Chapter 165: Who’s Face in the Portrait

Chapter 165: Chapter 165: Who’s Face in the Portrait

Nobody moved.

The lamp hummed. Somewhere beyond the chapel door, a monitor gave its low, patient note, so faint it might have been in Lin Yue’s own head.

He did not look away from the portrait. He made himself do what he always did. He checked the details first, and the feeling second.

Eyes. Set wide, with a slight downward tilt at the outer corners.

Jaw. A quiet line, not sharp.

Mouth. Closed, a little too patient.

He knew every one of them. He had watched them across a corridor, across a ward, across a table of cold hospital tea. He had watched that mouth smile at things that were not funny.

It was not smiling now.

"Everyone," Xia Lian said.

Her voice was low and very level. She had turned a fresh page in her notebook, and her pen was already above it.

"I need each of you to say what you see. Not who, but what."

"Xia Lian," Zhao Feng began.

"Please. Before anyone starts agreeing with anyone else."

Nobody answered at first. Then Qiao Lin, from the second bench on the left, said, "A man. Young. Dark hair, a little long over the ears."

"Eyes?"

"Wide-set. Tired."

"Mouth?"

"Closed." Qiao Lin swallowed. "It looks like he’s about to say something and has decided not to."

Xia Lian wrote.

"Shen Rui."

Shen Rui sat on the right side of the aisle, near the back. He did not look at the portrait. He had not looked at it once since the first moment.

"Same," he said. "All of it."

"Zhao Feng?"

"Same." Zhao Feng stood in the center aisle, almost at the altar rail. "Same from here."

"Lin Yue?"

"Same," said Lin Yue.

He glanced across the room.

Qiao Lin was on the left. Shen Rui was on the right. Zhao Feng stood at the front, and Xia Lian sat in the middle with her notebook on her knee. Bai Wuyin was pressed against Lin Yue’s arm, three benches from the back.

Five angles. One face.

Not one person’s imagination. Not a trick of the lamp.

"Bai Wuyin," Xia Lian said, more gently.

The boy did not answer.

His good eye was fixed on the portrait. His gray one drifted toward the floor, the way it did when he was thinking very hard. His fingers had gone slack on the cover of his sketchbook.

"Bai Wuyin?"

"It’s the same," he said at last. The high, thin voice was barely there. "It’s him."

Xia Lian wrote that down too.

Observed: all six present can see the same face.

Observed: all six name the same features without prompting.

Observed: no one in the chapel has been told what to see.

She underlined the last line once.

"That’s the part I’d like to be sure of," she said quietly. "No one is imagining this alone."

"No," said Zhao Feng.

He took a step toward the altar. Then another.

His hand rose, and Lin Yue saw the exact moment he remembered himself. The fingers stopped an inch from the frame and hung there, trembling very slightly.

"Don’t," said Lin Yue.

"I wasn’t going to."

"You were."

"I was." Zhao Feng lowered the hand. His jaw worked. "I’ve had enough of touching things first and learning after."

He stepped back until his heels met the altar rail.

"Then we look," he said. "Only look."

Lin Yue stood.

He walked up the aisle slowly, past the worn ends of the benches, until he stood beside Zhao Feng and the portrait filled his sight.

Up close, it was not what he had expected.

It was not a painting, and it was not quite a photograph either. The surface had the soft grain of an old print, but the colors were deeper than any print should hold. The lamplight lay across it without glare.

The frame was dark wood, plain, and hung a little crooked. There was no brass plate on it, no card, no caption, no date scratched into the corner.

No inscription. No signature. Nothing to say who made it, or when.

He crouched and looked at the altar rail, then at the cloth, then at the floor.

Dust lay on all of it, a fine gray film that held the print of his shoe.

He stood and looked at the frame again.

There was no dust on the glass. None on the wood. Not along the top edge, where it gathers first.

"Zhao Feng."

"I see it."

"Somebody cleaned it."

"Or something does."

"Recently?"

"I don’t know." Zhao Feng’s voice was careful. "That’s the problem. I don’t know anything about it."

Lin Yue made himself think the ordinary thoughts first.

An old photograph, used as a reference. A coincidence of features. Someone who has seen Ye Xian and placed his likeness here on purpose.

He turned each one over and set it down.

A coincidence could explain a similar jaw, or similar eyes. It could not explain the particular tilt of the mouth, or the small, patient weight in it, a weight Lin Yue had seen exactly once, in a stairwell, when an orderly said you’ve been here before.

