Chapter 18: The Rehearsal

Mei arrived at the courtyard at eight in the morning with three coffees, two bags of buns, and a leather jacket.

"I'm here to be useful," she announced. "Where's the whiteboard?"

"We do not have one," said Jiang Lü.

"You have a wall."

"It is a very old wall."

"Then I'll draw on the old wall," said Mei, and borrowed a brush.

Lin Jie came at nine, hunched into his hoodie, with a laptop in each arm and a lanyard Tang Yu had never seen.

"It's the crew badge," he said. "It gets you through the loading door. I made it at the print shop."

"Is that legal?"

"It's decorative."

They set up in the main room around the great desk.

Tang Yu moved the stone ladybug aside, gently, and laid out the plan.

"Zhou's whole demo hangs on one tile," she said.

"The Users tile."

"It sits at the top of the screen, and he clicks it, and it says 120,000."

"Every investor in the room watches him click."

"It reads from the production database," Lin Jie said. "Same as always."

"But the tile is code," said Tang Yu. "And code has a test."

She turned the laptop around.

On it was a short script in plain white text.

"Ladybug can wrap any tile in a test," she said. "It runs on the click, and it prints what the data actually is."

"Under the number?" Mei asked.

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