Wendy decided—in the way people decide at three a.m. and un-decide at eight—that she would not run.
Not yet.
She would clear the wreckage on her own ground first, because otherwise she would land in Sydney already bent. She would not arrive as a refugee with a debt's shadow still on her. And if she ever did go, she would go on her terms, not as anyone's annex or story.
She wrote the rules down in her notes app like a contract with herself:
Equality with Jack: separate place to stay; split bills; no rescuers, no rescued.
Work: never again to prove worth; only to build a life I recognize.
China first: fix what I can, document what I can't.
Sydney scout: if funds allow, one short trip to map the ground; return; then three months' budget before any longer stay.
She stared at the list until the words steadied.
Jack's name lit her screen before the kettle boiled.
"Morning, Wen." His face was all blue window and office fern again, a postcard of a better climate. "How are you feeling? You look—" He cut himself off. "You look like you didn't sleep."
"I wrote a plan," she said. "If I come to Sydney, I book my own room, pay my own way. We meet as equals. No fixing me. No solving my past."
Jack nodded too quickly. "Of course. I wouldn't dream of—"
"And I'm not coming yet," she added. "Not to live. Maybe—maybe to look. One week. If I can. First I need to handle things here."
A small hesitation pricked the line. "Handle how?"
"Evidence," she said. "Logs, contracts. If they're making me the body on the hook, I won't be quiet about it."
He rubbed his brow. "Wendy, this sounds—dangerous."
"Danger is signing a paper I can't swallow," she said. "Danger is arriving in your city hollowed out and asking you to fill me."
He smiled then—not the easy grin she knew, but something steadier. "Okay. Terms accepted. Tell me what you need from me that isn't a plane ticket."
Her throat tightened. "Ask your bad pie to wait."
"It's immortal," he said. "It will."
Lin dragged her to a law office above a bubble-tea shop where the associate wore sneakers and a voice like a gavel. "Don't sign," Attorney He said, flipping the settlement with one finger as if it were a fly. "Demand system access logs, seal app audit trails, procurement workflow histories. You won't get them fast, but asking signals teeth. Meanwhile, document everything you remember: who touched the order, who had the motive, who benefits. And—" she leveled a look "—stay boring in public. People who go loud too soon get framed as hysterical."
"I'm not loud," Wendy said.
"Good," He said. "Be precise."
On the sidewalk afterward, Lin squeezed her elbow. "We'll run the calls through a friend at telecom for the burner that harassed you. I also asked an old auditor about Mr. Zhao's cousin. It's true—he's on the supplier's board."
Wendy's stomach tightened. "Will the audit team care?"
"They'll care if a headline cares," Lin said. "Our job is to make caring the easy choice."
That afternoon, a message arrived from an old classmate she hadn't spoken to in years: Zhipeng Liu, now some kind of systems engineer, the kind who saw through walls other people thought were solid.
Heard about your mess. Don't text back. If you want to talk logs, go to the back booth at River Teahouse at 7. Bring cash. Delete this.
Wendy read the note twice, then sent Lin only the place and time. Lin replied with a single checkmark and the words: I'll sit outside.
The River Teahouse was all lacquer and time. Steam rose from spouts shaped like cranes. In the back booth, Zhipeng wore a baseball cap and the hollow-eyed look of someone who'd learned to be careful.
"I shouldn't be here," he said without greeting. "But I hate bullies."
He slid an old USB across the table. On the label, someone had written CANARY in block letters.
"It's not the full audit trail," he said. "Think of it as a canary log. Our seal app pings a hidden file whenever an admin account makes a change after a document is submitted. It shouldn't exist. We left it in for debugging and… forgot." His mouth twitched. "Or maybe I didn't forget."
"Admin account?" Wendy repeated.
"Shadow admin," he said. "Not the official ones. The changes on your purchase order came from that account. Name the account ID?"
He wrote three characters on a napkin: J-0.
The napkin felt colder than the porcelain cup.
"'J'?" Wendy asked. "As in—?"
"Anything," he said quickly. "Initial. Joke. Junk. Don't map it to a person until you can prove it. But whoever used it changed your spec and scrubbed the visible log. The canary squawked."
"Then why did IT say 'no irregularities'?"
Zhipeng gave her a look that didn't need translation. "Because irregularities are relative."
"Can you testify?"
He picked up his tea, hands suddenly steady. "I have a mother who depends on my paycheck," he said. "I can vanish like your friend Mei if I testify. What I can do is give you a way to make the audit team ask the right questions. Anonymous tips are old-fashioned for a reason: they work if they smell like work."
He stood. "Don't contact me again. If you get a new phone, don't port your number. They'll mirror it."
"Why help me?" she asked.
