Chapter 162: Past Fourteen

Chapter 162: Chapter 162: Past Fourteen

Nobody spoke at the stairwell door.

The gap was still one hand wide, and the dark behind it did not move.

Lin Yue stood with his palm against the cold frame and listened. The footsteps were gone. There had been a pair of them, steady and unhurried, and then there was nothing, as though the stairs had swallowed the sound and kept it.

"He stopped," Shen Rui said.

"Or he’s out of range," Xia Lian said.

"Those aren’t the same."

"No."

Lin Yue made himself look at what was in front of him. He did not look at what it might mean.

Observed: the blueprints are gone from the counter.

Observed: Bei Cheng is not in the ward.

Observed: the stairwell door is open, and a scrap of brown paper lies on the third step.

Not observed: Bei Cheng. Anywhere.

Don’t assume, he told himself. Not yet.

Zhao Feng had pulled a folded sheet from his pocket, a pocket copy of the rotation board in his small, square block letters. He ran his thumb down the column.

"His name’s still on the board," he said.

"Because you haven’t crossed it out," said Xia Lian.

Zhao Feng looked at the marker in his other hand.

He did not answer.

Nobody said anything after that. Shen Rui looked at the floor. Fang Ning looked at Shen Rui. Lin Yue watched Zhao Feng fold the paper along its old creases, once, twice, with careful fingers, as though neatness were something he could still control.

No one walks the route alone.

Zhao Feng had written it. He had said it out loud. And two names from the same room had gone anyway, one after the other.

It wasn’t his fault. The board had never been a lock, only a precaution. Lin Yue knew that, and he suspected Zhao Feng knew it too.

Knowing it was not the same as believing it.

"The paper," Bai Wuyin whispered in a very small voice. He pointed at the third step. "It’s torn on one side. Did he drop it?"

"Maybe," said Lin Yue.

"Or did he leave it?"

"I don’t know."

"It isn’t crumpled," Bai Wuyin said, a little louder, a frightened child noticing something odd. "If you drop something while you’re running, it gets crumpled."

Lin Yue looked again.

The scrap lay flat against the concrete. It was torn cleanly along one edge and did not curl.

Set down, he thought. Or placed.

He could not tell whether it had been placed by Bei Cheng or for him.

"Leave it," he said.

"I wasn’t going to touch it," said Xia Lian.

"I know."

Zhao Feng’s voice came out low and rough. "We follow it."

Shen Rui turned. "Now? After Rong Ze?"

"Yes."

"We just lost one of ours, and you want to walk into the exact place that—"

"If we don’t," Lin Yue said, "we’re standing where he stood. Without knowing why he went."

"That’s not a reason."

"It’s the only one I’ve got."

Shen Rui held his gaze for a moment. Then his shoulders dropped half an inch.

"Fine," he said. "But we go together."

"We go together," said Lin Yue. "Nobody more than an arm’s length from the next person. Nobody goes ahead to check. Nobody goes back to check."

"Understood," said Zhao Feng.

Xia Lian was already tucking her pen into her notebook’s spine. "I’ll count the steps."

"I’ll count them too," said Lin Yue.

"Then we compare."

"Yes."

Behind them, near the counter, Ye Xian, Qiao Lin, Duan Yu, and Wei Tong stood watching the corridor. Zhao Feng had given them one instruction: keep the board, keep the door in sight, and don’t move from the station.

Nobody argued. Nobody wanted to come.

Fang Ning had not moved.

She stood three steps back from the door with her arms around her ribs. Her lips were pressed white. Lin Yue could see her working the arithmetic that had been running behind her eyes since Yun Shu: if she went, someone might need help, and if someone needed help, she might be the one who gave it, and giving it might be how she died.

"I can stay," she said. "I could stay with the others."

"You can," said Lin Yue.

"I don’t think I should be alone."

"Then you shouldn’t be."