It is not a resemblance. It is a record.

He kept that thought away from his face.

"His hair’s longer," Qiao Lin said, from behind him.

"Yes."

"And he looks..." She hesitated. "Tired. Not sleepy. Tired like he’s been carrying something for years."

"Older?"

"No." She frowned. "Or maybe. I can’t tell. It could be younger and worn out, or older and trying to look young."

Lin Yue studied the face again.

She was right. The portrait refused to settle. Looked at one way, the boy in the frame was a year or two younger than Ye Xian. Looked at another, he was a man who had stopped counting his years.

Past. Future. Or something the hospital wants us to believe.

"It doesn’t say when," he said aloud.

"Does that help?" asked Zhao Feng.

"No. It’s just true."

Qiao Lin had folded her arms tightly over herself. She was not looking at the portrait anymore. She was looking at the ceiling, where the PA grille would have been in any other room.

"It knows him," she said.

"Qiao Lin," said Xia Lian.

"It knew my name too." Her voice was thin. "Last night, over the speakers. It knew Fang Ning’s uniform size. It knew him." She tilted her head toward the portrait. "How much does this place know about us? What else has it been keeping?"

Nobody had an answer.

Lin Yue turned.

He had been avoiding it. Now he let his eyes go to the third bench from the back, where Ye Xian sat alone.

He had expected a reaction. A laugh, a deflection, a hand lifted in lazy surrender. In four days, Ye Xian had never once failed to produce one.

He had not moved.

He was sitting exactly as he had been when the portrait changed, hands loosely clasped, back straight. But the looseness was gone. His fingers had locked, white at the knuckles. His shoulders sat very level, like a man balancing something on them.

His face had no expression at all.

It was not blank. Lin Yue knew the difference. Blank was a mask. This was a face where every muscle had stopped at once, as though whatever ran them had gone elsewhere.

His eyes were on the portrait.

They did not blink.

Not defensive. Not guarded. Not even afraid, exactly.

He looked like someone who had heard his own name called from very far away.

"Ye Xian," Lin Yue said quietly.

Nothing.

"Ye Xian."

His eyes did not shift. His chest rose and fell, slowly, at a pace that looked chosen.

Across the aisle, a bench creaked.

Shen Rui had stood.

He did not shout. That was the thing Lin Yue noticed first, and the thing that frightened him most. Shen Rui walked up the aisle, stopped one bench in front of Ye Xian, and looked down at him.

His voice, when it came, was quiet and furious.

"Say something."

Ye Xian did not look up.

"I’m giving you the chance," said Shen Rui. "Right now. Say anything."

Silence.

"Is that you?"

Nothing.

"Have you seen it before?"

Nothing.

"Do you know this room?" Shen Rui’s voice cracked, just slightly, on the last word. "Do you know why your face is on that wall? Did you know it was there when we came in?"

Ye Xian’s lips parted.

Lin Yue saw it. Everyone saw it. Zhao Feng went still at the altar rail. Qiao Lin’s hand rose halfway to her mouth.

For one second it looked like he would speak.

Then his lips closed again, and the breath he had taken went out of him slowly, and he said nothing.

The chapel was silent in a way it had not been before.

Shen Rui waited.

Lin Yue counted it. Five seconds. Ten. Fifteen. Shen Rui did not fill the quiet and did not look away. And Lin Yue realized, with an odd tightening in his chest, that he really was waiting. He was not setting a trap. He wanted a joke, a half-truth, a lie, anything he could be angry at properly.

He wanted to be able to hate him for a reason.

Ye Xian gave him nothing.

"Fang Ning," Shen Rui said, very low. "Ten minutes ago, I couldn’t get her through a gap in a counter. And you, you walk into this building knowing which stairs dead-end and which orderlies to dodge, and now there’s a picture of you hanging over a church altar, and you can’t even..."

His voice broke off.

He took a breath.

"I would take a lie," he said. "You know that? I would take a bad lie."

Ye Xian’s eyes finally moved.

They came away from the portrait and settled on Shen Rui’s face. They were wide and dark and entirely without defense. Lin Yue had never seen that look on him.

Ye Xian did not smile, and he did not speak.

Shen Rui flinched. It was a tiny movement, quickly stopped. Whatever he had braced himself for, it was not that.

"Shen Rui," Lin Yue said.

"Don’t."

