]]>So far, the thought had met with two checks. The first turned out to not actually be a check. In fact when Yunlan had, very casually and completely in passing, mentioned the modern, cosmopolitan (and only a little likely to be raided) notion of a dance club, xiao-Wei had laughed at him.
]]>The apartment building was filling up with quiet life as the evening drew on, a little weight in his senses like a stone held in his hand. But not hard like a stone—lives were bright and a little skittery, like sparks on water. Taken together, though, all those little bits became a glare of brightness that flowed and pooled across the plain at the foot of the mountains, themselves a much deeper weight.
Which was actually really disorienting, because Shen Wei, currently wiping down the kitchen counters less than four meters away had almost as much weight in his senses as those mountains.
]]>"Yunlan?"
Zhao Yunlan looked up from his screen, a little startled. That was Li Huiliang's voice, and Zhang Shi was usually careful to call him 'Chief' at work. "Yeah?" he asked, trying not to sound too obviously wary.
She stopped hovering in the door, at least, and came to hold out a folded sheet of paper. "This came for you. It's from your father."
]]>It took most of a day to get up into the mountains near Dragon City, and to the currently empty retreat facility the University kept. Shen Wei had been there before, shepherding various classes to and from the biosciences observation center a little further north. It was a fairly familiar area, by now, which meant the wave of nostalgia that hit him as they unpacked the car took him by surprise.
]]>When Guo Ying knocked on the door of Zhao Xinci’s office, his Director of Supervision looked wary. Guo Ying wasn’t surprised.
]]>Zhang Shi opened the door quickly, at his knock, brows rising as she saw both of them waiting. "Did something come up at the Division?"
"No." Shen Wei let the weight of his responsibilities settle over him, and saw the reflection of it in the half step back Zhang Shi took. "Things have come to my attention that must be addressed."
]]>Shen Wei enjoyed the quiet times in his life, the times when he had no miscreants to chase down; when the humans were calm, not indulging in wars of conquest or moving their seat of government again; when his chosen profession had no crises and he could let himself be soothed by completing the small, daily tasks. He enjoyed those times very much, but he didn't take them for granted.
]]>Shen Wei leaned with his head propped on one hand and watched Yunlan sleep. Watched, on another level, the deep weight of him reach out to the world around them, touch the weave of the world with the same soft affection as he'd always had.
Watched how the brightness of Yunlan's potentiality reached out to Shen Wei, in particular, now.
]]>Yunlan slumped a little deeper into his desk chair and flipped to the next page of the long-and-only-getting-longer file on what he could only call Dixing tourism requests. Someone down there, and he darkly suspected the Regent, had declared that final decisions on who could come garden-viewing or shopping or whatever could only be made by the human Ministry, who had promptly passed the question on to the SID.
]]>The first official visitor from Dixing had flown straight past “visitation” to a trial of citizenship, and Zhu Hong personally thought it had been planned to stress-test Minister Guo’s nerves. It would have done hers, too, if she hadn’t already known the whole thing was a put-up. As it was, she stood straight and serious beside the middle-aged police lieutenant who’d been assigned as her oversight partner, and carefully bit back her smirk when the gateway between realms misted into visibility and the man startled back.
“Is that it?” Tan Xiao asked eagerly, from behind them.
“Be patient, Mr. Tan,” she admonished. “She’ll be here in a moment.”