He wondered about sending him letters, letting him know he was still here for him, that he and Xingyu were still working together to scrub the city of the last remnants of the List, that Xingyu was tearing apart the empire their family had built—but Xiaokai had made it very clear that he wanted no contact with anyone that he’d known in his past life; he wanted to be punished properly or something, he wanted Weiran and Xingyu to concentrate on their work. In fact, Xiaokai’s only interaction with the two of them had been a pair of letters he sent out to Weiran and Xingyu: the latter was of course a mystery, and technically none of Weiran’s business, and the former was short and sweet—just one sentence—

Your parents would be proud.

Maybe they would be.

EPILOGUE

1

PRISON WASN’T SO bad.

It wasn’t that Xiaokai liked being in prison, nor that he liked anyone that was in prison with him. But he got along fairly well; he liked the order of it, the structure of it. He liked that he didn’t have to be responsible for anything anymore. He liked that he didn’t have to have sex anymore. He liked that he didn’t have to gather information or keep secrets or lie anymore. He liked that he could finally, finally sleep, even without getting his brains fucked out first, even without any pills, because prison finally gave him the punishment that he needed the moment he got involved with the List. The hardest part, really, was the boredom—finding something to do. He studied for another degree. Studied art. Studied photography. Sometimes he wondered what everyone was up to—everyone who he’d left behind when he turned himself in. All of his clients. Sun Yue. Liu Xingyu. Zhang Weiran. What did his room look like? Had the police seized the house, or had they left it alone since Liu Xingyu had it—Liu Xingyu, who had left before he’d ever been put in charge of anything, who had come back and gotten right to taking the List down? Had anyone gone into his room? Did they pack it up and label the boxes? Did they find the pills? Did they find all the photographs he’d hidden inside his books?

And then he had to shove all of those thoughts into the back corner of his mind. Other than a few slipups, he didn’t take them out again until it was time for him to get out.

The morning air was crisp. Liu Xiaokai put on the sweater and the pants he’d come in with—a little small for him after the exercise he’d done, especially since he’d really been a bit sickly before—bowed to the guards, and stepped out the gates.