Set in a futuristic world that primarily uses Chinese names and honorifics, but English as the official language. Preapocolyptic. Slash, eventually.

September 21, 2134

“Xiao Hua!”

Heihua turned over once, not entirely awake before his mother called again.

“Xiao Hua! Wake up!”

He sat up, his hair falling lankly into his face, damp and blue-black from sweat. Why did his mother have to keep it so hot at night?

“I’m up! I’m up!” he called back, pulling his hair up messily into a rough approximation of a ponytail and stumbling into his en suite bath.

He washed his face, then looked at his reflection.

A fairly good-looking, rather effeminate seventeen-year-old looked back at him, deep black hair, pale skin, and grey eyes, none of which were the products of natural genetics, but rather human ingenuity. His parents had designed him from before his conception – he would grow up to be five-seven, one hundred and thirty pounds, black hair like his family, but with a smooth Caucasian texture and length, the same grey eyes as a model his mother had printed off of her favorite fashion site, the facial structure of another model. All of his organs would be synthetic, guaranteed to last two hundred years, his immune system optimal, his lungs guarded by natural filters that would protect him from the smoggy air outside.

They had even named him before the end of the first trimester: Liu Heihua

But two of their customizations had failed. The first had been the filters in his lungs. They were useless, and he had to wear a mask if he wanted to go outside.

The second, he hadn’t known about it until his doctor had let it slip.

His parents had designed their perfect daughter.

It hadn’t been until well into the third trimester that the OBGYN had discovered that Ma Jieyun was carrying a boy. And by that time, it was too late to alter their son any further. He would possess every trait that they had hoped for except the right gender. They had tried an experimental prenatal estrogen therapy to suppress the obvious maleness of Heihua’s body, but nature inevitably took her course.

At first he had been angry – all of those years he had been called a girl by his friends! But it was easy to use to his advantage. Girls trusted him naturally, so it was easier to get close to them.

He looked over his features with just a little vanity one last time before pulling a medical mask over the bottom half of his face and heading to school.

Around the same time, Zhen Youli was driving down the highway at a reckless speed, weaving through traffic with a precision unlikely in someone so distracted. It wasn’t that he cared whether or not he was on time to school; the only reason he ever went at all was his father’s threats of disowning him. But if he got there early enough, he could go to the library.

It freaked his friends out; the library had never held any particular fascination for him; it was just a big room towards the back of the school, full of computers with access to an expansive collection of e-books. But it wasn’t the books that interested Youli. It was the girl that he was after. She sat in the library every morning at a little cubicle – doing what, he didn’t know. If she was anything like the other girls, she was watching crappy romance movies or reading the latest issue of Shi Qi, but Youli had the distinct feeling that she wasn’t.

As soon as he entered the room, he made a beeline for the station next to hers and started up the computer. He wasn’t very good with them; he was more of the physical type, and it didn’t help that the library’s models were at least ten years old – big clunky boxes about six-by-three inches that projected a slightly translucent screen into the air. It had a fingerprint scanner that could read any information stored on an implanted chip, but nearly all newer models were about the length and thickness of a pen, and scanned chips through a retina reader. The newer ones were faster too – they almost loaded pages before you even thought a command. And Youli wasn’t patient enough for a three second wait. He usually overloaded the censor with thought commands before it could load a single page.

But he didn’t really care what came up on the screen as long as the girl stayed in such perfect view.

“Hey, Nüren-Yisheng,” he called across the partition, doctor-girl, because she wore a medical mask. Probably a failed lung improvement, it was common, but it could have just been for fashion. Youli didn’t get it, but a lot of girls were into that retro-punk thing.

The girl looked surprised, then smiled pleasantly. “Mh-hm?” she said, turning back to the screen.

Why was she grinning like that?

Youli suppressed a self-satisfied smirk. So this girl obviously had a thing for him. And he liked the way her voice sounded, not affectedly high and feminine like a lot of girls, but smooth and light.

“What’s your name?”

“ Liu Heihua,” she said, using her full name “And you?”

“Li,” he offered. Now she wouldn’t have any choice but to be on first-name terms with him.

“Very nice to meet you Li-xiansheng.”

Mr. Li. Typical. So she was like every other girl in this damn school – playing hard to get because she thought it was cute. Fine. He’d just have to be aggressive.

“When’s your lunch?” he asked. “Maybe I could eat with you.”

“I have lunch during fourth period,” she offered. “I’ll be in Xu Laoshi’s office. I grade papers for her on my break. You can stop in, but you can’t stay the whole time.”

And then she just got up and left.

What a rude bitch.

She was exactly Youli’s type.