Years ago, a pawnshop opened at the end of that old alley.
It dealt in only three things: pawning obsessions, pawning rules, and pawning lives.
Lin Moxian was the one who had been pawned. On his eighteenth birthday, he awoke behind the pawnshop counter, clutching a pawn ticket bearing his own name. The space for the redemption date was blank.
He could see the shape of every contract in the world: a wish someone had yet to fulfill, a rule a street could not break, a debt of fate owed by a rainstorm.
He could pawn all of them. There was only one thing he couldn't pawn: himself.
That night, the first customer arrived. It spread its own human skin across the counter.
