“Ah—no, of course not.” This was largely the truth. He’d spent quite a bit of time at the coffee shop where Liu Xiaokai had ambushed him, but he’d since moved to a different café—somewhere much less expensive and much less stressful than that place Liu Xiaokai had taken them for lunch. “Do you want to order while I set up?”

Xingyu twisted around to look over the menu. “Sure. What do you want?”

“Something simple. Dumplings, maybe?”

Ten minutes later, Xingyu was sitting across Weiran with a plate of hongyou chaoshou13 and a plate of xiaolongtangbao14 between them.

“So?” said Weiran as he picked up his chopsticks.

“I’ve been poking around my room and trying to see if there was anything I left that could be helpful. Mostly unlucky…I think they must have sent someone in to get out anything incriminatory just in case I turned on them.” He shrugged, gave Weiran a wry smile that Weiran didn’t particularly like. “Anyway, I went to some of the hiding places that I had around the house. I didn’t always hide much—sometimes just food for me and Xiao-Xiao since we were always on rations and I felt bad since he was so little.”

“Xingyu.” Weiran spoke in a low voice. “Get to the point.”

“Most of the places with food were gone, but there was one more place they hadn’t found—in a higher ceiling vent in one of the downstairs bathrooms.”

Weiran leaned forward. “What was it? People that your father made deals with?”

“No.” Xingyu shook his head as he reached into his jacket and pulled out a small bundle of papers folded into quarters. “Here.”

Weiran opened it. It was written in all Mandarin, and sloppily too—as if whoever had written it had been in a rush.

“I snuck into my mom’s office one time,” said Xingyu. “I hadn’t remembered until I came across this, but I remember now. She had gone out for a minute to talk to my father about something, and I wandered in and started poking around. I was curious about what role she had in everything that my father was teaching me.”

“So? What did you find out?”

“Basically what I had gathered as a child—my father took, and my mother gave. In essence, my father was the one who made deals that benefited the company, and my mother was the one who made deals as one of the holders of the List, giving them whatever they wanted whenever they wanted.” He tapped the paper between them. “I was able to get some of what you can get from the List. I also got the process for ordering someone through the List—though I don’t know how outdated either is.”

Weiran’s chest tightened. “Does this mean—?”