Lu Chen was jolted awake by the grating sound of fingernails scraping metal. He snapped his eyes open. Above him was a mottled, peeling ceiling, and the air was thick with damp mildew and a faint scent of rust. The "bed" beneath him was hard as an iron slab, and the gray fabric covering it chafed his skin. This wasn't the 15-square-meter apartment he rented, much less the folding bed in the school's teachers' office. He struggled to sit up and looked around. It was an enclosed space of about ten square meters, with no windows. The only light came from a flickering incandescent bulb overhead,
