**THE COLLECTOR'S GAME**
The roof didn't collapse. The tuning fork didn't fall. Gene stood frozen in the moment between choice and consequence, his mother's voice still echoing from a warehouse that shouldn't exist, while Zhao Xian's outline grew thin as smoke beside him.
Then Chen Lao—Morrison—whoever it was—smiled with Gene's father's mouth and said, "You always hesitated at the crucial moment. That's why you need us to decide."
Gene's anger projection didn't surge. It went surgical, precise, cutting through the illusion like a scalpel through scar tissue. The Morrison-figure fractured into light, revealing nothing behind it. No Potter. No trap. Just empty air and the echo of his own doubt.
Zhao Xian solidified, gasping like she'd been underwater. "He almost had me."
"Almost had both of us." Gene lowered the bone fork. It was cold now, dead. "He's not attacking our weaknesses. He's attacking our relief. The part of us that wants to be saved from ourselves."
Zhao Xian straightened, her shell snapping back into place. "Then we stop giving him candidates."
She walked away without looking back, her heels clicking on rooftop gravel that shouldn't exist in this part of the city. Gene followed, but his steps felt wrong, like his body was remembering how to walk in a timeline he'd already left.
---
**FOUR DAYS LATER**
The silence after a near-miss had its own texture. Gene threw himself into Chen Lao's architectural challenge, redesigning boundary sensors that ran on inverted emotion, but his drawings kept bleeding into other things. A sensor became a cage. A cage became a coffin. A coffin became a pottery wheel, spinning endlessly.
Wei found him at 2 AM, still in the impossible office, staring at a blueprint that had morphed into a map of Irvine.
"You're not sleeping," Wei said.
"I'm not tired."
"That's what people say right before they break." Wei set down a takeout container. "Eat. Real food, not dimensional fuel."
Gene picked at the noodles. They tasted like the memory of hunger, not hunger itself. Everything had that quality now—real but echoed, solid but slightly out of phase.
"There's someone asking about you," Wei said casually. Too casually.
"Zhao Xian?"
"A new someone. Calls herself a curator. Specializes in lost potential." Wei hesitated. "She's been talking to the Potter's former anchors. The ones you severed. She's gathering their stories."
Gene's fork stilled. "Why?"
"She collects people who've paid too much to become themselves. Says it makes them interesting." Wei looked at him. "She's dangerous, Gene. Not like Zhao Xian. Not strategic. She just... collects. And when she's done studying you, she'll either put you on a shelf or break you to see how you work."
---
**THE CURATOR**
Gene met her the way he met most threats in New Shanghai—by accident, in a place he shouldn't have been. The tea house in the French Concession where space folded just enough to make you doubt your own proportions. She occupied a corner booth like it was a throne, surrounded by objects that shouldn't coexist: a 1920s Shanghai telephone, a holographic Territorial map, a clay bowl that still spun slowly on its base, powered by nothing.
"Gene Eu," she said without looking up from the book she wasn't reading. "You look smaller in person. Grief does that. Compresses us."
She was younger than he'd expected, maybe twenty-four, with hair cut short and uneven like she'd done it herself with kitchen scissors. Her dress looked expensive but worn wrong, the straps twisted, the hem stained with something that might have been tea or might have been older. Everything about her was deliberately off-center, a carefully calibrated asymmetry that made you look twice, then look away, then look back.
"Li Min," she said, finally closing the book. "I collect the people everyone's given up on. You're my latest acquisition."
"I'm not for sale."
"Everything's for sale. Some things just don't know their price yet." She gestured to the seat across from her with a hand that had ink stains on the fingers, like she'd been writing the same word over and over. "Sit. Or don't. But standing there makes you look like you're waiting for permission."
Gene sat. The booth was too small, designed for intimacy without comfort. She leaned forward, close enough that he could smell her perfume—jasmine left too long in water, sweet decay.
"Tell me about the anchor you severed," she said. "The one that looked like someone you trusted."
Gene's jaw tightened. "Zhao Xian told you."
"Zhao Xian told me the facts. I want the feeling." Her eyes were dark, but not like Zhao Xian's. Zhao Xian's eyes held weight. Li Min's held nothing at all—just a perfect, reflective surface that showed him his own face. "What did it feel like, killing the version of yourself that wanted to be saved?"
