The bus ride up Nanshan took forty minutes.
Chen Mo had secured a window seat near the back, which suited him. From here he could see the city receding below them as the road wound upward through the pine-covered slopes, and he didn't have to participate in any of the conversations happening around him.
Gou Yiyang, predictably, had no such preference and was already deep in conversation with three people across the aisle.
Chen Mo leaned his head against the window and closed his eyes.
The medicine made him drowsy in the afternoons. He had learned, in his previous life, to simply accept this rather than fight it — fighting it only produced a particular kind of exhausted restlessness that was worse than either sleeping or being awake. So he let the motion of the bus and the sound of other people's voices blur together, and he rested.
He was almost asleep when someone sat down beside him.
He didn't open his eyes.
The seat had been empty when he boarded — he had put his jacket on it precisely because he preferred it empty. The jacket was now apparently on his lap.
"You look terrible," said Si Yan.
Chen Mo opened his eyes.
Si Yan was seated beside him with the easy posture of someone who considered every chair he occupied to be his by right. He was looking out the window rather than at Chen Mo, which was, Chen Mo had to admit, marginally less irritating than the alternative.
"I was sleeping," Chen Mo said.
"You were pretending to sleep."
"Same outcome."
Si Yan glanced at him sideways. In the afternoon light coming through the window, the golden embroidery on his shoulder caught briefly and went out again. "You look like you haven't eaten."
"I ate."
"When?"
Chen Mo thought about this. The congee this morning, which had been small. Nothing since.
He didn't answer.
Si Yan reached into the bag at his feet and produced a paper bag, which he set on the seat between them without comment. Chen Mo looked at it. Then he looked at Si Yan, who had returned to looking out the window.
Inside the bag were two steamed buns, still faintly warm, and a small bottle of electrolyte drink.
Chen Mo picked up one of the buns.
"The club president buying food for members," he said. "Is that in the rulebook?"
"No."
"Then what's this?"
"My grandfather told me to be nicer to you," Si Yan said, still looking out the window. His tone was perfectly flat. "I'm being nicer to you."
Chen Mo stared at the side of his face for a moment.
Then he bit into the bun.
It was pork and cabbage. Decent. He hadn't realized how hungry he was until he started eating, and then he finished it faster than he intended to.
He picked up the second one.
Si Yan still hadn't moved.
"Your grandfather knows my grandfather?" Chen Mo asked.
"Apparently."
"And he told you to look after me."
"He told me to have a better attitude." Si Yan finally turned to look at him, and there was something in his expression that might, in different lighting, have been amusement. "He said you were soft-natured and easy to bully."
Chen Mo stopped chewing.
He looked at Si Yan.
Si Yan looked back at him with the expression of someone waiting to see what would happen next.
Chen Mo swallowed, took another bite of the second bun, and said, very calmly, "Your grandfather has never met me."
"No."
"Then he's working from secondhand information."
"Clearly."
"And you find this funny."
"I find it interesting," Si Yan said, which was not exactly a denial. He leaned back in his seat. "I told him to watch and see. He didn't believe me."
Chen Mo finished the second bun and picked up the electrolyte drink. He cracked the seal and drank half of it before speaking again.
"What exactly," he said, "did you tell him you'd seen?"
Si Yan was quiet for a moment.
"Someone who doesn't back down," he said finally. "Regardless of the situation."
It was a simple enough observation. Matter-of-fact. Si Yan delivered it the way he seemed to deliver most things — without particular weight, as if he were commenting on the weather.
Chen Mo looked out the window. The trees had thickened as they climbed, the road narrowing between walls of pine. Below and behind them, the city had become a pale smear at the base of the mountain.
In his past life, he had never come to Nanshan. There had been no one to invite him, and no money for the bus fare, and the kind of exhaustion that made even wanting things feel like too much effort.
He took another sip of the electrolyte drink.
"Your grandfather also told you something else," Chen Mo said. Not a question.
Si Yan raised an eyebrow.
"About my family," Chen Mo said. "Otherwise you wouldn't have shown up at the hospital last night with that expression."
A beat.
"What expression?"
"The one people make when they already know the answer and they're deciding whether to say so." Chen Mo capped the bottle. "You knew who I was before I got in your car. You knew about the Yang family situation."
Si Yan did not deny it.
He also, notably, did not confirm it.
