There were no lights in the stairwell.
When Fang Runing stepped onto the first stair, something thick coated the sole of her foot—neither quite liquid nor solid, carrying a sharp, bloody reek. She did not need to look down to know what it was.
The smell of rust grew stronger with every step. By the last few, it felt as though blood had filled her nose. She covered her mouth with her sleeve and kept climbing.
Second floor.
Its corridor matched the first floor, except there were more doors, one every few paces, their signs blurred beyond recognition. Half the window at the far end was broken, admitting a cold draft.
A single lamp hung at the corridor's center. Weak voltage gave it an orange glow that brightened and dimmed, stretching Fang Runing's shadow long and short.
She drew the surgical scissors from her waistband and read the signs.
First door: Duty Room.
Second: Pharmacy.
Third: Infusion Room.
Yellow grime filmed every little window. The duty room was locked. So were the next several doors.
Then she heard a voice behind the fourth.
Its sign had fallen away, leaving only a square mark, but the light beneath it was different.
Red.
A young woman spoke inside.
“...I knew you'd come. You've always been like this. You always keep your promises.”
Fang Runing pressed a hand to the door.
She knew that voice. On her worst nights, it had traveled down the hospital corridor and knocked at her door: “Fang Runing, are you hungry? I bought congee.” “Stop staring at game records. Do you want to ruin your eyes?” “It's all right. You'll get better.”
He Yuanqiu.
Her fingers curled, nails scratching softly against the door.
The voice stopped. Padded feet crossed the floor, followed by a quiet meow.
Fang Runing's throat seemed packed with cotton. She could not speak. She pushed the door, rammed it with her shoulder, stepped back and kicked.
It did not move.
The door refused to let her enter.
Something flashed beyond the broken window. Outside stood a wall plastered with yellow newspapers. Across them, crooked words the size of heads had been painted in red:
NO PATIENT ON THE SECOND FLOOR MAY LEAVE.
The black cat crouched at the foot of the wall on a bed of shattered glass. Blood seeped from its severed tail and soaked a patch of newspaper. Its eyes glowed green. Watching Fang Runing, it lowered its head and licked a wound on its forepaw.
Fang Runing reached through the broken pane. The cat did not come closer.
“He Yuanqiu,” she whispered, so softly only the cat could hear. “That's you, isn't it?”
The cat rested its chin on the glass and closed its eyes. It looked like a nod—or exhaustion so complete it could no longer hold its eyelids open.
The corridor light went out for one second. In that second, the words on the opposite wall changed. Beneath NO PATIENT MAY LEAVE appeared a fresh line, red paint still running:
UNLESS YOU FIND HER.
When the light returned, the cat was gone.
Fang Runing withdrew her hand. Broken glass had cut its back, and drops of blood mingled with the red thread around her wrist.
The thread began to glow.
Then came a heavy footstep.
Fang Runing spun around. A figure stood at the stairs in a filthy nurse's uniform and low cap, dragging a birthing bed. Unlike the creature downstairs, its head was straight.
Another appeared behind it. Then a third. A fourth.
Each wore a nurse's uniform and dragged a bed. They lined up across the stairwell, a wall built of flesh and cloth.
Four.
Behind Fang Runing lay only the corridor and locked doors. There was one door she had not tried—the last on the right. Its sign lay on the floor.
ARCHIVE ROOM.
Half the broken handle fell away at her touch. Fang Runing opened a narrow gap. No light waited inside, only the smell of paper and dust. She squeezed through and pulled the door nearly shut.
Complete darkness. No windows.
The glowing thread showed her three walls of metal filing cabinets rising from floor to ceiling. Some stood open, others closed. Yellow papers and folders littered the floor.
She picked up the nearest sheet. A medical record from City Third People's Hospital, filled in with hurried blue ink:
Patient: He Yuanqiu
Age: Twenty
Admission: July 14
Diagnosis: Thirty-two weeks pregnant; premature rupture of membranes
Notes: Emergency surgery
Family signature: None
Surgical outcome—
A dark-brown stain covered the rest. Old blood.
Fang Runing crouched in the dark, gripping the paper.
