After feeding the kitten, her total assets could barely last her through April.
The cat had pooped on the balcony.
Sasha said other cat owners bought cat litter to make cleanup easier; Mi Xiaoliu, who had no idea what cat litter was, went down to the children’s playground and shoveled some sand back—and the cat used it all the same.
No one dared say a word; the moment they saw her, they’d clutch their children in terror and flee at top speed.
But forget paying rent and keeping a cat—even eating was a problem.
Counting on her fingers and toes, she worked out that without this commission, steamed buns plus spicy strips or pickles every day would just barely keep her fed through next month.
Opening the organization-issued smartphone and logging into the site, she could see the job’s details; ever since she’d accepted the team-up, she could even see the chat log between Hayato and the employer.
Hourglass: You there?
Need to meet up?
Employer: No need.
Here’s his photo and address.
Just break both his legs.
He owes me a thousand and won’t pay, and he’s damn smug about it.
Attached, a chat screenshot: It’s just a thousand Mila, what’s with the nagging?
Really didn’t think you were this kind of person, heh.
After all these years I’ve finally seen you for who you are.
Let’s just delete each other’s contacts.
Hourglass: Don’t need us to grab the money back for you?
Employer: Sure, grab extra.
I only want the thousand; the rest you all split.
Don’t just casually hand me a thousand to blow me off—I want to see his legs broken.
He didn’t care about that thousand Mila; all he cared about was that someone had freeloaded off his money with no intention of paying it back, and with an utterly foul attitude on top of it.
Mi Xiaoliu kept spamming ellipses at Hayato on her phone, flooding the screen.
At first she got no reply at all, but after two solid hours of her spamming, Hayato was finally worn down.
“The whole two thousand Mila is yours, okay?” Hayato couldn’t imagine what was packed inside this little girl’s head.
Didn’t she have homework to do?
Only when she saw this reply did Mi Xiaoliu stop her endlessly tapping finger.
Changing into the combat suit again, she switched off the lights and leapt out from the balcony, the girl dressed entirely in black melting into the night.
Though her eyes couldn’t see colors beyond gray, white, and black, she surprisingly suffered no great visual handicap in the dark; what she could make out was about the same as an ordinary person, though without color it was hard to tell objects apart in the shadows.
The information the employer had given was extremely detailed—so detailed that Mi Xiaoliu couldn’t understand a word of it.
Not that it mattered; Sasha could read it for her and point the way.
“Now you’ve got me all wrong.”
The middle-aged man in the back seat of the car pulled the corners of his mouth down bitterly.
He wore a suit, a red tie around his neck, the hair at his temples already going white.
Past ten in the evening and still not home—all over the city you could see office workers like him, still hustling for a living at his age, social standing stuck no matter how old he got, drawing a meager salary while pulling unpaid overtime.
They couldn’t be as hard-nosed as the young; at their age, finding a new job was far harder.
Chances for promotion and raises grew scarcer, and all they could do was bow their heads and watch people young enough to be their sons become their bosses and boss them around.
It was all because those two words—making a living—pressed down on their heads, until they’d grown used to bowing.
“How old are you this year, mister?” The driver up front glanced at him helplessly through the rearview mirror.
“Forty-seven.”
“Forty-seven…
and how much do you make a month?”
“Five thousand.” The middle-aged man leaned his head forward a little.
“Young man, my life may be a mess.
To this day I’ve barely saved a cent, and I certainly haven’t got the means to find a wife and start a family.
But every month I still donate half my salary to charity.
Why?
If it were you, seeing those frail girls standing out in the biting cold under dim lights, wearing so little—could you just look the other way?”
“Heh.
Go on.” The cop driving up front curled his lip.
“I’ve got a recorder in the car.”
Being a cop in this city was certainly dangerous, but you never had to worry about your quota.
Case in point—the mister he’d just arrested wasn’t even back at the station yet when, from a building up ahead, came a fresh round of screaming like a pig being slaughtered.
He hit the siren and swung the patrol car around to go check.
Sounding the siren might scare off the suspect, but if it could stop a crime in progress, it was worth it any way you looked at it.