She looked down the long dim ward at the counter and the lamp. Lin Yue watched her decide. It was not courage. It was the smaller choice between two kinds of fear.

"No," she said. "I’ll come."

"Stay behind me," said Shen Rui.

"Okay."

She said it so softly Lin Yue almost missed it.

Zhao Feng pushed the stairwell door open the rest of the way.

The stairs were ordinary.

That was the first thing Lin Yue noticed, and it unsettled him more than anything impossible would have.

Concrete steps, worn pale in the middle. Walls painted two-tone, cream above and institutional green below, the line between them ruler-straight. A metal handrail ran along the left side with its paint chipped at every bracket. A caged emergency light hung overhead, throwing a hard yellow circle onto the treads. The air smelled of old cleaning solution, sharp and sweet at the back of the throat.

It was a real stairwell.

Someone had built it, painted it, and mopped it for years.

"Count," Xia Lian said.

"One," said Lin Yue.

They went down in single file. Zhao Feng led, then Xia Lian, then Lin Yue, with Bai Wuyin pressed against his side. Fang Ning came next with Shen Rui behind her, one hand hovering near her shoulder and never quite landing.

Twelve steps to the first landing.

The wall at the turn had a stenciled mark in black paint: B1.

"Basement one," Zhao Feng said.

"Twelve," said Xia Lian.

"Twelve," said Lin Yue.

The stairs turned left. Another flight, and a second landing with another stencil: B2.

"Twenty," said Xia Lian.

"Twenty."

"The plan said two flights," Shen Rui said from behind. "One landing."

"The plan," said Lin Yue, "showed twenty-six steps and one turn east."

"That’s more than twenty-six."

"Yes."

They kept going.

The third flight was shorter, nine steps, and the landing at the bottom had no stencil. There was a rectangle of fresh paint where one should have been, the same green as the lower wall, applied so evenly it was almost invisible.

The stairs turned left again.

East, Lin Yue thought. The plan had the stairwell turning east.

It did. But the distance was wrong.

Thirty-one steps. Forty. Fifty-three. The landings came in the wrong places: eleven steps, then thirty, then six. A building built by a sane architect spaced its landings evenly, because people had to climb them. These were spaced the way a path is when no one has ever needed to climb it.

Lin Yue did not say that aloud.

Not an expansion, he told himself. Not an error in the plan. Either could be true, and so could something else.

He held the number in his head and did not decide.

"Lin Yue," Bai Wuyin said in a small voice. "The stairs keep going."

"I know."

"Is it supposed to?"

"I don’t know."

"I don’t like it."

"Stay close."

"I am."

A few steps later, while Shen Rui was steadying Fang Ning at the next turn and the others were a flight ahead, the boy’s voice dropped.

"The rail," he murmured. "Look."

Lin Yue looked.

Dust lay along the handrail in a fine gray film, thick at the brackets, thin on the bar itself. But down the middle, narrow as a hand, ran a stripe of clean metal.

It ran the whole way down.

"Bei Cheng," Lin Yue said, very low.

"Maybe." The black eye did not blink. "It starts at the top. Before the first landing."

"Of course it does. He started at the top."

"Yes." A pause. "It doesn’t stop. It doesn’t skip. If someone walked down this fast, they’d let go sometimes."

"Maybe he didn’t."

"Maybe."

Neither of them said anything else.

By Lin Yue’s count, they had descended seventy-three steps when the lower air changed.

It did not get colder. It got more still, like a held breath, the way it had been behind the monitors in that long room. The caged lights thinned out and then returned, evenly spaced and quiet.

The last flight was long and narrow. At its foot, the stairs ended on a wide concrete landing, and across the landing stood a door.

Lin Yue stopped.

"There," said Zhao Feng.

It was a plain steel door, painted gray, set flush into the wall. It had no number and no sign. It had a push bar across the middle, the kind found on fire exits and restricted entrances, and a small square window of wired glass at head height.

It could have been a pharmacy storeroom or a records annex.

