The last subway train after midnight never carries the living home.
After working late into the night, Zhou Jin took a wrong turn while trying to get back to his rented apartment and ended up at a last-train station that should not have been open. The station announcements kept reminding him to follow the rules:
Do not speak to passengers who have not gotten off. This station has only three exits. If an announcement is repeated twice, do not believe the second version.
At first, he thought it was just a prank. Then the first person to break a rule vanished without a trace after the train pulled into the station.
Zhou Jin made it out of that station alive. But from that day on, he could see wrong exits, outdated warning signs, and station staff ID numbers that should have been retired years ago in certain corners of the city.
Only later did he understand that it wasn’t just that one subway station that had gone wrong. There were places in this city that were slowly becoming somewhere the living did not belong.
