Someone Else's Story

The trouble with watching the protagonist was that the protagonist was very good at being watched.

Not deliberately — Lin Jue had confirmed this by watching long enough to see the seams. Shen Zhao had no performance about him, no cultivated magnetism. He simply occupied space in a way that drew the eye. When he entered a room, the room reorganised itself around him. Not visibly. Not dramatically. Just slightly, the way iron filings shift when a magnet passes near them.

Lin Jue had begun to document the radius.

Two metres, roughly, was the zone of ambient good fortune. Within two metres of Shen Zhao, small things went right: spilled cups righted themselves, dropped objects landed softly, tricky locks gave way after one or two attempts. Beyond five metres, you were on your own — subject to the standard distribution of luck and misfortune that governed ordinary life.

Lin Jue operated at exactly six metres. Close enough to have advance warning of escalating events. Far enough to be outside any blast radius of significance.

The risk, of course, was that he might become a supporting character.

He had given this serious thought. Supporting characters fell into two categories: the ones who served the plot and survived it, and the ones who served the protagonist’s emotional arc and didn’t. The distinction was not always visible in advance. The safest approach was to be useful without being necessary — to provide assistance that could have come from anyone, that required no particular sacrifice, that left no emotional debt outstanding.

It was, he acknowledged, a deeply mercenary way to conduct a relationship.

He also acknowledged that Shen Zhao had, twice, gone out of his way to make sure Lin Jue ate when he forgot to. Neither time had this been plot-relevant. There was no scene to observe, no dramatic context. Shen Zhao had simply looked across a courtyard, noticed, and done something about it.

Lin Jue wrote this in his mental notes under a new heading: Anomalies.

He was not sure what to do with anomalies. They didn’t fit the grammar. The grammar said the protagonist moved forward along a predetermined arc, accumulating allies and losses in a specific order. It did not account for small, unprompted kindnesses directed at someone who was, by all structural logic, a minor character.

He filed the anomaly carefully and did not examine it too closely.

That evening, Shen Zhao said, without any particular emphasis: “You’re always six metres away. Why six?”

Lin Jue looked up from the bowl of rice he had almost forgotten to finish. “Habit,” he said.

Shen Zhao considered this for a moment, then nodded and let it go. The protagonist, Lin Jue noted, had better things to do than interrogate the navigation strategies of people who were not central to his story.

He did not find this as reassuring as he usually did.