It could have been anything ordinary.

The window was dark.

Then the door moved.

Lin Yue saw it before anyone else. It was not a swing. It was a slow, even closing, the door drawing itself inward against its own frame with the smooth patience of a drawer being pushed shut.

It was already two-thirds closed.

"It’s shutting," said Xia Lian.

"Go," said Zhao Feng.

They went.

The landing was only a few paces across. It felt much longer, and Lin Yue’s mind would not let him forget that. Zhao Feng reached the middle of it. Lin Yue was a step behind him.

The gap narrowed. Eighteen inches. Twelve.

Light came through it.

Pale light, even and clinical, the color of a ward at night with every lamp on.

Lin Yue saw the corridor.

It was a hospital corridor.

That was what undid him. He had braced for a cellar or a drain, or the damp black throat of a place that should never have been built. Instead, the floor was clean, polished pale tile that threw the overhead lights back in long unbroken streaks. The walls carried the same finish as the wards above. Wall rails ran along both sides at hip height. A handwritten notice was taped neatly to the paint.

It looked finished.

It looked like a functioning ward that someone mopped at six every morning.

And it was long.

Lin Yue had walked the length of the building above. He knew its dimensions. He had counted its doors. The corridor beyond this one narrowing gap stretched farther than the building itself could be. It receded in a line so straight that the far end dissolved into a single point of white light.

There were gurneys along it.

Not one. Not two.

They stood at even intervals down both walls, parked square, their rails raised. Some had white sheets drawn smooth across their surfaces. Others were bare. Each rail carried a small brass plate with a painted numeral.

Lin Yue’s eyes moved before he told them to.

Six. Seven. Eight.

Eleven. Twelve.

Fourteen.

He read the number, and his stomach turned over. Fourteen was how many of them had woken on gurneys in a hallway like this one.

The row did not stop there.

Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen. Eighteen.

Nineteen.

The gap was narrowing. The angle of the door cut off the rest.

Fourteen was where we began, he thought. It isn’t where they end.

He saw something else, nearer.

On the tile just inside the doorway, less than three paces from where the gap was closing, someone lay on his side.

Dark green jacket. Broad shoulders. One arm flung out, fingers open.

A strip of brown paper rested beside the open hand.

Bei Cheng was lying very still.

He was not curled in pain. His face was turned half away, and nothing in his posture suggested a struggle. He lay as a man lies who has sat down on the floor, leaned over, and stopped.

His chest did not rise.

Lin Yue watched it. He watched long enough that his own lungs began to burn, and the chest did not rise.

Beside the doorframe, at shoulder height, a small brass holder was fixed to the wall, the kind that holds a placard for a patient’s room. A strip of white card sat in the slot.

BEI CHENG

The ink was wet. Lin Yue could see it catch the light.

Nobody wrote that, he thought. And no one had the time.

"Bei Cheng!" Shen Rui’s voice cracked out of him.

Nothing moved.

No orderly appeared, and nothing stepped into the corridor. It did not need to.

The hospital had already put his name where it kept the names.

"Lin Yue," Zhao Feng said. His voice was strange. "Can you see him?"

"Yes."

"Is he—"

"Yes."

"You’re certain."

"I can see his chest. It isn’t moving." Lin Yue kept his own voice level because someone had to. "I can’t tell you what did it. I can only tell you what I see."

The gap closed to the width of a forearm.

Zhao Feng lunged. Fang Ning made a small sound. Shen Rui’s hand shot out. Lin Yue reached too, uselessly, his fingers a full pace short of the edge.

It was never going to be enough.

The gap closed to the width of a hand, then a finger.

For one last half second, a single line of white light lay across the landing floor.

Then the door finished closing.

There was no impact. No bang or click, no alarm and no announcement.

The door settled into its frame the way a book settles when the last page is turned.

Then it was a wall.

