Summer, 1998. Shanhai. A three-story red-brick building. A wooden sign by the entrance bears a line of writing. After decades of rain, only the first two characters remain legible: Shanhai. Everyone inside wears a white coat. They walk softly and speak softly, as if afraid of waking something.
That autumn, someone wrote a code on the final page of a file: β-7. Then they closed the folder and locked it in a metal cabinet. A faded sheet of paper was stuck to the cabinet door, bearing just one sentence: Observation period: indefinite. No one asked where “indefinite” ended. And no one knew that, twenty-seven years later, a girl would lose any chance at an ordinary life because she spoke six seconds too late.
At twenty, Ming Yan had only one regret in her life, and it lasted just six seconds.
Six seconds later, the light came crashing down. The girl with the high ponytail fell beneath it, the red string bracelet on her wrist still shining. Blood slowly seeped from the soles of her white sneakers, tracing a circle on the polished floor.
From that day on, Ming Yan began hearing more things.
A cat’s meow, drawing closer. A code that shouldn’t exist. A red-brick building she passed every day but had never entered.
And one more thing, something she still doesn’t know:
The heartbeat she heard during those six seconds.
It wasn’t hers.
