Morning in Gongdeng City

Gongdeng City woke slowly. The light arcade above Whitegrass Street would first thin the night's warm yellow glow, as though someone were slowly rolling up a layer of old cloth along the length of the street. Most people living in the low-light level were still awake at that hour; now and then, a shadow shifted behind a window. The early-shift cleaning machines were already out, hugging the foot of the walls, their roller brushes sweeping through the fine dust left from the night before. Only ten or twenty minutes later would the pale silver light overhead come on section by section. Breakfast stalls lifted their pot lids, residential gates began announcing stops, a child upstairs started crying over a missing sock, and then the whole street could be considered awake.

Xu Linchuan woke later than the street. His wrist display had vibrated beside his pillow three times before he managed to find it. 7:12. First period was at 7:50. He had not washed his face, and he had no idea where he had thrown his teacher's bag the night before. Staring at the time, Xu Linchuan ran quickly through his options: call in sick, pretend his residential gate was malfunctioning, or trust that in thirty-eight minutes he could wash, eat, make it through two intersection signals, pass through the residential gate, and then run from the school entrance to Class Two, Grade Three. The first two would require a written explanation to He Qi. The third required only running. He sat up.

The last stack of homework from the night before was still sprawled across the desk. Han Yu had turned local history into an equipment design brief. One corner of Zhou Yan's paper bore a greasy mark. The Lu Nan siblings had each quoted their grandmother, then contradicted each other on the year. Xu Linchuan had graded until after one, and by the end he could no longer tell whether he was correcting his students' typos or they were testing his patience. He was still searching for his teacher's bag while brushing his teeth. Only after washing his face did he spot the strap beneath the sofa. He bent to pull it out, struck his head on the corner of the table, and rose with a hand pressed to his forehead, feeling that whatever happened today, he already had good reason to be in a bad mood.