Not a door standing shut. A wall, gray concrete painted the same gray as everything else, with no handle. The wired window was gone. Lin Yue’s eyes searched for the edge of the frame, the line of the push bar, the shadow of a hinge.

There was nothing.

The paint ran smooth from corner to corner. The landing looked as though no door had ever been set into it.

The silence afterward was the worst of it.

Zhao Feng reached the wall first.

He flattened his palm against the concrete where the push bar should have been. He pressed hard, then dragged his hand sideways in a slow arc, feeling for an edge. Then he went down on one knee and ran his fingers along the floor, along the baseboard, along the corner where the wall met the stair.

"Zhao Feng," said Xia Lian.

"Wait."

He checked the seam above. He pressed the surrounding wall in a grid, one patch after another, as though a hidden panel might give under enough care. He knocked once with his knuckles.

The sound was the sound of a hand on concrete. It did not echo, and nothing answered.

He stayed there a long time.

"There’s no handle," he said at last, his hand flat against the sealed wall. "There’s no seam. There’s nothing to force."

"Because it was never asking to be forced," said Lin Yue. "It was asking to be let in."

Zhao Feng turned his head.

Lin Yue didn’t raise his voice. He had not meant it as a revelation, only the end of an argument he’d been having with himself since the door began to close.

"It opened for him," he said. "It closed for us. Neither of those was a lock."

"So what was it?"

"A condition." He looked at the blank wall. "We didn’t meet it."

"What condition?"

"I don’t know yet."

Shen Rui swore, once, quietly. He pressed his fist against the wall, not hard, and let it rest there. Nothing happened.

Fang Ning had sat down on the bottom step with her hands over her mouth. Her shoulders were shaking, but she made no sound at all.

Bai Wuyin stood beside Lin Yue’s arm, small and pale, hugging his sketchbook. His black eye was fixed on the wall.

"Lin Yue," he said, in a frightened voice. "Did we see that?"

"Yes."

"All of us?"

"All of us."

"Okay," said Bai Wuyin, and pressed a little closer.

Nobody suggested breaking through.

They had all seen the thing. A door that vanished when the hospital stopped permitting it was not made of anything you could break.

Xia Lian was already writing.

She’d taken out her notebook while the door was still closing, and now her pen moved across the page in fast, even strokes. Lin Yue watched her mark the time, the direction of the stairs, and the count of the steps.

"Seventy-three on mine," she said. "Plus eleven from the landing. Eighty-four."

"Eighty-four," said Lin Yue.

"The plan said twenty-six."

"Yes."

"I’m writing that as measured, not explained."

"Good."

She turned a page. "The corridor. What I personally saw: tile floor, wall rails, a long hall. Gurneys on both sides. Numbered. I read up to fourteen before the angle cut me off. I did not see past that."

"I read nineteen," Lin Yue said.

She looked up. "You’re sure?"

"Yes."

"Then I’m writing nineteen as Lin Yue, single witness."

"Twenty-two," said Bai Wuyin, very quietly.

Everyone turned.

The boy had not looked away from the wall. "I think it was twenty-two," he said. His small voice shook, but it was clear. "I was lower down. The numbers were easier to see. I’m not sure about the last one."

Xia Lian held his gaze a moment. Then she wrote.

"Twenty-two," she said. "Bai Wuyin, partial. Not confirmed."

"Okay."

"It matters. Thank you."

Bai Wuyin ducked his head, a nervous child praised by an adult. Lin Yue caught the flick of the black eye toward him, brief and level, before it dropped again.

Not now, that glance said. Later.

"Shen Rui," said Zhao Feng. "Did you see Bei Cheng?"

"I saw him."

"Dead?"

"He wasn’t breathing." Shen Rui’s jaw worked. "I don’t know how else to say it. He wasn’t breathing."

"Write it that way," said Lin Yue.

Xia Lian nodded. "Bei Cheng. Seen in corridor. No chest movement. Four of us witnessed. Cause unknown."

