Chapter 6·Wen Jian · Chengdu

Wen Jian. Chengdu. Friday 12 March 2032, 08:10.

Nearly half the class was missing and Teacher Luo was there anyway, at the front, with the twelve lines on the board behind her. She had not chosen them. Every board in the school had them.

"We'll do the register," she said. She did it. She said nothing about the empty desks. At the end she put the tablet down and took them in.

Jian counted. Nineteen out of thirty-four. Hao had come to school too, in the end, after a lot of noise behind the bedroom door, so it was not only the small ones being kept home.

"Somebody's going to ask," Teacher Luo said, "so I'll say it first. Yes, it's real. I don't know that. Nobody knows that. But the people whose job it is to know say they can't find why it wouldn't be, and that's as much as anyone's got. So we're going to say it's real, and behave as if it's real, and if it turns out it isn't, then we'll have been careful for a week, and nobody ever died of that."

Somebody at the back laughed and stopped.

"Second line," Teacher Luo said, without turning to read it. "The day that person can tell right from wrong. That's the one for you. Who wants to ask me about it."

Nobody did. Then, because it was going to be him, Jian put his hand up.

"When was it? For us?"

"I don't know."

"But roughly."

"I don't know roughly. Nobody does." She pulled a stool out and sat on it, which she never did. "Some of them on the television are saying five. Some are saying seven. One woman said three and then a man got very angry with her. It doesn't say an age. It says a day. It means the day you first understood that hurting somebody was wrong and did it anyway. That's not a thing anybody knows about themselves. I don't know it about myself. I couldn't tell you the day."

"So it's already happened," said Ling, in the front row. "To us."

"To everyone in this room. Yes. That's what I think."

The room took that in. Jian watched it go round. He watched it get to Ma Yong, who was the biggest in the class, and who hit people, not often, but regularly, to keep things where they were. Ma Yong had gone very still.

"So if I hit someone," Ma Yong said, "next Thursday."

"Then I think you'd die, Yong. Yes. I think that's what it says."

"But if I hit them today."

"Then you'd get sent to Director Fang's office. Like always."

Ma Yong looked at his hands.

"I'm not going to hit anyone," he said, to nobody.

"No," said Teacher Luo. "I don't think you are."

In the yard, at the long break, the class did what Jian had known it would do since the register. From the noise coming over the wall from the middle school, every class in the country was doing it.

They tested it.

Not on themselves. On each other. It started with Ling, who was clever and had no fear at all, walking up to Ma Yong and saying, loud, "Hit me."

"No."

"Go on. It doesn't count today. It's not Thursday. Hit me."

"I'm not going to."

"Then push me."

He pushed her. Not hard. She went back a step and grinned and said, "See? Nothing," and everyone turned to Ma Yong, who stood there with his hand still out, looking at it, as if it belonged to somebody else.

"It's not on yet," said Ling. "That's what that proves. Next Thursday do it again."

"I'm not doing it next Thursday."

"Then we'll never know if it works, will we. Somebody has to."

A ring had formed. It was not unkind. It was the opposite. It was the most interested Jian had ever seen his class in anything. They were eleven, and ten, and one of them was nine. Something enormous had been put in the middle of them. The adults were all frightened of it. The children were not, quite.

"What about lying," said Ling. "Somebody lie to me. Lie to me for something. Deception for gain."

"That's stupid."

"Then it doesn't matter, does it. Do it."

Wen Jian stood at the edge of the ring, as he stood at the edge of everything, and watched them work through the twelve lines one at a time, as he had watched Hao's class work through a lab sheet. What counts. What doesn't. If I take your pencil and give it back. If I take your pencil and mean to give it back and forget. If I say your mother's ugly and she is. Ling ran it like a game show. Ma Yong stood in the middle of it and looked, Jian thought, like a person who had been given a week's notice on a house he had lived in his whole life.

"Jian."

He looked round. Ling.

"You're not doing anything."

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because I don't need to," Jian said. "I already know what I'd do."

Ling looked at him with her head on one side, the way she did at a problem that had come out with the wrong answer.

"That's creepy," she said, and turned back to the ring.

Jian went and sat on the wall.

He had read the second line upside down on his father's phone. Whatever day it was that a person learned right from wrong, his had been a long time ago. Since that day he had done what the twelve lines said, without effort, without anyone telling him, without once thinking about it. He did not hit. He did not take. He did not say the thing that would land. So he had not been good. He had never been anything else. Until yesterday there had been no word for that, and now there was, and the word was safe.

Over the wall in the middle school somebody screamed, a long way off, and then laughed.

It might be a lonely thing to be. He was ten. The bell went, and he went in.