“Are you out of your mind?” Lu Han leaped up from his chair and glared at Yixing. “Is this some twisted kind of joke?”

                Yixing’s face tightened, but said nothing. Merely shook his head, very slowly.

                “You come here from nowhere, worm your way into my life, and now you expect me to believe you’ve had a vision that someone is going to kill me?” Lu had raised his voice, but he didn’t care. He was tumbling, tumbling fast into an alternate universe of shock, disbelief and the darkness of fear. Only, he had no way to know what exactly he should fear.

                “Try to kill you,” Yixing said evenly, quietly.

                “What difference does it make? Are you threatening me?”

                “God, no!”

                Lu Han could see Yixing coil, as if to stand, but he didn’t. Maybe he hurt too much. Maybe he thought it would appear intimidating. As if he cared.

                Yixing spread his hands beseechingly. “I don’t care if you ever talk to me again. I don’t care if you throw me out. All I want is for you to be on the alert. And all I’m going to do is sit on that damn park bench every damn night until I’m sure you’re safe.” Then he did push up off the sofa, using his arms for leverage. A small gasp escaped him as he straightened, but he didn’t hesitate. He took two steps away from Lu Han, giving him space, before saying, “Call me crazy, call me names. But I ignored these visions once, and I owe it to my husband and daughter not to do it again. If you have a gun, load it and keep it close.” Then he limped toward the door.

                Lu Han stood frozen, angry and stunned. Wanting to grab Yixing and make him take it all back. And afraid, so very afraid, that he might not be crazy at all.

                The front door closed behind him. “Lock it!” Lu heard him yell from outside. Then, moments later, the car he had arrived in sped off.

                Lu Han locked the front door. He ran through the house and locked every window, checked every door, all the while telling himself that Yixing had been pushed over the edge by the loss of his family, that he couldn’t possibly mean what he was saying, and even if he did, he couldn’t possibly know anything about the future….

                And then Lu Han collapsed on a chair in his office, wrapped his arms around himself, and began to rock back and forth, unable to believe, unable to disbelieve Yixing. Eventually something nudged his leg gently. He looked down and saw the nameless dog. He gave an uncertain wag of his tail, looking up at him hopefully. Helpless to do anything else, Lu Han scooped him up into his arms and held him close for comfort. Apparently, the dog liked that enough to his face with a soft tongue. Just a couple on tentative , as if testing the relationship.

                Trying to let go of his knotted emotions, he buried his face against the dog’s soft, furry neck and rocked gently in his chair.

                He should call Kai about this. But then he knew he couldn’t. For the same reason that Yixing had had so much difficulty telling him, for the same reason he hadn’t merely come into town and headed straight to the senior inspector’s office with his story. Who would believe Yixing’s vision? And if you didn’t believe him, there was only one other conclusion to reach: Yixing was insane.

                And if you reached that conclusion. . . .

                He sighed and eased his hold on the dog. The dog used the opportunity to give him another tiny , then burrowed himself in close against his shoulder.

                “I need to name you,” he said, hardly aware of the words escaping him, not even really thinking about them.

                He had read plenty about Zhang Yixing on the Web. Plenty. All of it showed him to be a responsible citizen, a brilliant man, someone who had suffered a tragedy beyond imagining. Did he want to be responsible for adding to Yixing’s problems by passing along a story that might get him into trouble? Even as horrified and angry as he felt by his prediction, if you could call it that, he wished the man no ill.

                Gently he put the dog down. “Yangshim”, Lu Han said, though he had no idea where the name had come from. “You’re Yangshim.”

                Yangshim wagged his tail as if he liked it.

                Then Lu Han went to do the only thing he could: he got his dad’s shotgun.

Bonehead! That was probably the nicest name Yixing applied to himself in the next hour. After dropping the car off the rental place― a garage, really, where they had a handful of cars to rent―he limped back to the hotel and dropped onto the bed like a six-foot slab of stone.

                What had he been thinking?        

                But of course, that really wasn’t the question. Unsure of his own ability to successfully intervene in the vision that plagued him, he’d made the really boneheaded decision to tell Lu Han so that he’d be on guard. That’s what he had been thinking.

