“You’ve tilted my world in the very best way, Laike.”

No matter how contented either boy felt in that moment, how much they wanted to persist as they were until infinity claimed them, time always had other motives. Yuhui watched the way his arms fit around that boy’s neck, watched the shifting beauty of his expressions with a critical interest. He dipped his head and turned his line of sight to the entrance of their hideaway, exposing the line of his neck for a moment of brief observation.

“… But we should go.” The prince’s eyes followed the outlines of three men approaching. Their weapons flickered beneath the weird canopy stretched long above, menace exuded almost as thoroughly as the scent of old grease and recycled oil staining their skin and garments.

“Mm,” the mountain’s shadow blade looked up but didn’t move from his position pressed to the wall, lips bruised to a ruddy crushed cherry blush. Even with Yuhui still against him, the boy was a mirror of the threat that suddenly eclipsed his happy reprieve. His aura was bladed; his rattlesnake gaze was already snapping for a taste. Suddenly guarded, that insolent boy went on the attack, calling down the alley: “You should leave.”

“But we just got here,” said their swarthy leader, blade suddenly solid in his hand. “Calm down priest, just paying respects to my Prince as we pass on through.”

“Weird place for a royal to be hanging out though, gotta say.” The man to the left of his centerfield companion commented, dipped gaze soaked through with malice. When one weapon solidified, so too did the second, the third.

“Yeah,” the far right man quickly observed. He walked with the impression that one of his legs was shorter than the other, tattered and over-repaired clothes rustling in the off kilter rhythm of his strange shuffling. “Who would even come if something were to happen to the Second Young Master? Who would hear his cries?”

Yuhui turned away from his friend, reaching into his belt to fuss with his purse. “There’s no need to threaten us. If you want money just hold on—I’ll give you the rest of what I have.”

“It’s not going to be enough,” the leader of the pack reached out and snatched the boy by the wrist, yanking him forward. “It’s not gonna be anything compared to what your clan would trade for you.”

The Tian boy’s yelp bounced off the long walls holding their crevice of shadows.

Laike moved in flickers, in glitches; in that dim alleyway of cast shadows and umbrage, Laike was an electric ghost. The Luanshi boy existed only in broken pixels, misplaced frames.

His black sword, 深海 carved in her here-and-there smokeshow blade, was instantaneous, heavy in her master’s hand. Laike, too, was an instant. He didn’t lunge after that boy who’d given him his first kiss, no—but he did appear suddenly close-by, lashing out quick and efficient. Shenhai set Yuhui free by cutting his kidnapper’s hand clean off.

“I will come,” Laike said, stark and calm with only the hint of a growl clinging to his words. He was a chime above the din as the howling began, his first opponent falling to the dirt clutching his wrist. “I will hear.”

It all happened so fast. Without realizing, Yu shook the disembodied hand off, sending it flying down the alleyway. The man it belonged to was on his knees, spilling blood he would never be able to catch despite the freneticism of his grasping. His life force carpeted the uneven path of their avenue with a vicious sticky red, creeping forth in every angle.

The other pair of men met each other’s eyes, unsure if this hold up was really worth it since their leader was down. In the silence of their long look, it seemed they found some agreement upon revenge: an instantaneous amputation was nothing to let slide and both turned back to the boys.

“You motherfucker,” the man on the left spat, raising his thick-bladed dadao above his head before he charged at Laike.

Laike dodged another blow like he wasn’t there at all, ghastly thing like a fragment of reality in that alley so full of shade. He flickered at the back of the path by a kitchen’s access door, then on an awning before he found where he was meant to be: flush to Yuhui’s back. He wrapped an arm around the Prince’s waist before he countered the boy’s attacker, cutting another assailant free of his dominant hand,

and then

they

f

e

l

l

into the dark.

Yuhui gasped into the pitch enveloping him, breath black and body sightless. He was shapeless save the tingling tips at the end of his fingers reaching to grip the arm marking the boundary of his waistline. What was anything in the void of everything? Where was time and place and form in ultimate aught?

Bladeless, bloodless, colorless in their caliginous confines, that darksight royal leaned his head back to see if it would meet his captor. Stolen away into absolute nothingness, Yu did the only thing he could: he held on.

