The Breath Merchant

The Tower of Breathless Men

It was 9:12 AM in Aurora Tower on the 88th floor. Lu Jingxing stood by the wall of his office gazing at the enormity of Hangzhou beneath him, who, in a way, was slowly rearranging herself to resemble a living circuit board.

From up here, the Qiantang River looked like a molten strip; the morning traffic turning into capillary pulsing red cells.

He pressed two fingers against the pane and traced the north-west route the girl had taken toward the junkyard masquerading as affordable housing.

There was an overlay of him reflected back over the map: cheekbones sharp enough to cut the sunset, lips the color of storm water, and eyes that had last firsthand witness shut some thirty-six hours ago.

The black card he had given her was no longer nestled in his pocket; it felt like a lost rib.

Behind him, machines breathed for him.

A portable oxygen concentrator made a soft whoosh at a setting of five liters per minute; it was more irritating than a mechanical lullaby.

Next to it lay a silver suitcase, the cocktail for today-pirfenidone, nintedanib, prednisone, and an experimental RNA inhibitor flown from Basel in this morning.

The last vial from the set cost as much as this girl would earn in a year working all her market street.

He unscrews it, tilts the liquid into a syringe, and injects himself through the port implanted below his collarbone.

Cold metal met warm blood.

Ten-counts-waiting for that familiar burn of inhaling ground glass to subside.

It just didn't.

The disease was advancing like a civil war in his lungs and turning his alveoli to stone.

His latest scan looked like a constellation; every white dot was a tiny star, already dead.

"Sir, your 9:30 is here," his secretary announced through the intercom.

Her voice was curved in deference; she had been trained never to mention the cough, the blood on the handkerchief, the way his sentences sometimes fractured looking for air.

Lu Jingxing readjusted the charcoal Brioni coat over his shoulders, it's now hanging even looser than last month. "Send them in."

A door by then opened, ushering in 3 white coats-Dr. Zhao from Pulmonology, Schmidt from Zurich, and an unknown woman whose badge read: "Trial Ethics, Ministry of Health."

A skinny bundle with them could just as well have been called a death warrant.

**: "Mr. Lu, the committee has reviewed your latest metrics. For your safety, we have terminated the Phase Three gene edit. The inflammatory cascade is-," he searched for a polite synonym. "-explosive."

Lu Jingxing did not sit.

Sitting bent the diaphragm; bending the diaphragm invited drowning on dry land.

Define explosive.

"Fifty-three percent mortality risk within four weeks."

"And without the edit?"

Schmidt's silence answered everything.

Lu Jingxing turned to the ethics officer. "So you have come to unplug the ventilator, politely."

The woman flushed.

"We prefer the words 'palliative transition.'" He laughed; it sounded like gravel poured into silk.

"I'm sure whatever verb gets you to sleep; now please kindly leave" and left the folder behind.

The consent forms, a DNR order, a private suite voucher at Aurora Hospice-a hospital painted a calming hue called serenity blue, to soothe the dying into an illusion of peace.

He chucked the file into the shredder, fully aware that it was an exercise in futility: even shredded paper would not do a proper job of soaking blood.

The machine wheezed along with his deep sorrows.

On the surface of his desk were an assemblage of three telephones: one for clanging business transactions, the second for family usage (the sole telephone he has hardly now spoken to), and the last one was his direct access to market data.

He picked it up to dial a long-untouched number, the second one, from his university days.

It rang five times and went to voicemail-his mother, a decade and a half younger, recorded when she still held a belief that her son would outlive her.

He hung up before the beep.

Grief was a luxury, and he had already spent his allowance.

Buzz.

The third phone.

Security chief texted: Target boarded bus 83. Seat 11. Estimated arrival at Xixi Wetland slum 09:47. Continue surveillance?

Lu Jingxing replied:

Eyes only. No contact.

He told himself it was prudent-the wealth attracted predators, and she carried the key to his kingdom with her.

Truth, however, was even simpler: he wanted to see what she would do when no one watched.

Confronted, people divulged their atoms; the entire world of his business empire was built on the very idea.

It was merely another corporate raid, and he would need to see whether she was leverage.

His chest gave an involuntary contraction-ribs grinding against lungs.

Double-over, and he caught himself on the window-frame.

The city swam; lights ran like wet ink.

For a horrible second, he felt his dissolving into the glass, becoming just one more diode in the circuitry.

Then the oxygen concentrator went off-alarm!—saturation 78%.

He jabbed the nasal cannula into his nostrils, inhaled the canned air, and counted prime numbers until the haze cleared away.

When he straightened, a ghost stared back at him from the window: hollow, translucent, already half into the next world.

He pressed the intercom.

“Coffee. Black. No sugar.” Caffeine was contraindicated, but so was extinction.

While the secretary fetched it, he opened a hidden drawer and took out a plain envelope containing a single strand of hair sealed in plastic.

The hair was black, completely straight, the root preserved.

He had plucked it from the girl's apron when she bent down to wrap the turtle-an instinct ingrained from boarding school-a survival skill of knowing which prefect would plant the contraband in one's locker.

DNA scanning would take six hours.

He wanted ancestry, disease markers, pheromone compatibility-any raw data that could explain why, when her fingers brushed against his, the pain had ebbed for one impossible heartbeat.

