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A little before noon, a car sliced a sleek black line through the city of Ghost Valley’s pre-lunch traffic. Passersby walking on the side of the road stopped to stare. Drivers didn’t necessarily slam their brakes, but they did crane their necks and trail the foreign, expensive vehicle with wide eyes, raised eyebrows, and well-hidden whispers.
Their thoughts weren’t too hard to guess. The man behind the wheel was just passing through, perhaps a little lost, making his way through town to somewhere bigger, more important, more lavish. They assumed he was sightseeing, distant, probably a little mocking of their pockhole-filled streets and rundown buildings. But, as most assumptions about drivers in strangers’ cars are, they were wrong.
This particular driver was called Wen Kexing. He wasn’t sightseeing, nor was he on his way to bigger and better things. He’d just finished becoming bigger and better. He’d stuffed himself full of all those things people said he’d never have, and he’d worked long and hard at it, too.
Now he was home, and he was furious.
--
The workers inside the Ghost Valley Residential Care Center (GVRCC) paused to watch that sleek black sports car come up the road. The lady at the front desk seemed unimpressed until the car didn’t actually streak past. Instead, it passed the center’s lopsided old sign and turned into their otherwise empty parking lot. She then raised an eyebrow.
Another head poked out from behind her, commenting that they ought to change the sign. It was missing a few letters and quickly being drowned in shrubbery, which this very rich visitor was sure to notice. Another worker, this one carrying a clipboard, brought a finger to her lips and jabbed a finger at the papers in her hand so hard that a page fluttered to the ground.
The sign-commenter picked up the page, looked at it, and lost all the color in his face.
“No way—”
He trailed off as the bell on the glass door jingled cheerily. A tower of a man dressed in a neatly pressed suit and sunglasses swept into the waiting room. The man made eye contact with the sign-commenter, who was now clutching the page in his fingers like a lifeline, and smiled.
It wasn’t a menacing smile at all. The man even had pretty doe eyes that softened the features of his handsome face, making him look gentle and almost harmless. Nevertheless, the sign-commenter’s hands trembled. The visitor’s eyes roved over all of them, counting heads, seeming to memorize all their faces in easy stride.
“How can we help you, sir?” the lady at the front desk asked, somehow sounding mostly unperturbed. The sign-commenter rushed to return the missing page to his coworker’s clipboard. Her hands were shaking, too. This visitor was clearly the kind of rich that could ruin lives. If they didn’t tiptoe carefully, they might tip off an unexpected ledge.
“I called earlier,” said Wen Kexing, smile ever-present. “Are you Lin Zexi?”
“I am. Under what name did you call?”
The soft curve of his smile sharpened into jagged angles, wide and predatory. “Wen Kexing.”
“Wen…” Lin Zexi’s brows creased as she tapped away at her keyboard, scanning the screen. His eyes darkened, but she didn’t see. “That sounds familiar. Is it your first time here?”
Her coworkers whirled to stare at her before covertly turning away just as fast. It was, to be fair, a rather stupid question. Everyone in that room had been working at the care center for years, and no one recalled ever seeing this kind of money walk into their institution. Which, of course, proved that he had never been there. The Wen Kexings of the world were to be remembered.
“I’ve never called before, if that’s what you’re asking,” Wen Kexing said, confirming their suspicions.
“Strange,” murmured Lin Zexi, glancing at him again. “I could have sworn…”
Her gaze lingered on his face for a little too long to be casual. He let her do as she pleased, clearly having drifted off to more important thoughts. When she finally returned to protocol and asked the appropriate questions, his expression focused with surprising poise. He began to rattle off his information with a sort of unnerving glee.
As expected, Wen Kexing owned the car in the lot outside, and had the registration to prove it. Despite being only twenty, he had bought himself a nice residence all the way across the bay in the big city, farther out than the majority of Ghost Valley’s residents had ever gone in their lives. He was currently the youngest CEO of his company, although he was taking a long sabbatical to finish his education. He said so with indifference, claiming that it would simply make covering any expenses a non-issue.
“So, is everything in order?” he asked smoothly once he’d finished, leaning the arm of his suit on the care center’s plastic grey table top.
“I don’t see why not,” replied Lin Zexi after a long, slightly uncomfortable pause. She was still trying to sneak a look under his sunglasses, but Wen Kexing had angled himself so the view she wanted was just out of reach.
“But...I have to make sure that you’re certain. The one you called about is...a bit of a handful.”
“Ah,” responded Wen Kexing, and the drawl in his voice was just enough to cause the workers around him, who had slowly gone back to their day-to-day business, to freeze in their tracks again. “This is the foster care system, Miss Lin. Whoever hasn’t become a handful by now deserves my respect and applause. Now, do you think we could speed up this process a little? I’m afraid I’m not a very patient man.”
--
The GVRCC had a very specific manner of dealing with problem children of the state, which was to say, it didn’t deal with them at all. The protocol was to treat the child like they had a temporary but powerful sickness: lock its door, pray to a higher power, and hope that once the door was opened, everything would be fixed.
To everyone’s dismay (but no one’s surprise), this didn’t work particularly well. In the case of Wen Kexing’s request, a few workers were required to wrestle the child to the floor while she screamed bloody murder and tried to bite their wrists and fingers. Her door was littered with papers containing a horrific mix of incomplete checklists and red Xs. She’d been to a few foster homes and sent back every time, not unlike a misbehaving dog, and she was treated as such.