"Step back."

"I said don’t."

"Step back." Lin Yue came down the aisle until he stood beside them both. He kept his voice low and level. "Not because he’s right. Because this isn’t going to give you anything."

"He’s right there."

"Yes."

"He knows."

"Maybe."

"Maybe?"

"Maybe," Lin Yue said again. "Let me tell you what we actually have."

Shen Rui’s jaw was tight, but he did not move away.

"We have a portrait of his face," said Lin Yue. "That’s all. We don’t know when it was made. We don’t know if it shows what he was or what he’ll be, or what this building wants us to think he is. We don’t know if he put it here, or if he’s ever seen this room. We don’t even know if he’s lying by staying quiet."

"He’s not saying he isn’t."

"No. He isn’t saying anything." Lin Yue held Shen Rui’s gaze. "Which is also not proof."

"You’re defending him."

"I’m not." He said it plainly. "Your suspicion is reasonable. Your anger is reasonable. Fang Ning is at that counter, and I would want someone to answer for it too."

Shen Rui’s breath shuddered.

"But shouting at him in front of everyone won’t get us the truth. It’ll get us a wall." Lin Yue lowered his voice further. "Give me time with him. Alone."

"And then what?"

"Then he tells me, or he doesn’t. And I tell you which."

Shen Rui stared at him for a long moment.

"I’m not satisfied," he said.

"I know."

"I’m not going to be satisfied."

"I know."

"If he lies to you..."

"Then I’ll know that too."

Shen Rui looked at Ye Xian once more. Ye Xian had turned his eyes back to the altar, as if the argument were happening in another room.

"Fine," said Shen Rui. He walked back to his bench, sat down hard, and folded his arms across his chest. He did not look up again.

Lin Yue let out a breath.

That wasn’t trust. It was a pause.

But a pause is something.

Behind him, Xia Lian turned a page.

They left the chapel in silence.

No one wanted to stay, and no one wanted to be the first to turn their back on the portrait. In the end, Zhao Feng went last. He stood in the doorway for a moment, looking at the altar, before he pulled the door shut.

It closed without a sound.

They returned to the dim ward and spread out among the cots without speaking. Xia Lian sat against the far wall with her notebook open, working on two clean pages. One was headed Portrait. The other, after a pause, she headed Open Questions.

"I’m keeping them apart," she said when Zhao Feng looked over. "What we saw, and what we guess. If I mix them tonight, I’ll believe the mix tomorrow."

"Good."

"It doesn’t feel good."

"No," said Zhao Feng. "It doesn’t."

Qiao Lin sat on a cot with her hands in her lap, turning her wrists over. Every few minutes she glanced at the doorway, and Lin Yue knew she was listening for the PA.

Shen Rui had taken the cot nearest the exit. He lay on his back with one arm over his eyes. He wasn’t sleeping.

Ye Xian had walked to the farthest corner of the ward, sat on the floor with his back to the wall, and drawn his knees up. He had not spoken since the chapel.

Lin Yue left him alone.

Instead he sat down near the others, at a careful distance, and let his gaze rest on nothing in particular. His mind went back over the chapel in order.

Portrait. Frame. Dust. Face.

And under it, a small, cold question he did not want to look at.

If the hospital kept his face, what else did it keep?

A sound reached him.

It was very faint. A soft, steady scratching, the sound of charcoal moving across paper.

He turned his head.

Bai Wuyin sat cross-legged on a cot near the wall, the sketchbook open across his knees. His right hand was moving. The charcoal skated in long, confident strokes. Smudging, correcting, laying down line after line.

His head was tilted toward the floor.

He was not looking at the page.

Lin Yue rose and crossed the room without hurrying. He did not want to startle the boy.

He stopped a pace away.

"Bai Wuyin."

The charcoal didn’t pause.

"Bai Wuyin."

Nothing. The boy’s good eye was fixed on a spot of bare floor, and his gray one rolled slowly outward. His mouth was a little open. He looked, Lin Yue thought, like someone listening to music from another room.

Lin Yue looked down at the page.

It was a corridor.

Not a quick one. A long, deep, finished drawing, with each pane of the ceiling lights drawn in perspective, each door inset on the left-hand wall, the floor tiles running to a point so distant that the charcoal thinned into gray mist.

And along the corridor, in two orderly lines, lay gurneys.

Lin Yue’s stomach tightened.

The vanished steel door.

