He set it down carefully. Not a dramatic gesture. He placed it parallel to the edge of the document, which was the same absent precision he'd applied to pens and clipboards and manifest sheets all through four years of night shifts at the freight warehouse, the small orderliness of someone who had learned to be tidy in shared spaces because tidiness was the one thing you could control.
Varro waited.
"No," Wei said.
It came out quieter than he expected. Not less certain—just smaller. The word didn't need to be large to mean what it meant.
Varro looked at him without changing his expression.
Wei said: "I'm not going to let you study me like a research specimen. I'm not going to let you put clauses around my soul's development. I understand what you want and why, and I think you've convinced yourself it's reasonable." He stopped. He was not particularly interested in making a speech. He found speeches exhausting even when he was alive. He said: "But I would be property under that contract. And I'm done being treated like something to be managed."
"You would be cared for," Varro said. Still without emphasis. Not a rejoinder—more like he was completing the thought, offering the piece of the argument Wei hadn't addressed.
"I know," Wei said. "That's the problem." He looked at the case in the wall, at the body lying still in its lit glass case. "Owned things are sometimes cared for very well. It doesn't change what they are."
Varro was quiet for a moment. Long enough that Wei thought, briefly, that the conversation was done—that whatever came next would come from the button beneath the table's lip, because that was what the button was for.
Instead, Varro said, slowly: "You're not afraid."
"I'm plenty afraid," Wei said. "I just have a policy about it."
Another pause. This one had a different quality—not the stillness of a predator, but the stillness of something being genuinely considered. Wei had the odd, unfamiliar sense that he had said something that had arrived in Varro's mind as actually new, not as a familiar shape of argument he'd heard across a hundred negotiations and had a response to.
Then Varro pressed the button under the table.
The door opened.
What came through it had not been in the earlier description of the room. Not the host in his uniform. Not a member of the staff.
Three of them. The first thing Wei registered was that they moved wrong. Not jiangshi-wrong—he'd spent enough time with Huang Qilin to know that specific quality of preserved corpse locomotion, the slight delay between intention and action, the sense of a body working from a manual rather than instinct. These moved more recently than that. More recently dead. The qi in them was stripped down and functional, like the wiring in a rental property—just enough to maintain operation, nothing decorative.
They wore dark clothes that matched the dining room.
The Consulate's mercenary dead. Security contractors, in the parlance.
Wei looked at them. He looked at Varro, who had the expression of a man who had given fair warning and was proceeding past regret. He looked at the door, which remained open behind the three that had entered.
He looked at the pen on the table.
"You could still sign," Varro said. "The offer remains open for another forty-eight hours."
"I know," Wei said.
He reached into his jacket pocket and took out the bell.