Chapter 8: She Couldn’t Reach Him
Very slowly, Qiao Zhiyi dragged her eyes away from the fountain.
A row of taxis waited across the road and she walked toward the first one.
The driver lowered his window as she approached. "Where are you going?"
Zhiyi held out her phone and he looked at the address, then at her uniform. "Pei Holdings?"
"Yes."
"That’s across the central bridge. Traffic is starting to build," the driver warned her. But that wasn’t of any concern to Zhiyi.
"How long?" she asked. She didn’t care where the building was in relation to where she was. She just cared about how long it would take her to get from her current location to Hanchuan.
"Maybe thirty minutes. Forty if there’s an accident."
Forty minutes.
Two thousand four hundred seconds.
Too long.
It was still faster than the alternatives.
Zhiyi opened the rear door and got inside.
The driver glanced at her through the mirror. "Do your parents know you’re going downtown?"
"No."
He waited, perhaps expecting an explanation, but Zhiyi only fastened her seat belt silently. Then she spoke.
"Pei Holdings," she repeated.
The driver shrugged and pulled away from the curb.
Zhiyi watched the university disappear through the rear window.
Her phone remained open to Pei’s photograph.
She enlarged it until his face filled the screen.
The image lacked the lines that seven years of hunger and pain had carved beside his eyes. His hair was too neat. His collar sat perfectly against his throat. His hands were clean, his shoulders broad beneath his suit.
His legs worked.
She needed to see them.
The thought arrived with such force that Zhiyi’s vision blurred.
She needed to watch Pei Hanchuan stand.
She needed to see him cross a room without dragging himself across concrete. She needed proof that his knees could bend, that his feet would support him, that no ruined building had already fallen across his spine.
The photograph wasn’t enough.
The taxi entered the central bridge.
Zhiyi didn’t look at the river below.
She didn’t check the date.
She didn’t check the time.
She didn’t calculate how many years and days separated the body she occupied from the one that had died against Hanchuan’s chest.
Those questions could wait until she found him.
There were more pressing questions at the moment.
Like... what if he didn’t remember?
The possibility returned every time the taxi stopped.
At the first traffic light, Zhiyi constructed six ways to enter his office without an appointment.
At the second, she considered the legal consequences of refusing to leave private property.
At the third, she searched the company’s executive directory and found no direct telephone number for the president’s office.
By the fourth, she had identified three public entrances, one underground parking entrance and a service corridor connected to the neighboring hotel.
She closed the map.
Hanchuan would tell her not to enter through a service corridor.
He would say, Front door.
Then he would handle whoever tried to stop her.
But Hanchuan wasn’t there to give her the first step.
Zhiyi looked through the windshield.
The upper floors of the financial district rose beyond the traffic. Glass towers reflected the afternoon sun, beautiful and structurally inefficient. During the first heat, the windows would trap solar radiation and transform every sealed office into an oven. During the flood, the lower floors would disappear. During the freeze, expanding ice would fracture the façades and send sheets of glass into the streets.
Zhiyi knew exactly how each building would fail.
But she had no idea which one belonged to Hanchuan.
The driver turned onto a wide avenue and pointed through the windshield. "That’s it."
A black-and-silver tower stood at the end of the block.
The Pei Strategic Holdings emblem was fixed above the entrance causing Zhiyi’s heart began beating faster.
The taxi stopped beneath the covered drive.
"That’ll be forty-eight dollars," the diver announced, turning to look at her.
She stared at the building.
People entered and left through revolving glass doors. Men in dark suits crossed the lobby. Security officers stood behind a polished black desk.
Hanchuan was somewhere inside.
"Miss?"
Zhiyi looked at the driver.
"Forty-eight dollars."
Payment.
She had forgotten payment.
Zhiyi opened her bag, removed her wallet and selected the correct notes. She handed them to him, waited for the receipt and placed it inside the smallest compartment of her wallet before returning everything to its proper position.
Only then did she leave the taxi.
The driver pulled away.
Zhiyi stood on the pavement with her bag over one shoulder and her phone held against her palm.
The building had sixty-two visible floors.
Hanchuan’s office would be near the top.
She crossed the covered drive.
One step.
Then another.
The revolving door moved too slowly. Zhiyi entered the next section and pushed against the glass until it released her into the lobby.
Cold air touched her face.
Black marble stretched beneath a ceiling three stories high. The sound of footsteps echoed through the open space. A digital directory displayed the names of forty-three subsidiary companies beside a bank of secured elevators.
Zhiyi walked toward the reception desk.
The woman seated behind it wore a grey suit and a professional smile. Her gaze moved over Zhiyi’s university uniform, canvas bag and slightly disordered hair.
"Good afternoon. How may I help you?"
"Pei Hanchuan."
The smile remained, but something behind it changed.
"Do you have an appointment with President Pei?"
"No."
"Are you expected by someone in his office?"
"No."
"Then I’m afraid President Pei isn’t available."
Zhiyi looked beyond her toward the elevators.
He was inside the building.
Possibly less than two hundred metres away.
That was closer than she had been to him in at this time in her last life.
"I need to see him."
"President Pei doesn’t accept unscheduled visitors."
"He’ll see me."
The receptionist’s smile thinned. "If you leave your name and the purpose of your visit, I can forward a message to the appropriate department."
"Qiao Zhiyi."
"And the purpose of your visit?"
Zhiyi looked beyond the woman toward the secured elevators.
If Hanchuan remembered her, her name would be enough.
If he didn’t, she needed to present a problem important enough that he would agree to see her.
"Someone inside his company is selling confidential information."
The receptionist’s expression didn’t change. "What information?"
"I don’t know."
"To whom?"
"I don’t know that either."
"Do you have any evidence?"
"No."
The woman stared at her.
Zhiyi understood the problem. A claim without evidence had no useful value. She had selected a statistically plausible threat, but plausibility wasn’t proof.
"Then I’m afraid I can’t help you."
"You haven’t told him I’m here."
"President Pei is not informed every time someone enters the lobby and asks to see him."
"He needs to know my name."
"Do you have an appointment?"
"No."
"Then you’ll need to leave."
Two security officers had begun walking toward the desk.
Zhiyi looked from them to the secured elevators.
She had reached the correct building.
Hanchuan was somewhere inside it.
But she had no appointment, no evidence and no method of reaching him. If she refused to leave, security would remove her. If she left, she didn’t know whether she would be permitted to return.
Too many possible responses opened at once.
Argue.
Wait outside.
Find the parking garage.
Call his office.
Contact one of his friends.
Return to the university and construct evidence.
Each option divided into further consequences before she could select the first step.
Zhiyi stopped moving.
The receptionist said something else.
One of the security officers reached her.
Zhiyi didn’t hear either of them.
She had found Hanchuan.
Only, she simply couldn’t reach him.