Chapter One: After Midnight

After midnight, don't photograph anything alive. Then: Whatever you see, don't let them know you haven't changed. She called. An automated voice told her he was outside the service area. Zhou was a graduate student working at Linlan University's observatory, where he should have been monitoring tonight's once-in-a-century alignment of seven planets. That afternoon, he had stopped by her studio and loaded a roll of his homemade black-and-white film into her camera. With studied carelessness, he had asked, “If everyone became a monster and you were the only one who didn't, who would you say the monster was?” Jianyue had been retouching a commercial shoot. Without looking up, she answered, “Whoever hasn't paid the balance.”