The Performance Begins
2:49. 2:48. 2:47.
…
Wen Yiqian glanced at the countdown, picked up his phone, and dialed the number Kid had just called from.
The line rang and rang, unanswered.
An Zhi broke the silence. “I really do want to know why you came.”
She paused. “Even if he specifically asked for you, you could have refused. Easily.”
She gestured at herself, then at the people around them. “Whether it’s my life or the lives of all these strangers: none of it has anything to do with you.”
“With your personality, you wouldn’t care at all, would you?”
Click. The call disconnected.
Wen Yiqian, looking entirely unbothered, hit redial and glanced over at her. “If I didn’t care about you, why would I risk my life to be here?”
An Zhi caught the shift in him immediately. “The moment you cut off Captain Li, you couldn’t wait to drop the act?”
“Act?” Wen Yiqian smiled and said nothing.
That confidence, that ease: it pulled An Zhi back to the night before, to the moment he had revealed himself at her car window. The weight of it had been immediate and suffocating.
“Is all of this part of your plan?” The thought surfaced before she could stop it, and she said it aloud before she had decided to.
“What makes you say that?”
“Because you’re sitting next to a live bomb and you look like you’ve already won.” An Zhi felt the shape of something just beyond her reach. “Because someone set all of this up to get exactly what they wanted.”
A flicker of something moved through her eyes. “When the bomb is about to go off, you’ll dismantle it at the last second and pull me out. The perfect rescue.”
“And no one will ever know you were behind any of it.”
Her voice dropped. “You’ll have used your own brilliance to stand above the law again, earned everyone’s trust again, and somehow even managed to make me fall for you in the process.”
Wen Yiqian’s smile widened.
He stood up, turned around, and looked down at her.
An Zhi was still talking, fully absorbed in the architecture of her own deduction.
Wen Yiqian dialed again and stepped forward.
One meter was not far. With his stride, two steps was enough to cross the line Kid had set.
The moment he stepped past it, the call connected.
“You broke the rules.” Kid’s voice carried a note of genuine displeasure.
“You lost,” Wen Yiqian said.
“Explain.” The impatience in Kid’s voice was sharp.
“Isn’t it clear enough?” Wen Yiqian glanced back at the device on An Zhi. The countdown had reached zero.
A beat of silence. Then Kid let out a short, dismissive sound. “You think this device is fake?”
“The device is real. The game was fake.” A faint edge of disdain entered Wen Yiqian’s voice. “Those six wires are decoration. All of them. It doesn’t matter which one gets cut: nothing stops, and nothing explodes.”
Silence on the other end.
“The game was only ever yours,” Wen Yiqian continued. “Your real objective was simple: humiliate me, prove you’re smarter, and enjoy the view.”
He let out a quiet laugh. “The hint about the answer being somewhere in the amusement park: that was invented on the spot to make me run in circles, wasn’t it?”
The silence stretched. The line stayed open, but no voice came. Just faint, slow breathing.
“Let me walk through it.” Wen Yiqian’s tone was unhurried. “If I had done exactly what you wanted: spent my five minutes frantically searching for an answer that doesn’t exist, picked a wire, cut it, and found that nothing happened, I would have assumed I had guessed right. I would have relaxed.”
“And that’s when you would have called.”
“You would have told me the truth. Enjoyed watching it land. And then told me I was going to die.”
He paused. “Because the switch has always been in your hands. Just like the package you sent to the station: the countdown was theater. You could detonate it whenever you chose.”
The breathing on the other end grew slightly heavier.
“It seems I was right.” Wen Yiqian tilted his neck until it cracked. “Then let me go a little further.”
He let the silence sit before continuing.
“You heard about me from An Zhi. You’ve always operated at a level above everyone around you, and ordinary targets stopped being interesting a long time ago. A so-called high-IQ criminal: now that was worth your attention. The satisfaction of outmaneuvering someone genuinely capable is a completely different feeling from toying with someone who never stood a chance.”
He rubbed the corner of one eye. “Everything was going your way at first. You held every advantage. You had me moving exactly where you wanted. And somewhere in the middle of it, you started to wonder whether An Zhi had overstated things: maybe I was no different from all the others.”
“But now something’s changed. This particular pest is starting to make you feel something you didn’t expect.”
“Disgust. Unease. Something close to anxiety.”
“And something else.”
“Stop.” Kid’s voice came out harder than before.
Wen Yiqian stopped.
He raised one hand, palm flat, angled slightly above his eyes, as though blocking out the sun and scanning the distance.
“What are you doing?” Kid’s response came quickly.
“Listening.”
“To what?”
“Your heartbeat just sped up.”
“That’s impossible.”
Wen Yiqian’s lips curved.
“You’re afraid.”
(End of Chapter)