He didn't answer. She didn't seem to expect him to.
"I have something for you." She reached into her bag—a leather satchel that looked like it had been salvaged from a shipwreck—and pulled out a coil. Not a memory. An object. A small clay figure, crude, shaped like a person but without features. "One of the Potter's early works. He gave them to his anchors. A physical self to hold while he dismantled their real ones."
Gene took it. The clay was still warm, as if it had been fired moments ago. It felt like holding his own heartbeat.
"That one didn't take," Li Min said. "The woman he gave it to was too broken already. No self left to dismantle." She smiled. "He collects perfection. I collect the leftovers."
"Why are you showing me this?"
"Because I want to see if you'll keep it or crush it." She leaned closer, her knee pressing against his under the table. The pressure was deliberate, a test of whether his body would retreat or respond. "The Potter builds perfect prisons. I believe in messy freedom. You—" she traced a finger along his knuckles, following the path of his anger "—you're the messiest thing I've seen in years."
The touch was clinical and intimate at once, like a surgeon exploring a wound she intended to preserve rather than heal. Gene felt the boundary between them thin, that familiar shimmer of dimensional overlap. But this time it wasn't the Potter. It was Li Min, pushing at his edges to see where he'd give.
"Zhao Xian wants you to become a weapon," Li Min whispered, her mouth close enough to his ear that her breath raised goosebumps. "I want you to become an accident. Something so unpredictable that even you don't know what you'll do next."
"That's not a goal. That's a collapse."
"Same thing." She leaned back, breaking the tension as suddenly as she'd created it. "The Potter's moved on from anchors. He's building something new. A central collapse point. A timeline so stable, so perfectly boring, that all the others will be pulled into its gravity."
"Where?"
She smiled. "Where do you think?"
Gene knew. The answer had been spinning on his coffee table for three days. The coil of grief. The memory of safety. The weight of what he'd paid.
"He's building Irvine," Gene said. "A version so perfect, so medicated, that every other me will want to live there."
"Not just you." Li Min stood, dropping cash on the table with a casualness that suggested money was just another story she told. "Everyone who's ever wanted to stop being dangerous. Everyone who's tired of paying the price for being real."
She walked to the door, then paused. "He'll invite you in soon. Not as an enemy. As a refugee. And you'll be tempted, because the price of staying here is you have to keep killing pieces of yourself. The price of going there is you only have to kill one."
"Which is?"
"The piece that knows the difference." She disappeared into the crowd, leaving him with the clay figure in his palm, still warm, still waiting to be kept or crushed.
---
**THE INVITATION**
It arrived at midnight. Not a coil. Not a memory. A plain envelope, slipped under his door, addressed in his own handwriting.
Inside: a photograph of his apartment in Irvine. His real apartment. The one his mother had dusted every Sunday. The one with the coffee mug he'd left in the sink when he'd flown to Shanghai for what he thought was business.
A note on the back, also in his handwriting: *The rent's paid. The medication's in the cabinet. Come home whenever you're tired of being a ghost in other people's stories.*
Gene turned the photo over. On the other side—because of course there was another side, the Potter never gave you just one—a picture of Zhao Xian's brother. Younger. Alive. Smiling in a way the real Zhao Xian never did.
Another note: *Or I could bring him here. Would she trade you for that? Would you let her?*
The phone rang. Not his phone. The landline in his apartment, the one he'd never used because it had come with the lease.
Gene picked it up.
"Gene?" His mother's voice, clear as if she were in the next room. "Gene, are you coming home for dinner? Your father made your favorite. Beef and broccoli."
He should have hung up. He should have crushed the photo, burned the envelope, thrown the phone out the window.
Instead, he said, "What time?"
"Seven. Don't be late."
The line went dead.
The photo in his hand changed. Now it showed the warehouse rooftop. Himself and Zhao Xian and the moment he'd almost chosen to save her instead of sever her.
A new note, appearing in ink that bled through from a dimension he couldn't see: *Seven PM. Your apartment. I'll save you a seat. And Gene? Bring the coil. The real one. Not the neutralized copy.*
The Potter wasn't building a trap.
He was settling a debt.
And the price was the last piece of Gene that still believed he could go back.