Coffee came-the Ethiopian single-origin bitter as penitence.

He sipped before making another call.

"Legal, draw up a non-disclosure agreement. Gu Muyao as beneficiary. Unlimited medical tuition and debt assumption as consideration. Lifetime term. Moral-behaviour clause-in no politics, no media, and no boyfriends vetted by tabloids."

Pause.

"And then add a blood-sample rider. I want quarterly draws."

The lawyer on the other end had experienced uglier demands; he just asked him to spell the surname for him. Lu Jingxing spelled it out, hung up, and then stopped short as he realized he had not even asked that girl for her permission. This should have unsettled him. It didn't. Consent was an after-market commodity in his world. at around 10:00 am-the time for the shareholder meeting he'd convened for announcing his successor, he straightened his tie, made sure his tie, checked the mirror, and rehearsed the smile which once made investors throw their money at him. It resembled a crack in porcelain. Opening the door of the boardroom, he walked inside, a tank full of piranhas clad in Hermès. They broke their fast with him for forty-five minutes. Revenue down 8%. Regulatory fines up 12%. The press compared his cough to a dying emperor's bell. One vice-president-his cousin-suggested "a period of convalescent leave" while "fresh vision" took the helm. Lu Jingxing listened and nodded, then played the last of his card: a merger offer from a Hong Kong conglomerate that would triple share value overnight - conditional upon his remaining CEO for life. The room froze mid-bite. He adjourned before they tasted blood on their tongues. Power was easiest wielded when people thought you were too weak to lift it. Back in his office, he found a new email from the lab: Preliminary sequence on Sample Q-1 complete. Deletion on chromosome 4, locus 4q31. Matches rare allele associated with… Heart hammering triple time, he scrolled down. This allele is associated with improved alveolar regeneration following silica dust exposure in mouse models. Frequency in general population: 0.0003%. He read it again, then again, as though the words might rearrange into mercy. Instead they formed a single sentence. The girl is by biology incapable of suffocating. He laughed till it turned into a cough, till cough turned into hemorrhage that spotted his sleeve with pink roses. Security burst in; he waved them off. When he finally managed to suppress them, he rubbed his mouth clean and spoke to the empty room. "So the universe sends a fish seller to teach a drowning man how to breathe." It sounded deranged to say, but he caught it anyway, recording a voice memo titled, "Proof of Delirium." At 11:30 a.m., he made what would later be termed by analysts either visionary or suicidal. He canceled all appointments for the afternoon, called his chauffeur, and took his private elevator to the underground garage. Waiting, engine idling, was the Range Rover shadowing Bus 83. Lu Jingxing climbed in, oxygen tank discreetly stowed under the seat. "Take me to Xixi Wetland," he said. "That's the poor man's entrance, not the tourist boardwalk." The driver hesitated-mud, stench, potential kidnappers-but one look in the rear-view mirror killed protest. They merged into traffic, sirens off but lights clearing a path. Despite the pollution index, Lu Jingxing rolled down the window. City air tasted burned plastic and ambition; he wanted to drink it while he still could. Each kilometer thinned the skyline, replaced by the squatters' shacks balanced on stilts above green water. Here, lotus grew through rusted roofs and children dove for coins tossed by photographers hunting after the "authentic China." He spotted Bus 83 parked at a makeshift terminus, its flank painted with an advertisement for lung-enhancing tea-irony so sharp it could have sliced his throat. He did not approach the girl's house. He turned-and slowly, cane disguised as an umbrella, went to the canal where he released the turtle. It smelled of fertilizer and lost hooks from fishing.

He had found exactly the right place and kneeled, not noticing the gasp of the chauffeur at his action.

The water lapped on his Italian leather shoes, staining them the colour of aged blood.

He dipped two fingers, touched them to his lips, tasting algae, diesel, and something indecipherably clean.

Half a baptism, half a biopsy: a ceremony.

Then he rose, and the sun broke forth from the smog, showing the ash-laden motes drifting through the air like wisps from invisible volcanoes.

He felt encircled by the world of the girl, if only for a moment: the poverty, the hope, the adamant refusal to drown.

A promise was whispered to the winds, words carried towards a shack where Gu Muyao boiled rice and counted pennies.

Then he went back to the chauffeur, shoes splashing.

"Back to the tower," he said.

"Configure a press conference for tomorrow morning on the topic: Aurora Group announces new frontier in personalized medicine. Guest of honor—"

He paused, letting himself enjoy the styling.

"Ms. Gu Muyao, scholarship recipient."

The driver nodded, already composing the opening lines in his head.

Lu Jingxing closed his eyes, letting the city's motion rock him like a makeshift cradle.

Behind his lids, he saw two futures superimposed: one lay in a hospice of serenity blue, the other breathed the lake air at eighty and was surrounded by children who called the fish-seller Grandma.

The futures flickered, fighting for signal.

He did not know which would win; he knew only that the battle began today.

As the Range Rover sped back to the glass tower, a turtle broke the surface of the canal, ancient eyes tracking the departing ripple.

It blinked once, twice, then dove, carrying on its shell a drop of blood that had fallen from Lu Jingxing's lip, a tiny red star adrift in green infinity.