---
6
"That day, I was sitting in a taxi, on my way to work."
"A beautiful fluorescent blue butterfly landed on me, slowly beating its wings."
"At an intersection, traffic backed up, and the car stopped."
---
"I rolled down the window and let the butterfly fly out. My eyes followed it up into the sky, and then I saw a massive billboard plummeting toward me."
"Shawn, do you really believe me?"
Shawn sat across from me, his pen sketching on a notepad.
"Sophie, that day—"
"Don't call me 'ma'am.'"
He laughed. "I'm not really into calling people 'miss.'"
"Then use my name."
"Alright, Sophie. That day—what were you wearing?"
I blinked. "Why does that matter?"
"If the future can't be changed, then by reverse inference, if one element is wrong, it's not that future."
"What are you talking about?"
He sighed. "I'm saying, if you hadn't worn that outfit, you wouldn't have encountered that situation."
"Oh!" The light dawned on me. "But I didn't see what I was wearing."
He rolled his eyes.
A very clear, very deliberate eye-roll, just as exaggerated as the one I'd given him.
"Shawn, are you getting back at me?"
"Yep." He grinned, pulling a pair of sunglasses from his pocket. "In that future, you weren't wearing sunglasses, right? Because with sunglasses, it's hard to spot fluorescent things."
I nodded.
"From now on, always wear these sunglasses when you go out. That way, you won't experience that death scene."
"Terrible taste." I took the sunglasses and put them on. "Shawn, I want to ask you something."
"Go ahead."
"Why are you helping me?"
"Isn't it obvious? You can see every bad thing in the future, and I'm a cop. My job is to change those things."
---
7
I didn't know why he could change the future when I couldn't. Shawn later said it was because you hadn't met me yet. I told him to stop being full of himself.
He said, think about it—all the futures you saw before didn't have me in them. Now I've appeared, and that's a whole new variable.
"Of course it changes everything."
After that, Shawn and I began our partnership.
Every time I saw a future fragment, I told him immediately so he could intervene.
In practice, it wasn't as easy as it sounded.
First, I could only see each future fragment once, with no replay. They appeared randomly. If my attention wandered, I'd miss crucial details.
But those details were exactly what Shawn needed—time, location, people, event. In most cases, I could only nail the last two.
So every time Shawn's "rescue" failed, I'd be devastated.
"It's fine. Failed operations happen all the time, right? Our precinct goes out on calls every day—you think we solve a case every day?"
Shawn was twenty-two, only a year younger than me, but his personality was like a kid twelve years his junior.
He loved anime, loved video games, loved eating spicy nine-grid hotpot and then spending an entire day running to the bathroom.
I said, how can you be so carefree? If you fail to stop the futures I see, someone definitely suffers.
He said, how can you be so unable to let it go? I've already failed—what good does your sulking do?
"Sophie, everything we do always comes with a price, always with sacrifice. All we can do is try our best."
"..."
"Still upset?"
"Talk to me for another half hour, will you?"
"No way, I'm exhausted. You have one nightmare and I chat with you for an hour, what more do you want?"
"Shawn! I've given you so many cases to solve, you get commendation banners every day, female cops are chasing you—"
"Officer Chen and I are strictly colleagues!"
"Don't call me 'sis'! I don't care, twenty-five minutes."
"Ten."
"Then twenty."
"Fifteen."
"Done!"
"Damn... you really are the older one."
"Say the word 'old' one more time and I'll kill you."
"..."
"Just kidding, I'll fall asleep on my own. You're young, get some sleep. Oh right, about tomorrow's bus incident..."
"I remember. 2:21 PM, Nishui Street gas station. I'll pick you up three hours early."
---
8
After partnering with Shawn, whether from growing confidence or improved emotional state, my ability to "see" seemed to sharpen. The temporal fragments stretched into "paragraphs," and I could always find markers for time and location at the scene.
Shawn was thus able to make more rescues, and his case-solving rate became famous at the precinct.
And the "bus incident" we spoke of was the biggest case Shawn and I had tackled since we started working together.
On July 12, 2017, a bus would lose control for unknown reasons, crash into the Nishui Street gas station, and trigger a massive explosion and fire. In the future I saw, there were no specific casualty figures, but from what I witnessed, not a single person on that bus would survive.
Shawn's strategy for this case was to achieve the maximum impact with minimum effort.
Although he'd previously waited until incidents were happening to intervene—at least that counted as solving a case—the bus incident was too catastrophic. It needed to be "stopped at the source."
"The source?"
"Right. We go to the bus depot, find the schedule, figure out which bus is going to hit the gas station, and disable it ahead of time."
Shawn's strategy was sound. The bus indicated on the schedule arrived at the depot around 1:45 PM. The driver got out, chatted with a colleague, smoked two cigarettes, then went to the bathroom.
Then Shawn slipped in and used handcuffs to lock the bus's accelerator and brake, stealing the onboard radio while he was at it.
At 1:55 PM, the driver returned and hopped around inside the bus, cursing.
Meanwhile, Shawn and I sat in a jeep at a distance, enjoying the show.
"How many people do you think we saved today?" Shawn asked.
"At least twenty. What, didn't get to play the hero, feeling disappointed?"
"Sophie, are you underestimating me? Twenty lives—what medal is more important than that?"
"Don't get mad, I'm just teasing you... I told you not to call me 'sis'!"
"Sophie."
"That's right, use my name."
"Thank you, Sophie. On behalf of all Southside officers and twenty citizens, thank you."
I paused, because when he spoke seriously, he really was quite handsome.
"Please—you're an intern, and you think you can represent the precinct and the citizens?"
He laughed, the slanted sunlight tracing the handsome contours of his face.
"Shawn, you're a guy—how are your eyelashes so long..."
I moved closer to him.
He looked at me, and didn't pull away.
Just then, the stolen radio crackled with a voice.
"Old Xia, my bus is fixed. I'll do a dry run on the Nishui Road route on your schedule."
---
9
"What does that mean? What does that mean, Shawn?!"
"It means there's another bus that broke down on the side of the road, and now it's fixed. What's it going to do?"
"It'll finish the route... They're still going to crash into that gas station!"
"Sophie, my mistake. Our plan has a fatal flaw—you don't know the exact license plate of the bus that crashes into the gas station, and bus schedules can change at any time. For this case, unless we guard the gas station itself, we can't guarantee success!"
He said all this while accelerating the jeep past 120 kilometers per hour.
We'd wasted too much time at the depot. Even at full speed, we'd arrive at the gas station just in time for the incident.
No time to prepare at all.
The car raced forward, passing vehicle after vehicle, the sounds of acceleration and braking alternating at every intersection.
2:20 PM.
We spotted the rear of the bus.
It was moving fast, the entire vehicle swaying in small S-patterns as other cars on the road scrambled to get out of its way.
It had lost control and was accelerating with no sign of slowing down.
"Shit."
Shawn shifted gears again, floored the accelerator, and surged forward.
As we overtook the bus, I could see clearly—the driver inside was slumped against the window, unconscious.
"Sorry, but you're going to have to risk your life with me."
"What are you doing?"
"Hold on!"
He jerked the wheel sharply, and the jeep instantly pulled away from the bus.
But the bus was already hurtling toward the gas station, less than five seconds from impact.
We're not saving it?
Before I could voice my question, Shawn called my name.
"Sophie!"
"What?"
That moment was fleeting.
But the image of him turning his head to look at me felt like slow motion, stretched into a clear, complete sequence.
"We'll be fine."
There was no anxiety in his voice, no fear. Just calm, grounding certainty.
But the next second, he wrenched the wheel again.