Alice noticed the light before she noticed most things. It was one of the ways she was strange, though she did not think of it as strangeness — only as what happened when she opened her eyes. In Xi'an the light had a body. It had weight. It pressed against the windows in the morning and lay across the floor in slabs, and in the afternoon it thinned and withdrew and left the rooms looking like photographs of rooms, slightly flattened, slightly past. She'd tried to explain this once, to her father, and he'd looked at her with the expression he reserved for her mother's side of the family — interested, cautious, as if she might be about to say something that would require professional attention.
She did not try to explain it again.
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She met Wei Lan on the metro.
This was in early January. The Line 2 train heading south from the Bell Tower station at ten at night, half-empty, the fluorescent lights giving everyone the same greenish pallor, like specimens in a jar. Alice was standing near the doors because she liked to stand near the doors. She liked the cold draft that came in when they opened, the brief blast of platform air that smelled different at every station — fried dough at Beidajie, concrete at the Sports Center, something fungal and sweet at Xiaozhai that she never identified.
Wei Lan was sitting in the priority seat, which was technically for the elderly and pregnant and disabled, reading a book with a red cover that she held very close to her face. She was maybe nineteen or twenty. She had the kind of thinness that wasn't fashionable or sick but simply structural, as if she'd been made with less material than other people. Her hair was cut short and uneven, possibly by herself. She was wearing a coat that was too big for her, army green, and her hands coming out of the sleeves looked like a child's hands, except that they weren't — the knuckles were too prominent, the tendons too visible. Alice noticed hands the way other people noticed faces. She couldn't help it. Hands told you what a face was trying not to say.