And the suspect, naturally, was tipped off—nothing to be done about that.
On the ninth floor, Mi Xiaoliu crouched with a stack of bills, studying, baffled, the fat man on the ground who was clutching his leg and howling worse than a slaughtered pig, squirming across the floor like a maggot.
She couldn’t understand it.
Last time, that person in the heavy rain hadn’t made a sound after dying—so why was this one making such a racket?
Mi Xiaoliu wore her hood; the fat man hadn’t seen her face, and the searing pain of his broken leg left him no mind to study the culprit’s features.
From outside came a sound she didn’t recognize yet somehow found unsettling.
“Master, run.
The police are here!”
Though she didn’t know a siren, thanks to Sasha’s explanation Mi Xiaoliu knew the police specifically caught bad kids like her, then locked them in a little dark room and wouldn’t give them anything good to eat, and rapped them on the head now and then.
Sasha had also stressed again and again that the whole reason she had her keep the hood up whenever possible was to keep the police from remembering her face.
From the balcony she could see the cop had already charged to the stairwell and even looked up at her.
But it was the ninth floor, plus the dark of night, plus Mi Xiaoliu’s hood, so he couldn’t make out her features.
It seemed that very dip of Mi Xiaoliu’s head let the cop roughly fix her position; without hesitation he entered the stairwell.
Because he knew only four kinds of people would be dressed like that indoors in the middle of the night: cosplayers, Esper Police, supervillains, and idiots.
“He’s definitely taking the elevator, Master.
If you take the stairs you should—”
Before Sasha could finish, the girl raised her leg and kicked the balcony’s security grille flying, then jumped.
It didn’t make a particularly loud noise—her weight was too light—but it was enough for the cop, who hadn’t yet made it onto the elevator, to notice, since the grille had come off with quite a bang.
She landed right in front of a short-haired girl, scaring her so badly she dropped onto her rear, the plastic bag of groceries in her hand flung straight to the ground.
Walking along minding her own business, and a person suddenly drops out of the sky and slams down in front of her—if she’d walked three more meters (about ten feet) she’d probably have died on the spot.
“Ugh…”
Mi Xiaoliu frowned and rubbed her knee.
Her knee was scraped, but it quickly healed back to normal.
She stood up and looked down at the girl she’d frightened.
“Master, your hood!”
Only at Sasha’s reminder did Mi Xiaoliu realize her hood had fallen off—she had, after all, just leapt from the ninth floor.
She put it back on, but the girl had already seen her face.
“A pretty, cute, and handsome girl”—that was everyone’s first thought on seeing Mi Xiaoliu’s uncovered face.
It was an unembellished description, yet perfectly accurate.
The sight made hearts flutter: how could there really be a girl this good-looking in the world?
You almost hoped she’d never grow up, because growing up carried the risk of the looks fading.
By this time the cop had run out too.
He didn’t shout “Freeze!” first like in the TV dramas; instead he crept closer with his handcuffs out—only to be noticed by Mi Xiaoliu.
The girl nimbly dashed away.
One look at that speed and he knew he probably couldn’t catch her.
Speaking a few words into his walkie-talkie, the cop came over and helped up the short-haired girl sitting on the ground.
“You all right?”
After noticing the girl’s face, the cop hurriedly moved behind her, out of her line of sight.
“Mingxue, you’re not wearing your sunglasses today?”
“They fell off.” The girl called Mingxue picked up the sunglasses beside her.
Even with one arm of the frame broken, she put them back on.
To her, sunglasses were as important as prescription glasses to the nearsighted.
Only once she had the glasses on did the cop dare to stand in front of her again.
At that, Mingxue gave a mocking, lopsided little smile, which left the cop a bit embarrassed.
“Mingxue, did you see what that person was just thinking?” By the time he’d arrived Mi Xiaoliu already had her hood on; he didn’t know Lu Mingxue had seen Mi Xiaoliu’s face.
“I nearly got crushed to death and I’m still supposed to keep track of what she was thinking for you?”
She shot the cop a glare, then, annoyed, picked up her groceries and headed for the stairwell.