Chapter One: Midnight Final

At 11:47 p.m., only two things remained awake on the twenty-seventh floor of Lantu Advertising: Gu Yan and the nameless woman on his monitor. She stood in a field of blue so dark it was nearly black, her silver-white dress divided by light from no visible source. Her face belonged to no real person. Gu Yan had taken the eyes from seven rejected model photographs, drawn the bridge of the nose himself, and raised one corner of the mouth by two pixels. Yet the way she looked at him was disturbingly whole. She seemed to know how she had been assembled—and that the man who assembled her was being taken apart. The perfume name NOCTURNE occupied the lower-right corner. The pitch was at nine tomorrow morning.