By noon, the sky had curdled into the colour of soured washing-up water, brooding clouds pressing down on Garden City's forsaken skyline. The surviving glass towers harboured only pigeons and hush; wan sunlight skated over their crazed panes like dull pewter. Somewhere a torn plastic banner thrashed against a half-finished balcony, its rhythmic slap carrying across the empty lots like a warning drum.
Lin Kai halted at the perimeter of what had once been the Zhang Development Complex, a sprawling residential programme frozen mid-construction. Concrete frames reared like the bleached ribs of a beached leviathan, and scaffolding shed russet flakes that drifted away on the wind. A sour draft carried the mingled scents of mildew, cheap insulation and rain-soaked cement. Under it lurked a sweeter note, rotting apricots from a cracked vending crate, proof that even perishables were abandoned mid-delivery when the money ran out.
Property had been the city's final throw of the dice.
After the steel foundries foundered and the chemical works migrated to thriftier provinces, Garden City attempted rebirth as a New Urban Haven. The old was levelled, and hollow aspirations rose in its stead: condominiums, luxury flats, glass-clad malls with fountains that never flowed. Yet when livelihoods vanished, so did people, and the towers stood vacant, mute monuments to broken vows. The launch billboard still clung to the site gates, its slogan slashed by spray paint into the grim rebuke Never Heaven, the letters already weeping rust.
Kai recalled the ribbon-cutting here five years earlier. He had been a twenty-four-year-old councillor, stiff in an ill-fitting suit, stationed beside Mayor Duan. Duan had produced a carnivorous smile and proclaimed, "This is the future!"
That future now crackled beneath Kai's boots as he stepped over glittering shards of window glass.
"Bold of you to turn up," observed a voice behind him.
He pivoted.
Qiu Jialin.
She wore a slate-grey trench coat over high-waisted black trousers, boots that clicked with unhurried sovereignty. Her long hair was coiled in a businesslike twist, though a few strands danced loose in the wind. Once she had been the city's star developer, until the crash swallowed her projects whole. Since then, she had slipped from sight, her townhouse mortgaged twice to cover half a year of unpaid worker wages until today.
"Didn't know you were back," Kai said, folding his arms.
"I never truly left," she replied. "I merely stopped returning the banks' calls."
Her gaze traversed the skeletal estate.
"This was my life's work."
"This was a city," Kai answered softly.
Silence breathed between them. Then she studied him properly. "Still set on playing the hero?"
"I'm not playing," he said. "I am the mayor, for the moment."
"You were elected by children and the desperate. Do you call that a mandate?"
"I call it a last chance."
A cold gust keened through the frames above, making the metal groan. When Jialin adjusted her grip on the leather folio, Kai noticed faint calluses laddering the bases of her fingers, evidence that she had spent more nights on scaffolding than in boardrooms.
Jialin stepped closer and lowered her voice. "I have returned with a plan, something tangible. It will demand more than sentiment and soup kitchens. It will demand risk and uneasy alliances."
Kai lifted an eyebrow. "With you, I suppose?"
"You require someone who still comprehends the flow of capital, even now, especially now."
He hesitated.
Garden City had been scorched by developers before, and there was hardly a queue of visionaries outside his office door.
At length, he said, "Talk."