She had known He Yuanqiu for three years. They attended the same university; He Yuanqiu was two years ahead of her, vice president of the student union and captain of the debate team—someone everyone knew.
They had never been especially close. At least, that was what Fang Runing had believed.
Until the afternoon a man charged into their classroom and He Yuanqiu shoved her aside.
Only He Yuanqiu had moved.
The knife she took for Fang Runing pierced her spleen. By the time she reached the hospital, blood loss and oxygen deprivation had gone too far. The doctor's exact words were, “Even if she wakes, she'll remain in a vegetative state.”
She never woke. A ventilator and feeding tube kept her body alive. Fang Runing had once thought the doctor was describing the worst possible outcome. Only later did she understand he had been trying to comfort her.
Every week Fang Runing visited, sitting beside the bed all afternoon without speaking or doing anything.
She had never known He Yuanqiu had been pregnant.
The record was dated six years ago, when He Yuanqiu was twenty—a university sophomore. Pregnant? Alone at a hospital, with no family signature?
Where was the child? Why had blood covered the surgical result?
Unable to make sense of it, Fang Runing folded the record into her pajama pocket and searched the other cabinets.
Outside, bed wheels creaked across tile one after another. The nurses stopped at the door.
One spoke in a blurred, unnatural voice. “Second-floor patients cannot leave.”
Fang Runing ignored it. She opened the second cabinet, then the third, flipping through papers faster and faster.
Records. Surgical reports. Death certificates. Dates spanning six to three years ago, different names—but all the patients were pregnant women in their early twenties, all without family signatures.
At the bottom of the last cabinet, she found a printed document unlike the rest.
TWIN SYSTEM—WARD TWO OPERATIONS LOG
Date: June 19
Connected Subject: CT-077, He Yuanqiu
Bound Subject: CT-019, Fang Runing
Match Status: Twin binding complete. Mirror generated. Consciousness synchronization: 97%.
Note: CT-077 retains unusually strong residual consciousness. Recommend isolation outside Ward One. If cross-ward interference occurs, terminate mirror port immediately.
Fang Runing's fingers began to shake so violently she almost flung the report away.
He Yuanqiu had not been chosen by the system. She had been connected to it.
Her residual consciousness—the black cat—had remained outside Ward One, downstairs. And Fang Runing had taken the wrong path from the beginning. She should have come to the second floor. He Yuanqiu was here.
Something struck the archive-room door. The wood groaned, hinges loosening as dust sifted down.
The things outside had started moving.
Fang Runing folded the operations log and tucked it beside the medical record. In the corner, a metal rack held a pair of hemostatic forceps, larger and heavier than the scissors. She took them, tested their weight, and looked up.
A half-arm gap separated the top cabinets from the ceiling. Above it, a cracked plasterboard loosely covered a maintenance hatch.
She climbed the cabinet, hooked her fingers beneath the plasterboard, and pulled. It shattered, pieces striking her shoulder. Beyond lay a narrow service space, barely wide enough to crawl through. Light showed at its far end—probably daylight.
Dawn was close.
The door took a second blow and split. An arm in a white sleeve reached through, fingers spread, black matter packed under its nails.
Fang Runing hauled herself into the duct.
She crawled hard through the cramped passage, knees and elbows scraping raw against concrete. Mold and dead rats fouled the air. After three or four meters, she looked through a rusted ventilation grille.
The room below was bright and clean, unlike everything outside. White walls. Polished tiles. A glass of water and an open book on the bedside cabinet.
A woman lay in the hospital bed, wasted thin, face bloodless, hair shorn short as though after brain surgery. Her lips parted with each slow breath. Tubes and wires covered her—IV, catheter, heart-monitor leads.
It was exactly the room Fang Runing remembered.
He Yuanqiu.
Fang Runing pressed her forehead to the cold grille. They were so close, separated only by a ceiling and rusted slats. If she dropped down, she could touch the hand outside the blanket and learn whether it was still warm...
For one instant she wanted to take He Yuanqiu and run. Reason stopped her. This was an instance, a space inside a game. The woman might be an image generated by the system, no more real than Fang Ru'an.