He knew that corridor. He had only glimpsed it, for no more than a breath, through the narrowing gap before the wall closed. But the rhythm of the lights was the same. The pale green on the doors was the same, and so was the unnatural length, stretching further than the building could possibly allow.

"Zhao Feng," he said, not loudly. "Xia Lian. Come here."

They came quickly. Qiao Lin followed, and, after a pause, Shen Rui, who stood at the edge of the group with his arms folded.

"Don’t wake him," said Lin Yue. "Just look."

Nobody breathed.

The charcoal kept moving. A gurney’s rail took shape beside the first. A white sheet followed, then the rise of a pillow. Each had a small card clipped to the foot of the frame.

Lin Yue bent closer.

The cards were numbered.

Beneath the numbers, each one carried a second tag, a narrow strip no wider than a thumbnail. Bai Wuyin was drawing them in the same patient, careful hand.

"Fifteen," Xia Lian read, barely audible. "Sixteen, seventeen..."

"We saw those," said Zhao Feng. "Through the gap. Fifteen, maybe sixteen."

"We saw the first few." Xia Lian already had her notebook open. "My note says we confirmed up to sixteen. After that it was too far down the hall."

"And he’s drawn..."

"Twenty-two," said Qiao Lin.

"Twenty-three."

"It doesn’t skip."

Lin Yue counted along the line himself.

Seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty. Each number followed the last, in unbroken sequence, down the whole length of the page.

We never saw that far. No one did.

"He couldn’t have seen that," Zhao Feng said. "He was at the back. He was right behind you. He couldn’t even see the end of the stairwell."

"No," said Lin Yue.

"Then how..."

"I don’t know."

He kept his voice even, but his heart was beating with a hard, careful rhythm. He did not let himself think the word.

Prophecy. A convenient answer. The one explanation that would let us stop checking.

Instead he said, "Xia Lian. What did we confirm, exactly?"

She flipped back. "Gurneys along both walls. Numbered upward from fifteen. Last one visible was sixteen. No tags, no labels. Nothing under the cards."

"Nothing under the cards?"

"I’d have written it."

"Then the tags are his."

"Or new."

"Or new," Lin Yue agreed.

He bent lower.

The tags were tiny, and Bai Wuyin was still working. As Lin Yue watched, the charcoal moved to the nineteenth gurney, to the narrow strip clipped beneath its card.

A line formed. Another.

Letters. Then digits.

Lin Yue went very still.

He knew the sequence before the last digit settled.

The charcoal stopped.

For a moment, nothing moved in the ward.

"Say it," Zhao Feng whispered. "Tell me I’m reading it wrong."

"You’re not," said Xia Lian. Her pen had stopped on the page. "That’s a player ID. That’s a registration number."

"Whose?"

She did not answer.

Lin Yue straightened. He crossed to the neat stack of wristbands the hospital had issued on the first night, now piled on the end of Zhao Feng’s rotation board. He found the one he wanted and turned it over in the lamplight.

He read the number twice. Then he came back and held it beside the page.

The band said one thing, and the drawing said the same.

Every character matched. The grouping was the same, and so was the stroke of the final digit.

"Exact," he said.

Behind him, someone made a small, sharp sound. It might have been Qiao Lin. It might have been Shen Rui.

Xia Lian wrote.

Observed: Bai Wuyin drew a gurney tag in the Ward 7 corridor.

Observed: the tag matches Ye Xian’s registration ID exactly.

Observed: Bai Wuyin did not see this tag, and could not have read it.

She stopped. Her pen hovered.

"I want to write why," she said. "I can’t."

"Don’t," said Lin Yue. "Leave it open."

"Leave it open." She said it like something she was trying to believe. "It’s the only honest thing."

The charcoal rolled off Bai Wuyin’s knee and clicked against the floor.

The boy blinked.

He raised his head slowly. His good eye came into focus first. His gray one lagged a moment behind it, like a door swinging closed. He looked down at the sketchbook. He looked at the page.

Then he looked up at the five faces above him.

"Oh," he said, small and very young. "Did I do something wrong?"

Lin Yue crouched until they were level.

"No."

"I fell asleep." Bai Wuyin’s voice wavered. "I think. I didn’t mean to. I was just sitting."

"You weren’t asleep."

"Weren’t I?" The boy’s gaze dropped to the page. His lips parted. "I drew all of that?"

"Yes."

"I don’t remember it."

"Any of it?"

