The Rules

Rule One: never stand near the protagonist when he’s about to do something impressive.

Lin Jue had learned this the hard way on his third day in what he had come to privately call The Situation. He’d been standing approximately two metres from Shen Zhao when Shen Zhao had decided, apparently on instinct, to deflect a runaway carriage. The carriage had shattered. Shen Zhao had emerged without a scratch. Lin Jue had spent the following week picking splinters out of his left arm and reassessing his understanding of how the world worked.

The world, it turned out, had a structure. Not the comfortable, statistical structure of cause and effect that Lin Jue had trusted for twenty-eight years of ordinary life, but something more intentional — a shape, a direction, a grammar. He had read enough stories to recognise the grammar when he started seeing it everywhere. The way fortune seemed to curve toward Shen Zhao. The way danger arrived in escalating waves, each one slightly worse than the last. The way every person they encountered was either essential to the plot or would be forgotten by the following week.

Lin Jue was not essential to the plot. This was, he had decided after careful consideration, his most significant advantage.

He had begun keeping notes. Not in a journal — journals were confiscated in chapter nine, chapter twenty-two, and chapter forty of every story he had ever read — but in a system of mental shorthand he reviewed each night before sleeping. The notes were organised under three headings: Things That Will Definitely Happen, Things That Might Happen If He Was Unlucky, and Rules.

The Rules section was the longest.

Rule One: no proximity to protagonist during impressive moments.

Rule Two: do not become attached to anyone introduced with a name and a backstory in the same scene. They would be gone within three chapters, and grief was a distraction.

Rule Three — the one he was still working out — had something to do with the way the world seemed to have requirements. Things it needed to happen in order to continue. Lin Jue had not yet identified what it needed from him specifically. When he did, he intended to provide the minimum necessary and no more.

He watched Shen Zhao across the crowded hall — laughing at something, radiant and entirely unaware that the man three tables over had been watching his movements for six days — and Lin Jue thought: I know what kind of story this is.

The question was whether knowing would be enough.