Ding Rong should have suspected scheming the moment he saw Wang Zhi in red.

Ding Rong, in his narrowed dagger-keen focus on his task, is unsure of the time when he is first made aware of Wang Zhi’s approach. He knows only by the dark of his workroom, dim-lit by his low-burned candle, that it is well into the evening. He knows only that it is no other visitor but Wang Zhi, circling into his periphery, portended by a flutter of draping fabric, because no other but Wang Zhi would dare to come unannounced.

Ding Rong has walked himself through five vivid calculations of Wang Zhi’s death at his hands in the carriage before Wang Zhi speaks.

“I’m in need of a second,” he says.

On the one night of their journey that suspends itself in the in-between, not yet Hetao but no longer home, Wang Zhi joins him for dinner.