"I remember the chapel." His thin shoulders pulled in. "I remember sitting down. And then you were all standing here."

"It’s all right," said Lin Yue.

He stood. He held out a hand.

"Come with me for a minute."

They went to the supply alcove at the end of the ward, where the shelves of folded sheets made a narrow, quiet space. Lin Yue set the sketchbook on a shelf between them.

For a moment Bai Wuyin said nothing.

The frightened child had slipped from his face. He stood with his arms at his sides, and his black eye moved over the drawing with the flat, steady attention Lin Yue knew well.

"Is it bad?" he asked.

"I don’t know."

"That’s a no, then."

"That’s an I don’t know."

The boy’s mouth twitched.

"Do you remember drawing the corridor?" Lin Yue asked.

"Not the whole thing."

"Part of it?"

"The beginning. The doors." Bai Wuyin tilted his head. "Then it was like walking. I didn’t stop to look. I just went along it."

"Went along it."

"That’s what it felt like."

"Do you recognize it?"

"The corridor? We saw it for a second. In the stairwell."

"Only a second."

"I know." Bai Wuyin’s finger hovered over the page without touching it. "That’s the strange part. I didn’t see this much."

"No."

"I’d remember."

Lin Yue nodded slowly.

He reached out and turned the sketchbook a few degrees so the nineteenth gurney faced the boy.

"Do you know this number?"

Bai Wuyin looked.

He looked for a long time. His lips moved, silently, around the characters.

"No," he said at last.

"You’re sure."

"I don’t know it." He frowned. "But it’s familiar. I don’t know why. It’s like a word on the tip of your tongue. You know it’s yours, but you can’t say it."

"Whose?"

"I don’t know."

"Could it be someone you’ve seen?"

"I don’t think so."

"Someone you’ve heard?"

"I don’t know, Lin Yue." The thin voice sharpened. "If I knew, I’d say."

"I believe you."

The boy’s shoulders dropped a little.

"Do you think I’m doing it?" he asked quietly. "Do you think I’m making it happen?"

"What do you mean?"

"The drawings. Last time, in the old place, they just showed up. I thought maybe I was only drawing what I’d already seen." He swallowed. "But I haven’t seen this."

"I don’t think you’re making anything happen."

"Then what am I doing?"

"I don’t know." Lin Yue said it gently. "And I won’t pretend I do."

"That’s what I thought you’d say."

"Does it bother you?"

"A little." The boy almost smiled. "But I’d be more bothered if you lied."

Lin Yue studied the page one more time.

Evidence, not guidance.

It might be a warning. It might be a record of something already done, or a hook set for us to find. It isn’t a map until we’ve walked it.

"We don’t treat this as a plan," he said. "We treat it as something that was shown to us. We don’t follow it. We check it."

"Okay."

"Don’t draw alone from now on. If you feel it start, tell someone."

"Even if I don’t notice?"

"Then someone will notice for you."

Bai Wuyin considered that.

"You noticed," he said.

"Yes."

"You always do."

The boy looked down at the sketchbook, at the long gray corridor and the numbered gurneys.

"It looks lonely," he said.

"The corridor?"

"The bed." His finger moved, at last, and rested lightly beside the nineteenth card. "Somebody’s been lying here a long time."

Lin Yue said nothing.

He closed the cover very carefully, and the charcoal smell lingered in the narrow air.

When he came out of the alcove, the ward had changed.

Zhao Feng stood at the board with Xia Lian, speaking in low, careful tones. Qiao Lin had lain down on her cot and turned her face toward the wall. Shen Rui sat bolt upright, watching the far corner.

Ye Xian had not moved.

He was still against the wall, knees drawn up, head tilted back. His eyes were open. They were fixed on nothing.

Lin Yue left the sketchbook with Xia Lian. He crossed the ward, one quiet step after another, and stopped a pace away.

"You recognized it," he said.

It was not a question.

Ye Xian’s eyes slid toward him.

That was all. They did not sharpen or narrow. They simply came to rest on Lin Yue’s face, and the long dark look stayed there.

Lin Yue sat down on the floor beside him, not close, with a hand’s width of cold tile between their shoulders.

"I’m not going to ask you everything," he said. "I know you can’t answer everything. I’d rather ask four things, and have you answer one."

Ye Xian said nothing.

"Had you seen that portrait before today?"

The silence stretched. Ye Xian’s gaze dropped to his own clasped hands.

