Prologue
THE PRATT, SHANGHAI, CHINA
I planned to start by telling you my name, but that won’t work. I’ve had too many. I don’t know who I am, much less which name suits a girl like me. So I’ll start by telling you what they call me. Double-Eight. Like the digits. 88.
I live in China—no, living implies choice. I exist in China and my existence depends on my gift.
I don’t believe in luck, but that’s what people say I have. Of course, all they see is my ability to make millions of dollars at the drop of a hat, not the constant bombardment of numbers that rule my inner world.
I’ve learned to live with my gift, even maneuver in it, but if someone had told me how my life would turn out, I’d have opted for the fate of a sewer rat instead.
My mother, whose hands are clean of anything that has happened to me over the past two years, told me I had this rare gift for a reason. I remember her eyes shining brightly, gazing down at me. “You could change the world with your mind, Little Seagull.” If only she knew what my mathematical genius was being used for. The shock might cause her to jump right out of her grave.
But she’d die twice if she knew what Dad and Mara had done. It almost makes me laugh—a girl who can predict almost everything around her, except the betrayal of her own family.
It’s completely logical that I missed it. I loved them and love cannot be calculated or measured in numbers. It requires trust, which acts on unseen forces, not sound theory. It takes risks and sometimes we lose. In my opinion, it’s easier to stay away from things like love.
People who don’t see the world through a screen of equations often say love happens by chance. But accidents are a joke in my world of numbers. There’s no such thing as coincidence. I’d be a fool to say my ending up here was left to chance.
But numbers, no matter how you calculate them, can never answer the question we all ask at some point, the one burning craters in my heart: Why?
Red—the only reason I’m not some fengzi rocking back and forth in a corner—says that each one of us is given a destiny. That the choice to walk in that destiny is also ours. He says I can go down in history.
But at seventeen years old, I have no future to speak of, let alone history to make. “So what do you do,” I asked Red, “if your destiny doesn’t turn out as you once thought it would?”
Red gazed at me with his dark piercing eyes and said, “That part, qin ai de, is up to you.”
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