Chapter Four: Outside the Canvas

Zero spoke calmly, but his collage face held expressions Gu Yan had deleted from himself: rage when his credit was stolen for the first time; shame at finishing Shen Zhuo's revisions while his father lay in the hospital; numbness when the redundancy list landed on his desk and he did not protest. A white fracture opened ahead. The Type Tower swept sideways past it, close enough for them to see names printed on its walls. Outside the canvas, there was no distance. Five wrong steps had cut across a three-day journey. They fell through the fracture into the rejected city. It was under attack. Fluorescent beasts flooded the alleys, their spines made of client comments. The leader was solid magenta.