                Had he even for one deluded moment believed Lu Han would accept that news as if he’d just remarked that it was a nice day? Of course not. In fact, right now he wouldn’t be surprised if the senior inspector showed up again, this time to tell him to get out of town. That would make things easy; he’d be driven off and wouldn’t―couldn’t―drive himself nuts with this feeling of responsibility. Hah! Sure. You bet.

                But part of him had hoped Lu Han wouldn’t totally sunder the tentative relationship they’d begun, because he really felt it would be best if they could work together somehow.

                Or maybe, if he was honest with himself, he was actually enjoying making a human connection for the first time in a long time.

                But if that was so, what the hell was he thinking, racing headlong into the one thing he could have told Lu Han that would cause him to never want to see him again?

                Had he become self-destructive?

                Possible. Entirely possible. He had thought he’d moved past the days early on when he had sometimes contemplated suicide as an antidote to the grief that had been tearing him apart. But maybe he’d just moved to a different phase.

                The inspector didn’t knock, of course. Even if Lu had called him, Yixing, doubted that anyone had the authority to throw someone out of town. Instead, he lay there waiting for night to come, waiting for his mission to resume. Turning his memory of his visions around in his mind as he sought any possible new clue.

                The visions were scattershot. First he had seen someone in a darkened house with a silenced gun, stalking a man who had turned out to be Lu Han, reaching his room, and then raising the gun, pointing it toward the bed in the shadows. . . .

                Nothing.

                Then he’d seen a man sitting at what had turned out to be Momo’s café. He’d gotten a clear vision of the clock over the bar showing the time―twelve-fifty―as the man got up and walked out into the night.

                Then the park bench.

                Then the outside of Lu Han’s house. The sight of a hand cutting a wire. He assumed a phone line, but he didn’t know for certain.

                And he’d gotten the clearest vision of Lu Han. He’d known him before he clapped eyes on him.

                Gradually, over the past months or so, a picture had emerged, enough that he had been able to piece together a sense of what he needed to do. Knew the instant he reached the bus terminal that this was where he needed to do it.

                So every night he walked into Momo’s café and waited until the hour at which the gunman was supposed to leave. Waited to see if some stranger arrived, then left on time.

                But he was the only one who arrived and left at that time. So far.

                Then he limped down the street to the park and Lu’s house, and he waited. Waited because someplace deep inside he knew the killer wouldn’t approach from the front. Knew that his presence on the bench wouldn’t prevent what might happen.

                He knew, somehow, that every night he was following the killer’s intended path until the point where he reached the house. Right before that, except for the vision of the gunman in Lu Han’s bedroom, everything splintered. Maybe because everything wasn’t fixed in cement. That was the only hope he could cling to. That something he might do, that something Lu Han might do, could keep that man from shooting him in bed.

                That between them, one or both of them would do the critical thing to shift the probabilities just enough to save Lu Han’s life.

                He had to believe that. Even before he had met Lu Han, he had had to believe that.

                Because he couldn’t stand the thought of living in a world where the future was fixed. Couldn’t even begin to believe in such a place.

                But now, there was something he couldn’t stand even more: the possibility that Lu Han might die.

                With a groan, he rolled onto his side and pounded the mattress just once with his fist. The theories that had fascinated him for so long had become more than theories. They had become a living hell he couldn’t seem to escape.

That night, Yixing was on the park bench again, and just like every other night, he left after about twenty minutes. Only then did Lu Han go to bed.

                The next morning he ran errands and tried to stay out of the house, taking Yangshim on a long walk in the countryside and finally returning home in the late afternoon, tired and somehow more frazzled than he’d been earlier.

                The smell of gun oil hit his nose the instant he entered the kitchen, and carried his back to the days when he and his father had often used the shotgun on critters in the field behind the house. They hadn’t really wanted to kill anything, just scare them away.

                “Han,” he’d said to him on more than one occasion, “birdshot is really all you need. And I wouldn’t load anything more powerful into this gun unless I decided to go hunting big game. It’s enough to scare the birds, and inside the house it’s the safest load for self-defense. Inside of twenty feet, it’ll hit as hard as buckshot. Do we have any place in the house big enough to need more than that?”

                He still didn’t have any place in the house to need more than that. What’s more, he didn’t want to be shooting anything that might go out his window and into a neighbour’s with deadly force.

