Chapter One: Another City in the Sky

He enlarged the photograph to eight hundred percent. Between blocks of digital noise, the woman raised her face. Seven years had passed. She had not aged at all. “Sister…” The shutter fell for the eighth time. Now Xingyao stood on the photographed riverbank, looking at him across two overlapping cities. Her lips formed a sentence. Then she thrust out her hand, palm toward the lens. The camera screen turned white. Every streetlamp nearby went dark. Cheers became cries, then laughter when emergency power returned. Everyone treated the blackout as part of the spectacle. Nobody noticed the perfectly straight black line cutting across the river toward an abandoned building. Shen Yan did.