**THE WEIGHT OF WHAT YOU PAID**
Gene didn't sleep. He sat in his apartment watching the neutralized energy coil spin slowly on his coffee table, a galaxy of grief caught in glass. It cast no light, but the shadows it made were wrong—he could see faces in them that belonged to no one in this timeline.
At 4:47 AM, his phone buzzed. Not a message. A location ping. Zhao Xian's coordinates, moving through the city toward the old French Concession, where space folded in ways that made GPS说谎—*shuo huang*, lie. The device showed her in three places at once, all of them true.
He didn't follow. He knew better. The coil was his payment, and payment had to be held before it could be spent.
At 6:30, Chen Lao summoned him. Not to the docks. To the training room in Building C, the one with walls that changed thickness depending on how hard you looked at them.
"You killed an anchor," Chen Lao said without preamble. "How does it feel?"
"Quiet."
"That's the problem. Quiet is when the real ghosts move in."
Chen Lao poured tea. The pot didn't move itself today. He poured it by hand, the deliberate slowness a teaching tool. "Phase Three isn't about learning to sense boundaries. It's about learning to live in a world where you've severed your own escape routes."
"I don't want to escape."
"Everyone wants to escape from the version of themselves that does the killing." Chen Lao slid a cup across the table. "The Potter is still out there. You cut one thread. He has thousands."
Gene's hands were steady as he lifted the cup. The tea was bitter. "Then we keep cutting."
"No. He'll adapt. He'll find threads you can't cut. Threads you won't want to cut." Chen Lao's eyes held a question Gene wasn't ready to answer. "The woman you saw last night. The construct. She looked like someone you trusted."
"She looked like someone I invented."
"Same thing." Chen Lao set down his own cup. "Trust is a vulnerability the Potter can simulate. Love is harder. He can mimic the shape, but not the force. That's his weakness."
"How do you know?"
"Because if he could love, he wouldn't need to collapse worlds to feel safe." Chen Lao stood. "Your solar return chart came in. The astrologer the family uses—old man, blind, sees through time—he sent a message. One line."
Gene waited.
"'The debt you pay to kill a ghost is you must become one.'"
---
**ZHAO XIAN**
Zhao Xian was in her office when the coil arrived by courier. Not the neutralized one—Gene's. Another. This one pulsed with a different frequency, hot instead of cold. She didn't need to scan it to know it was from the Potter.
The note attached read: *Tell your American he's sentimental. He left something behind.*
She activated the coil. A memory unfolded, projected into the air like holographic dust:
Gene, younger, sitting in a hospital bed in Irvine. His parents on either side, holding his hands. His mother crying. His father saying, "We'll get you help, son. We'll fix this."
The memory looped. The parents never stopped crying. The father never stopped promising. The Gene in the bed never stopped looking lost.
Zhao Xian watched it twelve times before she deleted it.
The Potter wasn't attacking Gene's present. He was weaponizing his past. The version of Gene that had needed fixing. The version that had believed his parents when they said he was broken.
She forwarded the coil to Gene with a single line: *Payment accepted. Now collect what's owed.*
---
**GENE**
Gene received the coil at noon. He was in a meeting with the shipping department when it arrived, and he opened it without thinking. The memory unfolded in the conference room, twenty people watching as his younger self wept in a hospital bed, his parents promising to make him normal again.
The room went silent.
Gene let it play through once. Then he crushed the coil in his fist. The memory screamed as it compressed, a high-pitched whine of parental love curdling into something else.
"Sorry," Gene said to the room. "Personal message."
No one asked. They'd all seen the file. They knew what he was.
After the meeting, Wei cornered him by the elevators. "You okay?"
"The Potter's sending care packages from my past."
"That's not care." Wei lowered his voice. "That's recruitment. He's showing you what you gave up. Making you doubt the price."
Gene looked at his hand. It had stopped shaking. "I don't doubt it."
"Then why do you look like someone just died?"
"Because someone did." Gene met Wei's eyes. "The version of me they were proud of."
Wei had no answer for that.
---
**THE PAYMENT**
At 7 PM, Zhao Xian texted: *Rooftop. No noodles.*
Gene took the elevator to the top of his building. She was there, looking out over three versions of the river, her leather jacket catching the wind.
"You got his gift," she said.
"It wasn't a gift. It was a receipt."
"Same thing." She handed him a metal box. Inside: three more coils, each pulsing with a different memory. "These are from the three territories he collapsed. The people he used as anchors. Their final moments."
"Why are you giving them to me?"
"Because payment works both ways. You paid to kill a piece of yourself. Now you get paid in the currency of the dead." She closed the box. "Phase Three isn't about fighting the Potter. It's about becoming the person who can survive his absence."
"What does that mean?"
"It means you have to decide what you build when you're not tearing things down." She turned to leave, then paused. "The Potter builds pottery because clay holds shape. It's safe. Contained. But you're not a potter, Gene Eu. You're a navigator. You move between shapes."
"So what do I build?"
"That's the question your solar return is asking." She smiled, but it was sad. "The answer comes next year."
She disappeared down the stairwell, leaving Gene on the roof with a box of dead memories and a quiet anger that no longer needed to project.
It just was.
He opened the box. The first coil showed a woman in a timeline that no longer existed, laughing as her child took a first step. The second showed an old man dying peacefully in a world that had been erased. The third showed Mei—his Mei, not the construct—saying goodbye to someone Gene couldn't see.
He crushed them all. Not from rage. From respect.
The weight of what he'd paid to get here settled on his shoulders, not as a burden, but as a foundation.
Gene looked out over the city, over the rivers that flowed in impossible directions, and he began to understand.
The Potter collapsed worlds because he couldn't hold them.
Gene would become someone who could.
Tomorrow, Phase Three would begin. Not with a fight, but with a choice.
Build or break.
He knew which one he'd choose.