                The birdshot he loaded into the gun had been purchased recently. His dad had always told him to keep fresh ammunition, so he regularly bought a new small box and donated his old stuff to the local gun club.

                The trip back to childhood made him close his eyes. His mom had died when he was ten, bled out on the kitchen floor from an ovarian cyst while no one was at home, and then he’d lost his dad to a heart attack just after he graduated from college. The last time he had seen him alive, he’d been beaming from ear to ear at his graduation dinner. Then he had flown to Seoul to join his new firm, only to come home a month later for a funeral.

                But his dad was still with him, especially as he held his old shotgun. He could still see his work-hardened and gnarled hands holding it, showing him how to treat it with respect and caution.

                How he would say, “I know plenty of folks who say guns don’t kill, people do. To some extent they’re right. But guns can also kill in the hands of people who don’t know how to handle them. So you’re going to learn how to handle this, Han. You never know when you might need it.”

                So out they would go to some isolated place and shoot away for an hour or two. It had been fun, actually. Lots of fun. Maybe because it was time with his dad when they weren’t busy with chores. Maybe because target shooting was just a fun pastime. And in the weeks immediately following his mother’s death, target shooting had even felt therapeutic.

                Birdshot is just as good as buckshot within twenty feet. He checked the load yet again, five rounds, and closed the chamber. Then he flicked on the safety. And wondered briefly if he was nuts to even be doing this.

                No, he decided, this was not nuts. No more nuts than making sure he always had fresh ammo on hand, as his dad had taught him. This was just caution, plain and simple. It didn’t mean he believed Yixing was right, it didn’t mean he believed someone would actually try to kill him. It merely meant that if something bad did happen, he’d be ready.

                That was most definitely not nuts.

                Sighing, he looked down at Yangshim, who was lying patiently on his feet on the linoleum. He seemed to be a singularly content young dog. He probably ought to take him for another long walk, but after Yixing’s announcement yesterday, he was absurdly skittish about going outside, even if Yixing did seem to think the threat would come in the middle of the night.

                Like most people, he couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to kill him. But the thing was, the world was littered with innocent victims who’d never done a thing to deserve such an attack. There didn’t have to be a reason. If you let yourself really think about it, that was the scariest thing of all.

                So people didn’t think about it, himself included. Until today.

               He thought once again about calling Kai, but he could just imagine how he’d react if he told him about Yixing’s vision. Hell, he would probably be even more annoyed and disbelieving than he was himself. No, that wasn’t the route to take. Not unless something more happened.

                He took Yangshim out back to do his business, then returned inside, where he discovered he no longer felt entirely comfortable. Yixing had done that to him. The safety of home no longer seemed inviolable.

                That alone should have been enough to make him furious with Yixing. Instead, now that the first shock had passed, he was feeling sorry for him. If he’d really had those visions before he lost his family, then he could understand why he was so obsessed now. Guilt. Atonement. Maybe a type of sad mental disconnect, an attempt to recreate an awful event in order to ease his guilt.

                Sighing, he put the shotgun on the table, then rested his forehead in his hand, as he often did at work when faced with numbers that weren’t working right.

                Time to examine his own beliefs about things, he decided. Time to think about where Zhang Yixing fit into his worldview. Time to figure out what disturbed him more: what he had said yesterday or that he might somehow be right.

                Did he believe in ESP? Telepathy? Yeah, at some level he did. Like many people, he’d experienced those moments of knowing something he shouldn’t have, like who was about to call just before the phone rang, or thinking about someone he hadn’t thought about in a while for a day or two before a letter arrived, or an e-mail. As if he knew they were thinking of him, too.

                At times, with Minseok, it had been often enough and significant enough to really catch his attention. With his dad sometimes, too, although he had always put that down to knowing him so well.

               But precognition? Knowing the future before it happened? That stuck in his craw. He didn’t like anything about that.

                But Yixing’s story about his visions and his dream before the plane crash―that was something he couldn’t dismiss easily. He hadn’t made that up. He believed it. In fact, he’d believed it all along, not just now, because he had read in one of the news articles that he’d said, “I knew something was going to happen. I just knew.”

                That was something a lot of people said.

                He sat up a little straighter. A lot of