacation.” Daiyu’s grin was clearly visible behind her glass helmet.
“But your father—”
“I got access to his account and sent the message that way.”
I laughed, incredulous. “You mean you hacked into his account and pretended to be him.”
She crossed her legs demurely and flipped through an ancient textbook on Chinese folklore, feigning innocence. I could smell the must of its pages even from where I sat across from her, a distinct scent that always transported me to a different time, a different place.
“I didn’t actually sign off as him,” she replied.
I shook my head, amused. I loved how she always surprised me. “And your driver?”
“My driver is well paid by me,” Daiyu replied, still looking very pleased with herself. “And a brute. He’s all the bodyguard I need.”
I hoped he was better than the one I had taken out when I had kidnapped her last summer. Then an irrational fear gripped me, that I had somehow spoken this aloud, or that she could read the truth in my eyes. I took refuge on the rock wall again, not using a harness for the second time, needing to focus myself through sheer adrenalin. She didn’t say anything.
When it came to Daiyu and me, so much was better left unsaid.
CHΔPTER ELEVEN
On the sixth day, I finally ventured out so Daiyu could take me on a personal tour of Jin Corp as she had promised. Lingyi had instructed me to gather info on the building’s security setup and layout, to observe as much as I could. She had found Daiyu’s eight-digit personal code for access throughout Jin Corp on her Palm, but the restricted areas required a brain wave scan. She sent a grab device that could capture the brain wave scan for our use if I could somehow convince Daiyu to take me into a high-security area.
I talked to Arun via Vox; he had his own instructions for me. Convinced that the virulent strain of avian flu was being manufactured in Jin Corp itself, he wanted me to keep an eye out for any laboratories hidden behind thick vaults.
“I’m close to getting my antidote to work, Zhou,” he said to me. His face was tiny on my Vox, but I could still see the dark circles beneath his eyes. “I can help to curb this epidemic, but I need a sample of the actual flu strain to test and make certain my antidote can kill it.”
I turned on the wall screen after speaking with Arun. It lowered from the ceiling, and I clicked to a news channel. Muted, the screen showed paramedics dressed in full hazmat suits loading the sick into ambulances. “At least three dozen already infected with dangerous flu virus in Taipei” flashed across the bottom of the screen. “Three deaths have been reported.”
A reporter dressed in a black suit wearing a mask stood apart from two ambulances. It was clear from his rigid stance, leaning away from the scene, that he didn’t want to be there. “We have no information on this new flu, although scientists believe it is a mutation of an avian flu strain with a high fatality rate. Doctors are recommending face masks be worn at all times and for people to stay inside.”
I suited up. Even though I was feeling back to full health, my mood was grim. The last thing I wanted to do was tour Jin Corp with Daiyu and feign my rich-boy role. But time was slipping from us, people were dying, and my friends were relying on me.