"Four?" said Zhao Feng.

"You, Lin Yue, Shen Rui, and me."

"Fang Ning?"

"I didn’t see," Fang Ning said from the step. She didn’t lift her face. "I couldn’t look."

"That’s all right," said Xia Lian. "I’ll write that too."

Lin Yue stood a little apart and rebuilt it in order, the way he always did.

Bei Cheng took the blueprints.

He went down the stairs alone.

The door at the bottom stood open long enough for him to pass through and for us to arrive.

By the time we reached the landing, it was already closing.

Beyond it was Ward 7, or something like it.

The gurneys were numbered past fourteen.

The door vanished completely.

Bei Cheng was inside, and he was dead.

He turned the list over again and found a hole in it.

"The door opened for him," he said.

"We said that," said Shen Rui.

"Why?"

Nobody answered.

"He didn’t do anything special," Lin Yue said. "He didn’t have a key. He didn’t speak to it. He took a paper the hospital left within reach, and he walked down."

"So the paper was the key," said Xia Lian.

"Or the paper was the invitation."

"What’s the difference?"

"A key opens something. An invitation only works if you’re expected."

Zhao Feng rose from his knee. His voice, when it came, was dry. "Expected as what?"

Lin Yue didn’t answer at once.

He was thinking of Yun Shu’s Admission Form, found open on the counter. A Discharge Date, filled in. No cause. No time. No signature.

"Xia Lian," he said. "Yun Shu’s form. When we found it, what did it say about discharge?"

She didn’t need to check the notebook. "A date. Nothing else. No cause of death. No time. No authorizing signature."

"And Han Xu’s?"

"The same. The date was already there before anyone reported him missing."

"Was there a stamp?"

She stopped.

"A stamp," she said slowly. "A physical mark. Ink. A seal."

"On either form."

"No." She flipped back through three pages. "No. Dates. Just dates. I never wrote down a stamp, because there never was one."

"A date isn’t a stamp," Lin Yue said.

Shen Rui frowned. "Meaning?"

"A date says when. A stamp says by whose authority." He glanced at the wall. "Every form we’ve seen has a date. None has ever been stamped."

"So?" said Shen Rui.

"So I think the hospital doesn’t consider any of us discharged yet."

"We’re not dead yet," Shen Rui said. "That’s—"

"That’s not the same as being discharged. Han Xu is dead. His form said discharge. But it didn’t have a stamp." He kept his voice flat, almost gentle. "The hospital recorded him. It didn’t release him."

A silence settled, heavy and slow.

"We’ve been treating discharge as what happens if we live," Xia Lian said. "As the finish line."

"Yes."

"But if it’s an authorization—"

"Then it’s something we have to be given."

"By who?"

"I don’t know."

"And without it—"

"Without it," said Lin Yue, "the door doesn’t open. Not for force. Not for timing. Bei Cheng didn’t get in because he was clever. He got in because the hospital allowed it. And it let him die for it."

"Then we were wrong about the door," said Shen Rui.

"We were wrong about what the door was for."

Xia Lian looked down at her notes. "If a stamp is required, then the door isn’t an exit."

"No," said Lin Yue. "It’s an entrance."

"Into Ward 7?"

"Into whatever the hospital considers the next stage of admission."

Nobody liked that.

Lin Yue didn’t either. He let the sentence stand where it was and did not try to make it sound better.

"One more thing," said Zhao Feng.

They looked at him.

"Everything we’ve learned in this place," he said, "we learned by watching somebody die."

"Yes," said Lin Yue.

"Han Xu, the rule. Yun Shu, the bill. Rong Ze, the debt."

"Yes."

"And Bei Cheng."

"The door," said Xia Lian. "That being here doesn’t mean we’re allowed in."

Zhao Feng nodded once. He looked, Lin Yue thought, very tired.

"Four," he said.

"Four," said Xia Lian.

He took a long breath through his nose. "Let’s go back up."