He did not nod. He did not shake his head.

"Do you know the chapel?"

Nothing.

"Do you know why the hospital has your face?"

A muscle moved in Ye Xian’s jaw. His fingers tightened and released.

That one landed.

Lin Yue waited. He did not fill the quiet. He had learned, in a long childhood of waiting rooms and closed doors, that people say more into silence than they ever will into pressure.

"Do you recognize the corridor?" he asked. "The one in the drawing."

This time Ye Xian’s eyes closed.

It was not a refusal. It looked, to Lin Yue, like a man shutting a door against a draft, an attempt to keep out something that had already gotten in.

When he opened them again, he turned his head slowly and looked directly at Lin Yue.

For a moment, nothing.

Then, very slightly, Ye Xian shook his head.

No?

Lin Yue studied him.

It was not the shake of someone denying a fact. It was slower and more uncertain, as if he were reaching for a word and finding the shelf empty.

Not "no." Something else.

He doesn’t remember it. Or he doesn’t know whether the memory is his.

The difference mattered, and Lin Yue did not push.

"All right," he said.

Ye Xian blinked.

"I haven’t stopped being suspicious," Lin Yue said. "I want you to know that. I’m not going to say it doesn’t matter, because it does. You walked through this hospital like it was familiar. You never said so. Fang Ning is at that counter. Shen Rui isn’t wrong to want an answer."

Ye Xian listened, very still.

"But I won’t ask you to explain what you can’t explain." Lin Yue kept his voice low and even. "I don’t need your whole past. I don’t need a confession tonight."

He turned his head.

"What I need is this. If you know something that could put the rest of us in danger, you tell us. Before it happens, not after."

Ye Xian looked at him for a long time.

It was a strange look. It had weight in it, and a kind of dazed attention, as if Lin Yue had said something in a language he had not heard in years and was only now beginning to understand.

His lips parted.

Lin Yue waited.

Then Ye Xian closed his mouth, lowered his gaze to his hands, and the moment passed.

Lin Yue rose.

"Think about it," he said.

He walked away without looking back.

The ward grew quiet again.

Hours passed, or what the hospital passed off as hours. The monitors hummed. The lamp over the board flickered once and steadied. One by one the others slid into restless sleep, or something close to it, with Shen Rui’s cot the last to go still.

Lin Yue did not sleep.

He sat at the foot of the long table at the end of the ward, with Xia Lian’s notebook open under the dim light and a pencil in his hand. On one side lay the sketchbook. On the other, the wristbands.

The corridor in the drawing. The gurneys in sequence. The tag at number nineteen.

He turned a page in the notebook and began to write his own list.

Observed: the portrait shows Ye Xian’s face.

Observed: all six of us saw it at once.

Observed: Ye Xian did not speak, deflect, or smile.

Observed: Bai Wuyin drew the Ward 7 corridor without looking at the page.

Observed: Gurneys run in unbroken numbers past sixteen.

Observed: the tag at nineteen matches Ye Xian’s registration number exactly.

He paused.

Inferred: the portrait and the corridor may be connected.

Inferred: the hospital may have held a record of him before we arrived.

Unknown: when the portrait was made.

Unknown: whether Ye Xian was ever a patient in Ward 7.

Unknown: whether the tag is a record, a bed assignment, or a message.

He looked at the last line for a long time.

Or something that hasn’t happened yet.

He did not write it down.

Behind him, a floorboard creaked.

Lin Yue didn’t turn. He had already marked the footsteps, soft and uneven, stopping a few paces back. They belonged to someone who had walked across the ward slowly, and thought about it the whole way.

"You’re awake," he said.

No answer.

He set the pencil down and turned in his chair.

Ye Xian stood at the edge of the lamplight.

He had not returned to himself. The easy lines were gone from his face. His shoulders were drawn in, his hands hung loose at his sides, and there was something raw around his eyes, as if he had rubbed them hard. He looked younger than Lin Yue had ever seen him, and much more tired.

He did not smile.

He did not stop at a careful distance either. He came closer, until the lamplight caught the edge of his jaw.

Lin Yue didn’t speak. He waited.

For a moment Ye Xian only looked at him, then past him, to the sketchbook on the table, shut now, its cover smudged with black.

When he spoke, his voice was quiet and rough. It was the first time Lin Yue had heard it in hours.

"I think I need to tell you something," said Ye Xian, "before the building decides to tell you first."