His eyes flicked to the window where the river crawled past. "Because once, years ago, you translated my scholarship essay for free," he said. "And because I prefer systems to people. This one is a bad system."
He left a stack of bills under his saucer and was gone before her tea cooled.
When Wendy stepped outside, Lin uncrossed her arms from a shadowed doorway and walked without speaking. At the corner, she said, very softly, "We have a path."
"A path," Wendy repeated, holding the small weight of the USB like a coin that could buy silence or light.
That night, anxiety was a radio she couldn't switch off. It flipped stations—Jack's face, Mei's absence, Mr. Zhao's pen, Zhipeng's napkin—never the song she wanted. She lay in the dark and began to count money instead of sheep.
One week in Sydney on the cheap: hostel bed, grocery runs, Opal card, data plan, cheap shoes. A number formed: not nothing, not everything. Three months' cushion to live like a person and not a plea: another number, heavier, but with a shoulder she could almost carry.
She opened a spreadsheet, because sometimes hope needs cells.
Sydney Recon (1 week)
Flight (Zhengzhou–Sydney, return, economy): 3,500–4,200 RMB
Hostel (7 nights): ~1,400 RMB
Transit (Opal + airport train): ~300 RMB
Food (self-catered): ~400–600 RMB
Buffer/misc.: 500 RMB
Subtotal: ~6,200 RMB
Three-Month Cushion (no work)
Room in share house / studio: ~8,000–12,000 RMB/month
Daily life: ~3,000 RMB/month
Subtotal (3 months): ~33,000–45,000 RMB
Total Target: ~39,000–51,000 RMB + margin
The numbers didn't comfort her, but they gave the fog edges.
If she went just to look—one week—she could fund it by selling the camera she didn't use, the gimbal she'd bought in a burst of influencer optimism, the gold bangle her aunt had given her and told her never to sell. She would not touch the bangle. She would be poor and stubborn and find another way.
Her phone buzzed on the table. A new email, no name, only a subject: We saved you a seat. The body contained a different itinerary, this time with a paid stamp, and a QR code for check-in. The date was tomorrow. The sender signature was a single letter: J.
Wendy's mouth went dry. She turned the phone toward Lin, who had fallen asleep on the couch with a spreadsheet open over her face. Lin woke in one smooth motion, read, and hissed, "Do not scan that code."
"I wasn't going to."
Lin's thumbs flew. "The bank flagged a payment of 3,980 RMB to an airline this afternoon from a prepaid card. The card was loaded with cash at a convenience store near your office." She looked up. "You have a stalker with petty-cash taste."
Wendy laughed once, a sound like someone stepping on glass. "They want me out."
"Or they want you trapped at immigration with a fake ticket and a story," Lin said. "Either way, you don't board a plane you didn't buy."
Wendy deleted the email, then emptied the trash, then went into settings and emptied the memory of the trash, the way you clear a room twice when you don't trust the first lock.
She messaged Jack: Did you book me a ticket?
Jack: No. I promised. Wendy, please be careful.
She set her alarm for six, when the city is still soft and a person can walk fast without feeling chased.
In the morning, she went to the company to collect what was left of her desk. The lobby guard looked at her the way people look at the weather: impersonal, braced.
"Just the mug," she said. "And my notebook."
"Your mug was sent to your house," he said without blinking. "Notebook is with HR."
"HR is where?"
He considered, then lied politely. "In a meeting."
She went up anyway. The halls felt thinner, like breath held too long. At her cubicle, the drawers had learned to be empty. On the keyboard, a sticky note waited in an unfamiliar hand:
Good luck wherever you land.
— M.
Mei? Or mercy.
On impulse, she checked the shared binder where procurement printed draft contracts for cross-checking. It had always been a mess—tabs labeled A, A2, AA. Today it was too neat. The plastic sleeves shone like ice.
Her phone vibrated in her pocket. A number she did not recognize: Unknown.
She answered and held her breath.
"Ms. Chen," a man said, cheerful as a weather app. "This is Officer Peng from the municipal bureau. We'd like to ask a few questions about your company's complaint. Are you available now?"
"My company filed a complaint?" she asked, heartbeat stepping wrong.
"A preliminary matter," he said. "We can meet at the bureau, or I can come to your address."
"I'll bring my lawyer," she said.
A pause. "No need to make this formal."
"That's the only way I do things," she said softly.
She hung up and texted Attorney He, who sent back a location and a time and the words: Do not go anywhere alone.
As Wendy walked out, she felt eyes tick across her shoulders, cataloguing the shape of her back. In the elevator mirror she didn't recognize the woman looking back: hair too neat, mouth too calm. She smiled at the stranger on purpose, to make a face the watchers would notice and misunderstand.
