Rating B

Member: Wen Yiqian (Reserve)

Education: D

Knowledge Reserve: ?

Observation: C+

Psychological Resilience: C+?

Cautiousness: D

Reasoning Ability: B?

Planning Ability: ?

Personality: Skilled at disguise, fond of using a simple and kind appearance to conceal his true self.

Specialty: Extremely strong ability to read people.

Weakness: Poor psychological resilience, insufficient caution, very easy to deal with.

Overall Rating: B-

Note: Barely qualifies as full member. Still has room for growth.

Fox read through it, thought for a moment, and began making revisions.

Psychological Resilience: C+ became a question mark.

Reasoning Ability: B became B+.

Planning Ability: the question mark was deleted. A.

Under Personality, she removed the original entry entirely and wrote:

Suspected mental illness. Dual personality. One personality is timid and unremarkable, indistinguishable from an ordinary person. The other is meticulous, highly perceptive, a natural high-intelligence criminal. Trigger conditions for personality switching unclear: suspected to require external stimulation.

Under Weakness, she rewrote:

Approach during the kind personality. Can be managed easily.

She looked at the Overall Rating for a while.

Changed B- to B. Added a question mark.

“A combination of good and evil.” She turned the phone screen off and stood for a moment in the dark. “How interesting.”

Wen Yiqian did not grieve over Sea Hare for long. He was a little surprised by how short the feeling lasted: even before they reached the police station, he had noticed something in himself that he could only describe as indifference, and the noticing of it unsettled him more than the feeling itself.

He turned it over on the walk and arrived at something that felt approximately honest. Li Weiguo had fired the gun. Wen Yiqian had only handled the planning. He had not killed anyone with his own hands, and for someone with his particular psychology, the distance between those two things was not small.

It reminded him of what Fox had said. She didn’t kill. She planned. Sea Hare handled the rest.

Wen Yiqian had planned. Li Weiguo had handled the rest.

The structure was not dissimilar.

He turned this over for a while and then made himself stop, because the conclusion it was heading toward was not comfortable.

The more he thought about it, the clearer it became that Sea Hare had been the tractable part of the problem. A killer, not a strategist. A man with a limitation built into his method: knives only, no firearms, a preference that had made him predictable in exactly the moment predictability was useful. Without that preference, the encounter at the bus stop would have resolved very differently.

Fox was the actual problem. Fox, who had apparently watched the whole thing from a nearby shadow and found it entertaining, and who had written Wen Yiqian into a file she was still actively updating. To her, Sea Hare had been a tool. His death was an inconvenience at most, and only if she didn’t already have someone in mind to replace him.

Wen Yiqian filed this away as something to think about later, when he wasn’t exhausted and had more money.

The statement took most of the night. Explaining the situation without explaining it: without surfacing Mask, without giving Li Weiguo anything that would send the investigation toward an organization capable of responding badly to being investigated, required careful navigation. Wen Yiqian was precise about what he offered and what he allowed to remain ambiguous, and by the time he was done his temples ached.

He had been deliberate about concealing Mask’s existence. This wasn’t a choice he felt conflicted about. Whatever these officers were capable of, they were not capable of handling that particular problem, and drawing their attention toward it would not protect them.

He told himself this was caution and not cowardice, and mostly believed it.

Stepping outside in the early hours, he looked up at the city’s night sky and found he didn’t quite have it in him to sigh. He felt, against his better judgment, reasonably good. The outcome was within acceptable limits. He had not killed anyone directly.

There was also something strange and worth noting: the performance had lasted nearly half a day. By his own prior estimates, his brain simply didn’t maintain that state reliably past an hour.

Apparently, under certain conditions, it did.

He scratched his head and could not account for it.

“Wen Yiqian.”

Li Weiguo, emerging from the station behind him. “I’ll drive you back.”

Wen Yiqian agreed without hesitation, partly from gratitude and partly because his feet were tired.

The city was quiet at this hour. Li Weiguo drove without hurrying. In the passenger seat, Wen Yiqian turned over the financial consequences of the past several hours. He had spent 1,000 yuan on a new phone for the plan and another 200 on an unregistered SIM. Without those, there would have been no way to text Li Weiguo at the critical moment. Necessary expenses. Still, thinking about what remained in his account produced a small, specific pain in his chest.

After a while, Li Weiguo glanced over.

“There are a few things I still want to ask.”

Wen Yiqian’s chest tightened slightly. He had not expected to get through the evening without this.

“Dissociative identity disorder,” Li Weiguo said. “You have it, don’t you.”

Wen Yiqian looked at the road ahead and did not immediately answer. Denying it seemed unlikely to accomplish anything useful.

“I think you’re a decent person,” Li Weiguo said. “The other personality is a different matter.”

“You’re not sending me to a psychiatric facility,” Wen Yiqian said quickly. “I’m not actually ill.”

“I’m suggesting a psychologist. Not the same thing.”

Li Weiguo had been thinking through the shape of it since the first time. The primary personality: timid, functional, genuinely harmless. The secondary: precise, cold, operating with a kind of intelligence that was not fully comfortable to think about too directly. The secondary emerged under pressure, and seemed specifically attracted to a particular category of case: psychopathic criminals, the kind of problem that resisted ordinary methods. It had, on several occasions, done the investigation a service.

Li Weiguo was not a rigid man. He had learned, over a career, when to work with what was in front of him.

“Psychologists don’t eat people,” he said. “There’s no harm in going.”

Wen Yiqian was quiet for a moment.

“This psychologist,” he said carefully. “Would it be expensive?”

Li Weiguo’s expression shifted into something that was not quite exasperation but occupied the same general area.

“I’ve told you before. If money is the problem, come work as a special consultant. Double salary.”

He meant it. A double-edged sword was still a sword, and there were problems that required exactly this kind of edge.

Wen Yiqian did not say no.

He sat with it for a moment, and the silence had a different quality to it than his usual refusals.

(End of Chapter)