Chapter 4: Call Waiting

On the third night Gu Anran, his assistant of six years, called at one in the morning, and Yu was not in a position to refuse.

He took the call at his desk, with the laptop angled and his jacket on.

Gu had a rule about video and a rule about sleep, and she broke the second to keep the first.

She appeared on the screen in a Greywater hoodie, eating cold noodles out of a carton.

"Mr. Yu. You look dreadful."

"It's the lab. There's no daylight."

"There's also no sleep, by the look of you," said Gu. "I have three things."

She held up one finger and chopsticks together.

"Payroll needs your thumb by Friday. The bank wants to talk about the covenant. And Lu asked me for your lab keycard."

"Did you give it to him?"

"I said you lost it," said Gu. She chewed.

"Lu has asked me for the build hashes twice. Mr. Cen's office keeps asking him for something, and he keeps coming to me for it."

"I don't like the shape of that."

Yu opened his mouth to answer.

A pair of hands settled on his knees under the desk.

They were not gentle hands.

He knew them by now.

He looked straight at the camera and made his face do nothing.

Mo Chenyao had gone to ground at the far desk ten minutes ago, ostensibly to read.

He had since crossed the white tile in silence and ducked under the lip of the wood.

Now he knelt between Yu's legs in the dark with his glasses pushed into his hair.

"Mr. Yu?" said Gu.

"I'm listening."

"You went quiet."

"The covenant," said Yu. "Go on."

The hands slid up his thighs.

A thumb found the zip and drew it down, one tooth at a time, and the sound was very small and entirely audible.

Yu coughed.

"Sorry. Dry air."

"You should drink water," said Gu, and put down her noodles. "The covenant requires a debt-to-equity ratio we don't have."

"Hexin's nineteen percent counts as equity. If Hexin sells, we're out of covenant in a week."

"Cen won't sell."

"Cen is a lovely man who owns a publisher," said Gu. "That is a different sentence."

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