Chapter Two: Everyone Else Was Wrong

The trophy felt cold and heavy. In the audience, Zhou Mo waved both arms. At the back, Lin Yan’s mother—still dressed in her bus uniform—wiped her eyes where she thought he could not see. For one moment, Lin Yan believed the door had finally opened. Then, in a corridor behind the stage, a girl in a black hooded jacket blocked his way. She looked his age. The ends of her short hair were dyed silver, and she turned an old coin engraved with an eye between her fingers. “Congratulations,” she said. “You won a competition they arranged for you to win.” An equation flared before Lin Yan’s eyes. It was not a familiar finite expression. It was a recursion consuming its own tail.