Chapter 9: Waking Up Without Her
The last thing Pei Hanchuan remembered was the weight of Zhiyi’s body in his arms.
He had continued talking to her after her heart stopped because he was worried that she might think that she was alone if she couldn’t hear his voice. And he never wanted her to think that he had left first. He would never leave her first.
So, instead, he had described shelves that he didn’t know how to build and a house beside a lake that they would never reach until the heat took his voice and then the rest of him.
But he didn’t leave her behind. He went after her, just as he should have.
When he opened his eyes again, she wasn’t in his arms like he remembered. Instead, someone was asking him whether or not Pei Strategic Holdings should proceed with an acquisition.
Hanchuan sat at the head of a long conference table and took in a deep breath. The afternoon sunlight had passed through the windows behind him, and climate-controlled air circulated through the room without a sound.
He took in another breath just to feel the cold air fill his lungs.
The presentation screen in front of him was displaying two columns of figures while twelve executives waited for his response.
He didn’t give them one. Instead, he looked down at the hand resting on the table.
The skin was clean and unbroken and a pen lay between his fingers instead of Zhiyi’s hair. He was definitely not happy with that fact either.
"President Pei?"
The executive who had spoken remained standing as he looked at him. Clearly, he was waiting for Hanchuan to approve a revised offer.
Hanchuan moved his foot beneath the table just to test something that he couldn’t believe. His shoe slid across the carpet without problems.
For three years after the concrete crushed him, he had occasionally dreamed that his legs still worked. He would wake convinced he could stand, only to fall from the cot or find Zhiyi already bracing herself beneath his arm because she had noticed the change in his breathing.
But this didn’t feel like one of those dreams.
Especially if Zhiyi wasn’t beside him.
He placed both hands on the table and stood, causing his chair to roll backward.
His legs held strong beneath his weight.
Sensation travelled through muscles that had been useless for seven years. His knees bent when he commanded them to. His spine carried his weight without pain.
He took one step away from the table and then another. No one in the room spoke to ask him what he was doing.
Ignoring them all, Hanchuan reached into his pocket and removed his phone. The date on the screen was ten years earlier than it should have been.
He knew the date on which the first heat began, and from what he could figure out, they had twenty-seven days before the first heat wave hit.
"End the meeting," he announced, his voice cold and strong.
The executive near the screen lowered the presentation remote. "President Pei, the seller requires a response before the market closes."
"Then they can wait until tomorrow."
"The board authorized us to—"
"I said tomorrow."
The man sat down and folders closed around the table as the others prepared to leave. No one asked why Hanchuan had interrupted the meeting to walk several steps across the carpet. They would discuss it the moment the doors closed, but they knew better than to do so in front of him.
Quickly, everyone left the meeting room until only his executive assistant remained behind.
Assistant Lin waited until the last director left before speaking. "Should I call Dr. Wen?"
The name caused Hanchuan to suck in a deep breath without warning.
Qinghe was alive.
For a moment, Hanchuan could hear him as he had been before the heat stripped away everything except survival—complaining that no amount of money could compensate for being called into the hospital on his only night off.
He unlocked his phone and opened the group chat he hadn’t seen in ten years, watching as messages filled the screen.
Most were from Zeyu. One contained a photograph of a new engine. Another threatened to replace the furniture in Shichen’s office if he continued ignoring the group. Qinghe had responded sometime after midnight. Jingwei had rejected the entire conversation with a single word.
They were all alive.
With a shaking finger, Hanchuan closed the group chat. He would call them as soon as he found Zhiyi. But she came first. She would always come first. They had each other, their parents, and more money than God, they would be fine for a day or two.
But Zhiyi had no one but him, and he wasn’t going to make her wait a second longer than she had to.
"President Pei?" Assistant Lin prompted, dragging Hanchuan from his thoughts.
"I don’t need a doctor," he replied, waving his hand in dismissal.
"Then should I reschedule the rest of your afternoon?"
"Yes," Hanchuan grunted. He didn’t know how long it would take to find her, but he would reschedule everything until that happened.
Assistant Lin opened his tablet. "All of it?"
"Yes."
Turning back to his phone, Hanchuan entered Zhiyi’s name into the search bar.
The results were too broad, but adding her university narrowed them immediately. Jingyuan Private University had published her name often enough that he found her in less than a minute.
She had mentioned the school during one of the long winters. Not because she missed it, but because he had asked how she learned to calculate structural failure quickly enough to keep them out of a collapsing building.
Her answer had begun with a professor, moved through three separate branches of mathematics and ended forty minutes later with a criticism of the university’s elevator placement.
At the time, he had only cared that she kept talking. But now that half-remembered conversation had given him a starting point in where to find her.
A photograph accompanied an article about a national mathematics competition. Zhiyi stood at the edge of a group of students with a certificate held between both hands.
She looked younger than the woman he remembered. Her face hadn’t been thinned by hunger, and her hair ended above her shoulders instead of halfway down her back.
But it was still her.
Pei Hanchuan handed the phone to Assistant Lin, pointing to her name under the picture. "Find her current location."