Ruyi

The automated voice of the roadside-assistance dispatcher provided a welcome mechanical rhythm against the static in Vinja’s head. He stood on the gravel shoulder while the wind from a passing semi whipped his jacket against his ribs. Jiejie’s phone felt unnaturally heavy in his right pocket. His own was pressed to his left ear. “Yes,” Vinja said, his voice flattened by the particular forced calm he used when his brain was redlining. “A flatbed. It’s an EV. You can’t tow it with the wheels on the ground.” He looked toward the iX. Its hazard lights continued their steady, patient blinking. The vehicle appeared undamaged, parked cleanly beyond the white shoulder line as though nothing impossible had happened inside it. “BMW iX,” he continued. “Take it back to the residential address I gave you. Leave it in the driveway.” The dispatcher asked whether he would be accompanying the vehicle. “I’ll follow behind.” He gave the credit-card number from memory. Vinja did not know whether the car’s emergency system had notified anyone beyond the alert sent to the My BMW app. He did not intend to stand on the shoulder waiting to find out. He did not want a state trooper asking why an electric SUV had stopped itself with surgical precision while its driver disappeared from behind a still-buckled seatbelt. He did not want to explain why Jiejie’s phone remained in the charging tray. He especially did not want anyone examining the sixty-inch television strapped upright across the folded rear row. Vinja had checked it. The screen was not cracked. It was not scorched. It was simply a dark slab of exposed glass held securely by moving straps. The thick blanket that had once covered it lay crumpled on the cargo floor beneath it. The television looked like an appliance someone had been transporting on an ordinary morning. The normalcy of it made his throat tighten. The dispatcher had begun reading back the confirmation number when Vinja’s phone vibrated against his ear. A second call cut through the line. The caller ID read Eomma. Vinja’s chest locked. He switched over. “Eomma?” He spoke in Korean, his voice automatically dropping into the warm, easy register he used only with her. “Vinja, baby, the airline sent the flight update to my phone instead of yours.” His mother’s voice came through clear and vibrant, completely untethered from the nightmare on the shoulder. Thirty-four years married into his father’s family, and her Korean had long since stopped sounding like anything but her own—unhurried, confident, seasoned by decades of holidays, arguments, whispered jokes, and lullabies in a language she had not been born into but had made hers all the same. She was in Seoul with his father for the season. “It says you haven’t checked in,” she continued. “You’re going to miss the connection in San Francisco. Did you oversleep? Tell me you didn’t let Jiejie talk you into staying up all night.” Vinja looked down at his shoes. The gravel beneath them felt dangerously thin, as though the ground might open next. “Nae, Eomma. Jeoneun mot gayo.” Yes, Mom. I can’t go. The line remained silent for three beats. “What do you mean you’re not coming? Vinja, abeoji already reserved the private dining room. We’ve been waiting for this week since New Year’s.” “Hwesa-e munjega saenggyeoseoyo.” Something came up with work. He looked through the rear window of the iX. The television remained dark. “Keun siseutem oryuga naseo, naega bwayahae-yo. Joesonghaeyo, Eomma.” A major system failure happened. I have to look into it. I’m sorry, Mom. “Vinja—” “Gwaenchanha, Eomma. Chajiwoni wasseoyo.” It’s okay, Mom. The tow truck is here. It was not there yet. But amber lights had appeared in the distance, rounding the curve toward him, and that was close enough. Vinja did not wait for his mother to argue. He did not want to hear the suspicion entering her voice, the transition from disappointment to the sharp maternal instinct that had caught him hiding things since he was six years old. He ended the call. The silence of the highway rushed back into place, cold and absolute.

The flatbed arrived five minutes later, its yellow strobes painting the gray highway in rhythmic slashes of amber. Vinja handled the driver with mechanical precision. He signed the digital authorization. Confirmed the destination. Explained the vehicle’s electronic parking system. Opened the iX with his Digital Key and watched while the tow operator engaged transport mode. The entire time, Vinja kept his eyes on the television through the rear glass. The exposed screen remained black. The blanket shifted slightly across the cargo floor as the flatbed tilted and the winch cable tightened, but the television itself did not move. The iX was pulled slowly onto the metal bed. Vinja followed the tow truck home, never allowing its amber lights to leave his sight. For twenty minutes, the only thing keeping him steady was the discipline of staying in his lane, checking his mirrors, and doing something ordinary with his hands. By the time the flatbed lowered the iX into the driveway and pulled away, Vinja had parked his own car and gotten out. He did not go inside. He stood at the edge of the driveway instead, watching the vehicle as one might watch a door one did not trust to remain closed. The television was still inside. Exposed. Dark. Silent. The screen had taken Jiejie without warning, but it had not gone with her. Vinja eventually sat on the porch steps with his phone in his hand and let the quiet catch up to him. Then the firewall in his mind collapsed. He folded forward, elbows on his knees, his face buried in his hands. A ragged, choking sound escaped him—one he would not have recognized as his own voice that morning. This was wrong in a way none of the previous incidents had been. The Portal had rules. For years, it had been a shared burden—a terrifying and selective thing they faced with at least some understanding of what had occurred. Sometimes it took them together. Sometimes it selected one of them while the other remained behind. But there had always been a witness. Someone had seen the screen change. Someone had known which world had opened. Someone outside had understood that the missing person had not walked away, had not been injured somewhere unseen, had not simply disappeared without explanation. There had always been someone waiting to recognize the return when the Portal finally released whoever it had taken. This time, no one had seen Jiejie go. No one had known which story had opened. No one had even known to look for her until the empty wall in the living room told Vinja something was wrong. He sat on the porch steps with tears blurring the car in the driveway, one thought echoing louder than anything else in the silent morning. If she was alone in there, who was going to help her survive until it let her out?

