New York's rain always ferments into mist in the deep night, winding between the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge. Chen Mo turned off the sixth screen flashing Bitcoin candlesticks, the minty taste of a mint candy still lingering on his tongue. In the trading floor's rest area at three in the morning, a girl curled up in an oversized hoodie was drawing sunflowers on a dollar bill with a marker in the blue light of a vending machine.
"This is illegal," Chen Mo pointed to the altered hundred-dollar bill in her hand. When the girl looked up, the neon leaking from her hair tinted the small mole at the corner of her left eye red, like solidified evening glow.
"Look at this," she held the bill up to the light, Washington's face changed to that of a tongue-sticking Shiba Inu, "real currency should be something that makes people happy." As she spoke, the silver chain on her wrist jingled, and Chen Mo noticed the frayed part of her hoodie sleeve, like a stubborn dandelion.
Su Xia came to paint banknotes every Wednesday after her night shift. Chen Mo noticed she always had a lemon candy in her mouth while painting, biting down hard on the candy when Bitcoin plummeted. One night during Ethereum's flash crash, she suddenly jabbed the paintbrush into his suit pocket: "Want to try drawing a heartbeat as a line chart?"
They shared hot cocoa at the Hudson River dock at four in the morning. Su Xia’s canvas shoes were stained with paint; she said each color corresponds to an emotion: cobalt blue is the loneliness of five in the morning, cadmium red is an unspoken confession. "What about you?" She suddenly turned her head, her breath forming small white flowers in the cold night, "Can you really hear the heartbeat of money in those fluctuating numbers?"
Chen Mo's stop-loss line began to crack. When Su Xia stuffed the seventh doodle into his trench coat pocket, he realized he remembered the color order of all her hoodies: ash gray, goose yellow, misty blue, and dark purple. She always said cryptocurrency was a digital ghost, yet when she heard about his liquidation, she silently sent him a hand-painted "amulet"—a Bitcoin symbol outlined in gold powder, with "the stop-loss point is here" written on the back.
The incident happened on a full moon night. Chen Mo had just closed his ten-times leveraged short position when he turned around to see Su Xia standing in front of the data waterfall screen. She wasn't wearing those rainbow-colored hoodies; the black dress looked like a segment of cut-off night. "I’m going to Iceland." Her fingertip brushed against his suit lapel, where a coin with a sunflower design was pinned, "In the aurora of Reykjavik... perhaps I can find fluctuations more eternal than candlesticks."
The alarm suddenly screeched, and Bitcoin's price began to plummet. Chen Mo was knocked off balance by the rushing traders, and when he looked up again, Su Xia had vanished like cleared cache data, leaving only an unwrapped lemon candy in his pocket.
Later, Chen Mo saw her shadow in every bullish candle. That night when ETH broke its previous high, he finally found that ash gray hoodie at a thrift market in Manhattan—still stained at the hem with Starbucks latte marks. The shopkeeper said an Eastern girl came by last month to pawn it, in exchange for a one-way ticket to Reykjavik.
On a snowy morning in New York, Chen Mo received an unsigned postcard. The back of the glacier photo was written in familiar handwriting: "We are all trading the most precious things; you trade your heartbeat for numbers, while I trade eternity for the moment." He touched his suit inner pocket; the lemon candy had long melted, sticking to half a sunflower outlined in gold powder.