They climbed in silence.

Lin Yue counted again out of habit. Eighty-four steps, according to his count. According to the plan, twenty-six.

Somewhere on the way, the handrail stopped looking clean. Dust lay across the bar from end to end, thick and unbroken, the way it would on any stair nobody had touched in years.

He did not mention it.

He kept his hand in his coat.

The black notebook rested against his ribs.

It weighed almost nothing, and it was the only record in the building that the hospital had not written. Its pages were Rong Ze’s, in Rong Ze’s own hand, before and after. The hospital had never been able to correct them because they had never been entered in the hospital’s books.

Rong Ze had said the hospital would keep a chart, because that was what it did.

He had been right.

The wall stayed behind them at the bottom of eighty-four steps, smooth and gray and exactly as before. Lin Yue looked back once from the first landing. He did not know why.

The concrete was just concrete.

And he could not stop thinking about the corridor he’d seen, the gurneys, the numbers running past fourteen, the clean pale light.

The hospital had shown them a whole ward.

Then it had taken away every trace of the way in.

They had come here as players.

The hospital had registered them as patients. It had given them rooms, entered their names, and begun to settle their accounts.

But it had not discharged them.

Not one of them.

Zhao Feng went to the board himself.

The others stood at the counter in the dim lamplight. Qiao Lin, Duan Yu, Wei Tong, and Ye Xian had waited where they were told to wait. None of them asked a question. They looked at the six faces coming back up the corridor and understood.

Zhao Feng uncapped the marker.

He found Bei Cheng’s name in the grid, third row down, neat block letters in Zhao Feng’s own hand. Beside it, Rong Ze’s name was already struck through.

He drew the line.

One stroke. Slow and straight.

Then he stood there with his hand still raised.

"Four," he said.

Nobody answered.

He lowered the marker. He went back to the top of the board and read down it, name by name, tapping each one with the capped end.

"Han Xu. Gone. Yun Shu. Gone. Rong Ze. Gone." The marker moved. "Bei Cheng. Gone."

He paused.

"Lin Yue. Bai Wuyin. Ye Xian. Shen Rui. Fang Ning. Qiao Lin. Duan Yu. Wei Tong. Xia Lian. And me."

He counted on the board with his finger.

"Ten."

"Ten," Xia Lian said.

"Out of fourteen."

"Yes."

He wiped his marker hand on his sleeve. His face was perfectly composed. Only his eyes gave anything away.

"I’m going to redo the pairs," he said. "Qiao Lin, you’re with Fang Ning. Duan Yu with Wei Tong. Xia Lian with me. Lin Yue and Bai Wuyin stay as they are, and Shen Rui with Ye Xian."

"Understood," said Qiao Lin.

"No one’s alone. Not at the station. Not in the corridor. Not to use the bathroom."

"Understood."

"If your partner steps away, you go with them. If they won’t let you, you tell me."

"Zhao Feng," said Shen Rui. "It wasn’t the board."

Zhao Feng didn’t turn.

"I know," he said.

"Then stop writing like it was."

"I’m writing the names, Shen Rui. That’s all."

He bent and began to rewrite the grid.

His hand was steady. But Lin Yue, watching from three paces away, saw how carefully he pressed each letter into place, as if every name might be the last one he was able to record.

He did not offer to help.

He only watched, and understood what Zhao Feng had understood while he drew the line. The board had once been a way to keep people safe. Now it was only a way to know who was still alive.

Xia Lian had opened her notebook again, to a fresh page.

"I’m splitting the deaths," she said.

"How?" asked Lin Yue.

"Han Xu was a rule broken, immediate. Yun Shu was the form completed, slow. Rong Ze was a correction spoken, transferred." She underlined each in turn. "Bei Cheng is none of those."

"Not a confirmed rule."

"No. He crossed into a place we can’t reach. I don’t know what the mechanism was, and I don’t want to guess."

"Then write that," said Lin Yue.

