"This is my apartment, from my first life," Shen Yuan explains. He looks out the window himself, arrested for a minute by a skyline he'd never paid all that much attention to while he was alive. It's...weird, isn't it, how much it makes him feel now. "We're in Beijing -- a vision of Beijing, anyway -- in the country China. Have you heard of it?" Come to think of it he never did ask Viktor what his own world was called. It could be an alternate or future Earth for all he knows.

"Come sit in the kitchen with me," he says, beckoning Viktor over. "I think we deserve a couple minutes to think and catch our breath." And he wants to see if this nightmare precludes modern conveniences like soda pop.

It doesn't, it turns out, and a few minutes later he's found and opened two bottles of raspberry-flavored cola and placed them both on his kitchen table. "So," he says, after he and Viktor have both had a moment to take in the carbonation (it's...actually a lot of sugar, Shen Yuan's disappointed to find. Living in a fantasy approximation of Ancient China has apparently ruined him for modern flavors) "you said before that Trench really hates letting us keep secrets, right?"