In the street, the air tasted like yesterday's rain. She walked fast. On the corner by the bakery, a boy in a school uniform bumped her, muttered sorry, and palmed her phone with a skill so good she almost admired it—until Lin stepped out of nowhere, caught his wrist, and reclaimed the device with a glare that suggested she measured his value in audit years.
"Nice try," Lin said, and let him go. The boy ran like someone who didn't yet know he was a pawn.
"They're sloppy," Lin said. "Or confident. Both are useful."
"Useful how?"
"Sloppy leaves footprints. Confidence leaves patterns," Lin said. "Patterns we can feed to people who eat patterns for breakfast."
Wendy smiled despite herself. "You mean auditors."
"I mean aunties with data."
She spent the afternoon in small acts that felt like rebellion because they were ordinary. She bought passport photos at a booth that made everyone look slightly hunted. She opened a new email account and wrote herself letters labeled EVIDENCE with attachments: photos of documents, scans of notes, a copy of the canary log zipped and password-protected with her father's favorite idiom. She walked to the river and, for a minute, did not think about planes.
At home, Ma sat with a pile of walnuts and a small hammer. "For your nerves," she said. "And for your memory."
"My nerves are raw," Wendy said.
"Then cover them with work," Ma said, cracking another walnut with a decisive tap. "Not the work they want you to do. The work you choose."
Wendy showed her the spreadsheet. "One week to scout," she said. "Then back. Then save for three months and decide."
Ma nodded as if this had always been the shape of the day. "When you go," she said, "do not stay with the boy."
"I won't."
"Find the Chinese market," Ma added. "There is always a Chinese market. Stand there. Listen. People will tell you what they need. Maybe they need the things you know. Maybe you will be the person who brings them."
Wendy thought of geosynthetic sheets, of fish farms lined against leakage, of building sites that needed a membrane between promise and ground. Sydney had water. Water meant edges. Edges needed care. Maybe there was a place there for someone who knew how to stop seepage—literal and otherwise.
That night, a WeChat group invite pinged: 悉尼打工度假&商贸互助群. No mutual friends were listed. The group picture showed a harbor in a blue so glossy it seemed rude.
She hovered, then accepted. Messages scrolled past: someone selling a secondhand rice cooker; someone asking about an ABN; someone warning about a fake landlord.
A post pinned near the top snagged her breath:
Looking for local liaison (Sydney-based) for small civil supplies. Must understand Chinese procurement, speak decent English. Part-time. Commission-based. DM.
She didn't DM. She took a screenshot and sent it to herself labeled MAYBE. Then she drafted a note in English—cool, professional, with none of the hunger that made people cheap. She did not send it.
At midnight, she opened the airline website—the real one, not a QR code's trap—and stared at Zhengzhou–Sydney flights like a person contemplating a map of their own nervous system.
There was a fare in two weeks, midweek, oddly affordable. Refundable for a penalty. She imagined landing in a city that spoke in magnesium light, taking a train to a hostel that smelled like other people's shampoo, standing at a Saturday market with a notebook, writing down what people bought and what they cursed about shipping.
Her cursor hovered over Book. Her heart did that winged scratching again, the kind that could be fear or its cousin, anticipation.
She booked the ticket.
Not tomorrow. Not today. In fourteen days. Enough time to gather papers, to hand the canary to someone who knew what birds meant, to earn the fare without selling the gold bangle, to teach her family the shape of her absence and her return.
When the confirmation email arrived—Paid in clean typeface, the name exactly hers—she forwarded it to Lin and to Attorney He.
Then she wrote to Jack:
One week. In two weeks. Separate rooms. Pie optional. I'm coming to look, not to stay. I go back after. We test the weight of this word: equal.
Jack replied almost at once: Equal. I'll make a list of terrible pies. Also, if you want intros to any Chinese community folks here, I can ask around—but only if you say so.
Ask for names, she wrote. No favors.
Names, then. See you soon, he said. Not soon enough.
Wendy set her phone face down and looked at the cracked office mug sitting on the shelf, now repurposed to hold pens. She didn't glue the handle. She wanted the crack to show. It made the mug honest and her careful.
The apartment was quiet except for Ma's even breath through the thin wall and, now and then, a distant motorbike declaring its own survival. Wendy lay awake and listened to the city's pulse knock against hers. Not synced. Not opposed. Two distinct beats, choosing to move in parallel for a while.
In the morning, she would take the USB to Attorney He and let the canary sing in a stranger's cage. She would call the number that claimed to be Officer Peng and give them a time to meet—in a room with glass and names on doors. She would go to the market and listen to what people bought and what they couldn't find.
When she finally slept, she dreamed of a harbor that was both river and sea, of a door that wasn't a wind, and of stepping through it with her hands unbound.