The Last Half Bottle

In the damp half-dark of the underground tunnel, the mould-reeking Wu Wei began to tell me what had happened five years ago. Memory stirred inside me, piece by piece.

Back then, Wu Wei and I had run a self-media channel together, uploading videos to a streaming platform — footage of ourselves exploring uninhabited regions. During one desert crossing challenge, we had fallen into a pit buried under the sand. After days of wandering through the cave system, only I had walked out alive. Wu Wei had been left there forever. Because I had drunk our last half-bottle of water myself.

His voice rose as he went on, heavy with resentment: "I trusted you more than anyone. With the last of my strength, dying, I said: 'Give me some water.' And you handed me a bottle — full of sand."

"Sand?" Why would I have given him a sand-filled bottle when he was asking for water? I dug at my memory. "That's wrong. I remember there was water in the bottle."

"No! Don't—!" The Wu Wei in front of me suddenly cried out in terror, staring at the half-bottle of water cradled in his own hands. A completely ordinary bottle of water. What was he afraid of?

He raised the bottle toward his face, his hand trembling as if it were moving against his will. The terror in his eyes deepened. His mouth kept forming "don't, don't—" but the bottle was already pressing to his lips. A long gulping sound — the entire half-bottle poured down his throat.

A scene I had seen before replayed in front of me. Wu Wei toppled backward and struck the ground. His eyes rolled white. His body convulsed violently, dark purple liquid seeping from the corner of his mouth. Within seconds he was still.

I stood frozen. Had he just died again?

"Shssss—" A rustling from beneath Wu Wei's body, and then I saw thin, fine things moving alongside his ragged clothes. I leaned closer: they were cockroach antennae. Several palm-sized cockroaches emerged from the folds of his clothing and crawled toward my feet.

I stepped back instinctively and brought my foot down on the nearest one — a wet crunch — and the rest scattered in every direction, climbing the walls of the tunnel, antennae twitching as they watched me.

In the ring of watchful eyes I noticed something different. Among the cluster of cockroaches, one pair of eyes held a quality that didn't belong there. I looked back at Wu Wei — the man who had just collapsed had, at some point, sat back up. And behind a shock of matted hair, I found two dark-purple irises and a disturbing grin.

"You remember correctly," the seated figure said, in that impossibly hoarse, impossible-to-gender voice. "There was water in the bottle at the time. But you had already drunk it. So when you handed it to Wu Wei, how was there water in it again?"

He wasn't Wu Wei?

The grin widened almost to the ears. "Because what was in the bottle wasn't water. It was me."

He went on: "I entered Wu Wei's body and took it for my own. I have you to thank for that — you gave me a vessel. The vessel wasn't ideal, though; by the time I entered Wu Wei, he was already at death's door. I extended his life by five years. But now even those borrowed years are spent. He has burned down to nothing. I've had to leave my chamber underground and come find you. You now need to find me a new host."

As he spoke, he raised the bottle Wu Wei had been holding — already half-full again. My hand reached out and took it as though I had no say in the matter.

His voice came again: "Go. Be my faithful servant. Find me a new host. Give them this half-bottle of water to drink. You have two days."

Two days. The skeleton-in-skin who had appeared in my bedroom yesterday had said I had three days left — was he connected to this thing as well? I wasn't ready to accept any of this. I looked at the bottle in my hand and said coldly, "And if I choose not to help you?"

"Beep-beep-beep—" My phone rang. Finance Manager Sun calling. I answered; her voice came through at a shout: "Do you still want your job? Yesterday you don't show up at all. It's almost eleven and you're still not in the office. Who do you think is doing your work?"

I answered quickly: "I'm on my way, something came up and I was delayed. I'll be there very soon."

I ended the call, ignored the raving figure in front of me, and walked out of the tunnel toward the office with the half-bottle in my hand.

The genderless voice followed me from behind: "You won't refuse me. You were born into a life of being worked like livestock. You have the right to obey. You have no right to choose."