Meteor Garden -2001- [SAFE]

It started, as these things often do, with a popsicle.

“But you’re still here.”

Shancai had crossed him. Deliberately.

The silence that followed was absolute. Shancai could hear the hum of the fluorescent lights. meteor garden -2001-

Not the movie-star tears she’d imagined, but the ugly, silent kind: shoulders shaking, jaw clenched, a single line of snot threatening to drip onto the cello’s neck.

The music was deep and raw, not a polished recital piece but something angry, something searching. It came from the rotunda. She crept closer, licking the last of her popsicle, and peered through a shattered window.

Si whipped around. His eyes were red, his face a mask of fury and humiliation. “Who’s there?” he snarled. It started, as these things often do, with a popsicle

She learned things. He learned things.

She ran.

She was walking home from the night market, a sticky red lychee popsicle melting down her wrist. She took a shortcut through the old Shilin district, past the abandoned housing development that everyone said was haunted. Locals called it the Meteor Garden—not because of stars, but because in the early 80s, a small meteorite had supposedly cratered there, and the developer, hoping to cash in on the miracle, built a series of modernist concrete pavilions around the impact site. The project went bankrupt during the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Now, the pavilions stood like broken teeth, their flat roofs sprouting ferns, their empty window frames gaping at the sky. A rusty gate, perpetually unlocked, led to a maze of cracked plazas, drained fountains, and one central rotunda with a domed ceiling painted with a faded, chipped mural of the zodiac. The silence that followed was absolute

That afternoon, she didn’t go to the Meteor Garden. Instead, she went to the Dao Ming Group headquarters, a glass-and-steel obelisk that scraped the Taipei sky. She walked past the security guards (they assumed she was a lost student), took the elevator to the 44th floor, and walked into the office of Dao Ming Feng.

“Because you don’t own it,” she said. “You don’t own anything here.”

Shancai stepped into the doorway of the rotunda, holding up her empty popsicle stick like a tiny white flag. “It’s just me,” she said, her voice steadier than she felt. “The wild vegetable.”

“I know,” she said.

That evening, she heard a sound she’d never heard in the Meteor Garden before: a cello.