But the red thread burned as if it would pierce her skin. It ran from her pulse through the grille and hung directly above the woman's brow.
The black cat had appeared beside her, curled in a hollow of the duct. Blood matted its fur. Its severed tail twitched once. It rubbed its head against the red thread on Fang Runing's wrist.
Alive.
Fang Runing slowly laid a hand on its back. The cat allowed it.
“I found you,” she said.
The cat looked up with luminous green eyes and gave a low meow.
Below, the woman's eyelid moved.
Fang Runing held her breath. For three years He Yuanqiu had never moved. Doctors said her cerebral cortex showed no activity—that her body was merely a running machine and her soul had long since left.
But her eyelid moved again. Then her lips opened and closed.
Fang Runing read the three syllables.
“Fang—Ru—ning.”
Her name.
The black cat hissed, fur standing on end. Lights flickered below. White paint peeled from the walls. Tiles around the bed cracked one by one, thick black fluid seeping from the fissures.
A voice exploded simultaneously from walls, ceiling, and floor:
“Warning. Mirror port compromised. Isolation failure imminent. Initiating contingency protocol.”
He Yuanqiu convulsed. Tubes tore free, the IV line whipping through the air as medicine splashed across the floor.
Her eyes snapped open.
Then she smiled.
Looking straight at the grille where Fang Runing hid, He Yuanqiu spoke with unmistakable clarity.
“Don't come down. Go up—to the rooftop.”
The lights died. Every sound vanished at once.
The duct sank into perfect darkness and silence. Only the red thread gave off a faint glow.
Fang Runing lay still for several seconds. Then she gritted her teeth and crawled on.
Go up. To the rooftop.
She passed grille after grille, section after section of concrete, knees torn open, dust and blood packed beneath her nails. She could see nothing except the thread. It grew brighter and hotter.
At last, she found an iron door. Dust covered its push bar, but it moved. She drove her shoulder into it, and dawn light stabbed her eyes.
She emerged onto the roof. Cold wind snapped her hospital clothes. The sky was whitening above a city skyline half-hidden in morning mist.
The rooftop was empty except for rusted vents and an open stairwell door.
A woman stood in its frame.
Fang Ru'an.
Arms folded, she wore the same hospital clothes and Fang Runing's identical face. Watching Fang Runing crawl out bloodied and filthy, she slowly raised that familiar smile.
“You survived the whole night,” Fang Ru'an said. “Not bad.”
Fang Runing ignored her and walked to the roof's edge. Cracks split the hospital courtyard below, dead weeds crowding through them.
Fang Ru'an joined her. “Thinking of jumping?”
“Would that clear the instance?”
“No. You'd die. Your clear condition is on the second floor, and you've already found it.”
“He Yuanqiu.”
“Yes.” Fang Ru'an turned her identical face toward her. “She's in that room. Go down, pull her consciousness out of the system, and you clear the game. She lives. You live.”
“Go down?” Fang Runing asked. “Four monsters block the stairs, and the archive door has already broken. How?”
Fang Ru'an laughed aloud. “Afraid already? You haven't even met the patients on the third floor.”
“What's on the third floor?”
Fang Ru'an did not answer. She stepped onto the low parapet and spread her arms.
“Fang Runing, I told you I'm the other you. I know what you're thinking. You aren't afraid of dying. You're afraid you'll reach the second floor and discover the woman in that bed no longer knows you.”
Fang Runing said nothing.
“But you've already begun repaying her,” Fang Ru'an said, looking back. “And she remembers your name. You heard her.”
Wind lifted their hair and clothes.
Fang Runing looked at the red thread. It sank through the concrete toward the second floor and the woman who had lain there for three years.
She turned toward the stairwell.
“Where are you going?” Fang Ru'an called.
“The rooftop is the top floor, right?”
“Right.”
“Then if I want to go up, I have to go down first.”
Fang Runing tightened her grip on the forceps, crossed the threshold, and entered the dim stairwell.
From the darkness below came the endless creak of birthing-bed wheels.
This time she did not call He Yuanqiu's name. She only checked that the red thread still shone.
Then she disappeared into the dark.
Her footsteps echoed down the stairs.