After a long struggle, the workers were finally able to force her to stuff all of her meager belongings (a few books, a teddy bear in piss-poor condition, an overused toothbrush in a dirty case) into a black trash bag. She was crying when she walked down the hallway, but the way one cries when they’re too angry to do anything else, tears streaming down her cheeks in otherwise stubborn silence. The workers kept telling her things that they thought were nice: you’re going to a new family and you’ll be living so well you’ll forget all about this place but she didn’t seem to be hearing any of it. The glower on her face said she was planning their imminent destruction and couldn’t wait to put her plans to work, until—
“Ah-Xiang.”
The little girl skidded to a halt. Her eyes, still red with tears, suddenly went wide as dinner plates. The worker had started to read off more files on a clipboard, but Ah-Xiang paid the useless information all of the attention it deserved, which was to say, none. Instead, she dropped her trash bag and tore down the hall like some herd animal let loose, crashing headlong into the buttons of Wen Kexing’s pristine suit and bursting into a fresh wail.
“ Ge! ”
For a brief moment, even dressed in his suit and with his eyes hidden behind his sunglasses, the tremble of Wen Kexing’s lip betrayed his real age. It wasn’t so long ago that he’d been a child himself, holding his own trash bag. “I said I’d come back for you.”
“But you—??”
“Shh,” Wen Kexing whispered, bending down to pull her tighter to his chest even as he reprimanded her into her ear, “Stop crying. If you’re going to ruin this nice suit I got just to see you, I should at least know what you’re saying.”
That seemed to spark something in Ah-Xiang, and she squirmed out of Wen Kexing’s arms. After they stared at each other for a moment, she pinched her arm hard and gazed intently at the indentation it left until it started to turn an angry red. A slow wonder spread across her face when she finally met his eyes.
“So I’m not dreaming.”
Wen Kexing frowned at the welt on her arm. “If you were, don’t you think the trick I taught you wouldn’t work?”
Ah-Xiang ignored him, clearly already convinced. She took his hands and studied his long fingers, each embellished with a silver ring more expensive than anything she had ever worn in her life. The reality of the situation was distant, but slowly...slowly sinking in.
“You’re going to take me home? To your home? You have a—” She gulped, tried again. “We can go home?”
“Absolutely,” said Wen Kexing firmly. “I’m not letting you stay in this goddamn hellhole any longer than I can help it. I worked my ass off to come back here to get you, didn’t I?” He stood, flashing his shark’s smile at the workers before they could say a thing, and then pointed at his little girl’s trash bag. “Is there anything in there you want to keep? Otherwise, I say we leave it for these nice people to do as they will.”
Ah-Xiang looked at the trash bag and then shook her head vehemently. “I want new things.”
Wen Kexing’s smile widened, and this time it was genuine. “Good girl. As you should.”
--
Two years earlier, Wen Kexing, previously known as Zhen Yan, had stumbled out of the glass door of the GVRCC with a nearly empty trash bag and a heart full of rage. His wrists still chafed from where the workers had held him too tight.
The door banged shut behind him, telling him you’ve aged out; you can’t come here anymore . Let’s see what you become, with all these odds stacked against you. The bell on the inside of the door jingled merrily at him. He’d glared back with sparks in his eyes and then marched up the street, determined to take life by its neck and throttle it.
He’d lived in public libraries, studied until he couldn’t think or breathe anything else, and then kicked his way into the indomitable tech industry. He fought tooth and nail to make himself so indispensable that they couldn’t do without him. Some called it a fluke—the diversity team pandering to the little foster kid—but eventually there was no denying it. Wen Kexing deserved his spot, be it a miracle or simply revenge.
It wasn’t long before the employees in his company could no longer remember what it was like when he wasn’t there. Most learned to stay out of his way, but some discovered that he could be kind and personable when he wanted to be. He was especially kind to the children who came to visit their parents at work, even throwing them onto his shoulders and flying them around his private conference room. The act always made him seem just a little more human.
“You’ll be a good father,” a mother told him as she took her daughter back in her arms. “You’re so good with kids.”
Wen Kexing smiled. “Only the rowdy ones. They understand me.”
The mother laughed along with him before she left the room, though they were laughing at slightly different jokes. He leaned forward, his eye drifting to the drawing sitting at the edge of the desk. Its lines were medium-thick and bright violet—the result of a crayon filed down with a child’s determined nails—but the grinning toddler in it was still perfectly discernible.
As foster children, they hadn’t been allowed pictures, but that would never have stopped Wen Kexing. He’d sat on the floor of the bathroom where the fluorescents were brightest and painstakingly traced her photo. If they wouldn’t let him keep his little girl with him in person, he would have this until he was powerful enough that they couldn’t refuse him.
I’ll be back, I promise.
In the end, it was almost too easy. It should have only taken him seconds to sign his name under the characters of Gu Xiang on the state’s official adoption documents. But, he was going to savor this moment. He spun the pen in his hand, idle, just so he could finally give Lin Zexi the angle she’d been hunting down. There was no need to hide anymore.
He waited until she was gasping in realization and stumbling out from behind the front desk before he grabbed Gu Xiang’s hand and swung it on their way out the door.
“Wait! You’re that kid, that troublemaker—you’re—!”
Wen Kexing didn’t waste a moment, and slammed the glass door in Lin Zexi’s face. Gu Xiang was too big now, but he still lifted her up onto his shoulders and carried her all the way back up to his fancy black car, whistling a bright tune. Once they were on the road, he wrapped a purple designer jacket with the tag still attached around her shoulders and told her she had her pick of the music. He’d listen to anything she chose because today was her day.
“This is it, princess,” he told her as he accelerated onto the highway. “Today, we win.”