Chen Mo found, to his mild surprise, that this didn't particularly bother him. In his previous life, he had spent years being bothered by what people knew and didn't say — the whispers, the careful looks, the particular kindness of people who pitied you. He had learned eventually that the energy spent on being bothered was simply wasted.
Si Yan knowing things was a fact. What he did with those things was what mattered.
So far, he had shown up at a hospital at midnight and bought steamed buns.
Chen Mo filed this away.
"Qi Lin," he said, changing direction. "He invited me today."
"I know. I told him to."
Chen Mo looked at him.
Si Yan met his gaze without particular expression. "You were going to spend the weekend in the dorm eating nothing and sleeping. That seemed like a waste."
"You don't know what I was going to do."
"Gou Yiyang talks a great deal."
Chen Mo made a mental note to speak to Gou Yiyang about this. Then he made a second mental note acknowledging that speaking to Gou Yiyang about anything confidential was functionally equivalent to broadcasting it over the school intercom.
"I'm fine," he said.
"I didn't say you weren't."
"Then why—"
"Fresh air is good for stomach problems," Si Yan said, with the tone of someone reading from a pamphlet. "Mountain air especially. Something about the altitude."
Chen Mo stared at him.
"That's not how altitude works."
"Isn't it?"
"No."
"Hm." Si Yan looked entirely unbothered. "Well. You're here anyway."
The bus rounded a long curve and the view opened suddenly — the whole valley spread below them, the afternoon light lying flat and golden across the rooftops, the river a silver th base of the hills. Several people near the front of the bus made appreciative sounds.
Chen Mo looked at it without speaking.
He had not seen this view before. In his previous life, this mountain had been simply a shape on the horizon — something that existed at a distance, that other people went to on weekends, that had nothing to do with him.
It was a better view than he had expected.
"Yang Shule will make trouble today," Si Yan said, without looking away from the window. His voice had shifted slightly — lower, more offhand, the way people spoke when they were actually saying something important. "He's embarrassed from last night and he's looking for somewhere to put it. You're the easiest target."
"I'm aware."
"Don't rise to it."
"I wasn't planning to."
"Good." Si Yan finally looked at him again, and there it was — that expression that might have been amusement, or might have been something else entirely, something that hadn't fully decided what it wanted to be. "It's more effective if I handle it."
Chen Mo considered this for a moment.
"Why would you handle it?" he asked.
"Because my grandfather told me to be nicer to you," Si Yan said, with absolute seriousness, "and I'm taking the assignment seriously."
There was a long pause.
"That's not why," Chen Mo said.
Si Yan smiled. It was brief and small and went away quickly, like something that had escaped before he could stop it.
"No," he agreed. "It's not."
He didn't elaborate.
Chen Mo looked at the empty paper bag between them, then out the window again at the mountain rising ahead of them, the pines dark and close on either side of the road.
The bus was slowing. Through the front windshield he could see the upper parking area coming into view, and beyond it, the wooden structures of the mountain summit rest stop, smoke rising from somewhere inside.
Around them, people were beginning to gather their things and talk about the ride ahead and argue cheerfully about which path to take.
Gou Yiyang appeared over the back of the seat in front of them, beaming.
"You two were talking? I thought Chen Mo was sleeping." He looked between them with undisguised curiosity. "What were you talking about?"
"Altitude," Si Yan said.
Gou Yiyang blinked. "What about altitude?"
"Nothing important," Chen Mo said.
He picked up his jacket from his lap, stood as the bus came to a complete stop, and moved toward the front with the rest of the crowd. Behind him, he heard Si Yan rise and follow without hurry, unhurried as everything he did, as if the mountain and the afternoon and the people around him were all simply proceeding at his pace rather than their own.
It was, Chen Mo thought, a very specific kind of confidence.
He was still deciding what to make of it.
The bus doors opened. The mountain air came in — cold and clean and smelling of pine and distance — and Chen Mo stepped out into it and breathed.
Gou Yiyang appeared at his elbow, looking around with excitement.
"Okay but seriously," he said, "what were you two actually talking about?"
Chen Mo looked at the mountain ahead of them.
"He bought me a bun," he said.
Gou Yiyang stared at him. "That's it?"
"That's it."
Gou Yiyang looked deeply unsatisfied. Chen Mo ignored this and started walking toward the rest stop, hands in his pockets, the cold air clearing the last of the afternoon drowsiness from his head.
It was, he thought, a better day than he had planned for.
He would allow that much.