The transition did not feel like falling. It felt like being pulled through a sieve. The last thing Jiejie remembered was the sharp synthetic smell of the iX’s interior and the violent vibration of the rumble strip beneath the tires. Then the light had not merely blinded her. It had replaced her. When her eyes adjusted, the smell of leather and cool conditioned air had disappeared. In its place was something heavy, sharp, and suffocatingly sweet. Incense. Sandalwood layered with the bitter tang of dried herbs and charcoal smoke. The temperature had changed as violently as everything else. The climate-controlled comfort of the car had given way to a damp, biting chill that cut through the thin fabric covering her body. She was not behind the wheel anymore. She was on her knees. “The consort is resting,” a sharp voice echoed somewhere above her, clipped and formal. “Why are you still lingering here? If the Head Eunuch sees you idling by the western wall, you’ll be looking for your skin in the laundry bureau.” Jiejie did not move. Her heart hammered against her ribs. She kept her head lowered and her palms pressed flat against cold, uneven brick. Slowly, without lifting her chin, she shifted her gaze upward. The stone bench she had seen in the rearview mirror was less than three feet away. A woman sat upon it in a stiff robe of deep indigo silk. Her hair had been shaped into an elaborate winged structure, and a heavy ornament of jade and kingfisher feather trembled faintly beside her temple. Jiejie knew her instantly. She would have known that face anywhere. Ruyi. What Jiejie did not know was when in the story she had arrived or what role the Portal had assigned her. She looked down at her hands. Her linen shirt was gone. Her wrists were wrapped in coarse, dull-green cotton—the plain, unlined clothing of a low-ranking palace maid. The words around her were being spoken in a language Jiejie had never formally studied, yet their meanings arrived in her mind as naturally as memory. The Portal always gave her just enough to survive whatever world it dropped her into. This time, however, it had done more than open a window. It had written her into the script. And Vinja was not standing beside her. “Did you lose your hearing along with your wits?” A sharp blow struck Jiejie between the shoulder blades. A senior maid with a pinched, unimpressed face stood over her, clutching a copper basin tightly against her chest. “Take the charcoal to the rear pavilion. The winter wind is coming over the wall, and if the Consort’s hand warmer goes cold before evening prayers, we’ll all spend the night outside for it.” Jiejie pushed herself upright. Her knees cracked against the stone. She followed the older maid’s path with her eyes, counting gates and turns the way Vinja would have, trying to build a map from nothing but attention. There were no cars here. No phones. No remote. No Portal standing visibly open and waiting for her. If she did not determine which role she was playing, she might not survive long enough to discover why she had been sent there. Worse, no one outside had seen which world had taken her.

For the first stretch of it—Jiejie could never later say exactly how long, because the days did not count themselves as they had at home—she searched for a way out. She studied every reflective surface the palace offered. Polished bronze mirrors in the dressing hall. The flat black water of the lotus pond at dawn, before anyone else was awake to see her staring into it. A lacquered screen in an unused sitting room that once, for one heart-stopping moment, seemed to hold something other than her reflection. Nothing opened. Jiejie repeated lines from the drama under her breath while she worked, half convinced that if she spoke something exactly as she remembered hearing it, the world might crack and release her. She touched painted scenery as though it might be a disguised door. Late at night, kneeling beside a cooling hearth after her chores were finished and no one was watching, she whispered Vinja’s name into the dark. At first, she said it to call for him. Later, she said it to remember him. Nothing opened. Days passed. Then months. The palace did not pause because Jiejie had been taken from another life. Meals still had to be prepared. Fires still had to be fed. Robes had to be aired, floors scrubbed, messages carried, medicines measured, doors watched, and rumors avoided. Jiejie learned quickly. She learned which corridors could be crossed without permission and which ones could cost a servant her position. She learned when to lower her eyes and when lowering them too quickly looked like guilt. She learned that kindness in the palace was often sincere but never safe. Most importantly, she learned where she had entered the story. She was not merely inside a Qing Dynasty palace. She had arrived in the early, bitter years of Ulanara Ruyi’s long ascent to Empress. An ascent Jiejie knew, with absolute and terrifying certainty, would end in the destruction of nearly everything Ruyi believed about love, loyalty, and marriage. Normally, when the Portal pulled Jiejie and Vinja into a drama, they operated as a team. Vinja observed and cataloged the mechanics of the world with his notebook and camera. Jiejie found whichever character had trapped herself inside a cycle of martyrdom, denial, or loyalty to someone unworthy and delivered the cold truth. They challenged the structure of the story. They pushed for justice. Then, when the Portal recognized what it had brought them there to confront, it pulled them home. But Vinja was not there. There was no remote. No living-room wall. No witness who knew which story had opened. Jiejie was alone with the knowledge of everything that was going to happen and no certainty that anything she did could stop it.