I’m here.

Laike incised his syllable calligraphy into Yuhui’s neck, tongued his scrawl on the stonebrook bank of a Prince’s wayward pulse, ladon heavy in the shadowdeep’s timeslip. In the stratosphere of what lay beneath, they were bundled tight together in a one-man shroud—where Yuhui ended, Laike gladly began.

The one who belonged here could wear it like comfort;

something deep in him prayed his visitor could too.

It goes deeper, he said. But we’re not staying.

Dizzied by every which way simultaneously, Yuhui’s digits counted out his thoughts in character blocks, index finger rapidly jotting down the choreography of stroke order on the weight of an arm he recognized was not his own, a simulacrum of tongue and teeth response. Maybe there was sound; or maybe it was all silence.

Where are we… going?

Between front and back, betweennow and when. Your ghosts make it difficult to find the way but don't worry: I know this place.

Laike may have worn a grin on his nowhere face; he found he enjoyed the rhythm of Yuhui’s handwriting almost as much as his moonsong voice. All around them, Laike’s shadows played cat and mouse games with Yuhui’s chaos flow; they eddied and swirled, whorled in inkstone black and voided remnants.

The world hasn’t had but a moment without us—your aura is like a monsoon tide on a cliff-face shore. Landing might be strange. Are you ready to go back?

No. Hold onto me just a moment longer.

When Yuhui turned his head in some direction he saw nothing and still he could not escape his mortal mannerisms. The shape of him relaxed in his keeper’s hold—he would gladly take comfort in this world of naught if it meant he could have Laike against him outside of reality’s watchful eye.

Besides, I thought you said I wasn’t haunted.

In the dark, Laike’s shape shifted, nestled closer to Yuhui’s implicated presence. He tightened his grip, hand flat against what could only have been the royal’s chest, given away by the hammer pulse lurking inside.

I don’t know what you are or what you are not. I don’t know how to describe you. I don’t have the words. I’m not a poet, Yuhui; I’m not wise. I haven’t experienced enough of the world to do you justice with my voice, with my mouth.

If this is the case, then why am I already dreading your leaving?

Yu’s hand found its way to the pressure between his lungs, to what he could only assume was that boy of shadows distinguished from himself by its shifting, that movement cloaked by the turgid night silent beyond the scream of day.

I meant it in jest. I’m not asking for exacts. I’m not asking for poetry. You don’t have to say anything. You’re wonderful how you are—Laike, I like you how you are.

Why?

Laike was made to be at home in the dark, but Yuhui was not. Yuhui was a child of the daylight sky, a trespasser wrapped up in the mountain orphan’s gloaming arms. Laike twisted him in his grasping photophobia, nose to what was solid like a cheekbone, solid like a jawline as he blindly sought ten.

What do you mean why?

Yuhui whispered onto the boy’s nightsilk skin.

You’ve been nothing but nice to me despite all my weirdness. Why wouldn’t I like that? You’ve helped me. You’re protecting me. The way you talk about looking after the younger orphans around you makes you seem like a caring person. Already I like to watch you—the way you shyly respond to things. I think you’re very cute but there’s also a seriousness there that is entrancing… like when you were trying to figure me out, when you were concentrating on writing on me.

He tested for shape and form in the sightless grasping of his hands.

Yeah, we’ve only spent half a day in each others’ company but we’ve been through a lot already. I feel like I am pretty good at seeing a person for who they are based on how they treat me. I think I can efficiently determine if someone only wants to be around me because of what I am rather than who I am. You don’t appear to want to use me to better yourself. You’re not scared of me, and…

He surrendered ten and greedily took eleven from the fountainhead dark.

I like that about you.

Laike was greedy for what he was gifted: eleven, twelve, thirteen without a word in between. Was want the same as desire? Would he be the center of suffering for the wide eyed thing in his vortex dark?

No—that was vanity. Even if Laike trusted this royal boy and his improbable plague to tell him the truth, they were from different worlds:

this couldn’t possibly be.

I like you, too.

Tooth to tooth for number fourteen all spit and disaster, Laike couldn’t hold them. The shadows dumped the boys out at the mouth of the alley some five feet above the ground, laying them out at Xueyu’s merciless feet.