"I am." She wrote:

Bei Cheng — entered inaccessible lower corridor. Death witnessed by four. Mechanism unknown. Do not attribute to a rule.

She looked up. "Is that fair?"

"It’s accurate."

"That’s better."

Lin Yue found, a little to his surprise, that he was grateful for her.

The ground floor was quieter than the ward.

They went down together at Zhao Feng’s insistence. He wanted a count of the lobby, and Xia Lian wanted to check the check-in ledger at the front desk. If the hospital had struck a name, she said, she wanted to know which.

It hadn’t.

The ledger lay open on the counter exactly as it had on the first night, fourteen names in the same unfamiliar hand. Han Xu’s was there. So were Yun Shu’s, Rong Ze’s, and Bei Cheng’s.

Nothing was crossed out.

"It doesn’t remove anyone," said Xia Lian, very quietly.

"No."

"They’re still on the list."

"Yes."

She closed the ledger with two fingers, as if it were something hot, and said nothing else.

Lin Yue looked up.

The Waiting Room opened off the lobby to the left.

He had passed it a dozen times since they arrived. It never changed. Rows of molded chairs stood bolted to the floor, their seats cracked at the corners. A vending machine hummed against the far wall. The reception counter held a stack of forms nobody ever collected. Above the door hung the old wall clock, its second hand ticking in place.

3:17.

It was always 3:17.

The light was pale and flat, and it lay on everything the same way.

There were people in the room.

Lin Yue counted six, seven. Men and women of no particular age sat with their coats on their laps and their eyes on nothing. None of them looked up when the group came through. They had been waiting, he thought, for something that no longer mattered, and the waiting had worn their faces smooth.

He didn’t stop.

None of them did.

Fang Ning walked a pace behind Qiao Lin, her arms still wrapped around herself. She kept her eyes on the floor.

She had nearly reached the doorway of the Waiting Room when a voice spoke.

"Fang Ning."

She stopped.

It was a quiet voice, level and polite.

Everyone stopped.

Lin Yue turned.

A relative sat in the second row, near the aisle. One of the waiting ones. They wore a plain dark coat and had folded their hands neatly on their knees. They had been sitting in that same seat, Lin Yue realized, every time he’d walked past.

They had never spoken to anyone.

Not to him. Not to Zhao Feng or Su Yun or any of the players. They had sat there for two days, and no one had thought to wonder what they were waiting for.

Now they were looking straight at Fang Ning.

"Fang Ning," the relative said again, unhurried. "Is that right?"

She did not answer.

"I’m sorry to bother you." The relative smiled slightly. It was a very ordinary smile. "I wasn’t sure it was you."

"Who—" Fang Ning’s voice came out thin. "How do you know my name?"

The relative did not seem to hear the question.

Lin Yue stepped half a pace closer without deciding to. Beside him, Bai Wuyin pressed against his arm. The boy’s fingers closed on Lin Yue’s sleeve, hard, and his black eye was fixed on the figure in the chair.

No one had introduced her.

Nobody in this room had been told her name.

Su Yun knew it, and the check-in ledger knew it. But the people in the Waiting Room had been outside the ward’s rooms and outside its rounds. No one had read Fang Ning’s name aloud to them.

And they had never so much as glanced at her before.

"Fang Ning," the relative said, very gently, as though speaking to a patient. "Could you do me a favor?"

Fang Ning did not move.

Her face had gone entirely white. Her hands, still clamped around her own arms, were trembling. She looked at the relative. Then she looked back, quickly, at the group.

At Lin Yue.

She didn’t say no.

She didn’t say anything.

The clock above the door ticked once, and did not change the time.

The relative waited. Their hands lay neatly on their knees. Their gaze did not shift from her face.

Lin Yue looked at the relative.

Then he looked at Fang Ning.

The hospital had already taken four people.

And now, in a room where nobody had spoken to them before, someone had decided to ask for help.