Daylight seeped in through the cracks. Strictly speaking, this glass room had no real windows.
That sliver of gray-white light came at an angle from the basement ventilation shaft, refracted faintly enough to be almost negligible—yet sufficient to tell Xie Qingqiu that another night had passed.
She sat propped against the headboard, her head resting on her arm, deep blue-black shadows beneath her eyes. She had barely slept all night. What kept circling through her mind was Pei Yan’s remark from the previous night—“It suits you”—and that moment when, completely off guard, she had actually reached out and gripped the other woman’s collar.
She hated this feeling. Hated that, teetering on the edge of losing control when the toxin took effect, her first instinct had not been to hurt someone, but to depend on them.
By the time footsteps sounded outside the door, she had already hidden every emotion and put on her usual guarded expression again.
Pei Yan entered carrying a tray. On it sat a bowl of thick white rice porridge, several lightly seasoned side dishes, and a cup of warm water, all arranged with such precision that they looked like a carefully composed still life.
“Eat something.” Pei Yan set the tray on the small table beside the bed, her tone as flat as ever. “Metabolizing the toxin last night took a lot out of you. Staying on an empty stomach for too long won’t help your wounds heal.”
Xie Qingqiu stared at the bowl of porridge without moving.
“Don’t trust it?” Pei Yan seemed to see through her hesitation. She simply picked up the spoon, scooped up a small mouthful, and unhurriedly put it into her own mouth. “Will that do?”
Xie Qingqiu turned her face away and reached for the bowl, but she did not eat immediately. Instead, she stirred the surface of the porridge with the spoon in aimless little circles, as if weighing something.
“You looked into my file.” Her sudden statement was not a question but a certainty.
Pei Yan’s movement paused for a moment. Then she sat down beside her as though nothing had happened.
“I did.” She did not deny it. “The Joint Defense Bureau’s public wanted notice, plus a few… less public channels.”
“What did you find?”
Pei Yan’s gaze fell on her, and a fleeting gravity passed through the depths of her eyes.
She took a tablet from inside her coat. The screen lit up and brought up a scanned document—the original wanted notice for Xie Qingqiu. The woman in the photograph had a hard, cold face and razor-sharp eyes. Beneath it, line after line of charges were densely listed, from “illegal escape” to “assaulting law-enforcement personnel,” and even “suspected dissemination of high-risk biological agents.”
“Look here.” Pei Yan tapped a date on one of the lines. “Three months ago, you were first placed on the wanted list. The charges were only ‘illegal escape’ and ‘resisting arrest.’ But last month, ‘dissemination of high-risk biological agents’ was suddenly added. That charge is serious enough for the Joint Defense Bureau to invoke its highest pursuit authority: ‘lethal force authorized if necessary.’”
Xie Qingqiu’s fingers tightened slightly.
“That’s strange,” Pei Yan continued. “If you really had both the ability and the intention to ‘disseminate high-risk biological agents,’ then given the Joint Defense Bureau’s usual efficiency, they couldn’t possibly have waited until the third month to add the charge. Unless the charge itself was deliberately added later.”
“What do you mean, added later?” Xie Qingqiu looked up. The wariness in her voice had faded slightly, replaced by an almost taut concentration.
“It means”—Pei Yan set down the tablet, her tone deepening—“someone wanted you to be killed with ‘proper legal justification,’ rather than captured alive, interrogated, or even returned to some original organization.”
Xie Qingqiu froze. The spoon slipped from her hand and landed in the bowl with a clunk.
Of course she knew she was wanted, but she had never examined the nature of the pursuit in detail. Perhaps from the very beginning, it had been nothing like the “law enforcement” she had imagined.
She had always believed she was fleeing legal punishment. But if Pei Yan was telling the truth, then the people who truly wanted her dead might not be the system meant to uphold order, but a certain force hiding behind it—a force that would rather see her dead than allow anyone else to take her away “alive.”
“You investigated my file.” She struggled to find her voice and stared at Pei Yan. “What for?”
Pei Yan was silent for a moment before slowly answering. “At first, to confirm your threat level and decide whether I should keep you here.”
“And now?”
“Now…” Her gaze settled on the tension in Xie Qingqiu’s profile, and her tone took on a seriousness even she seemed not to have noticed. “Now I want to know whether the ‘masterpiece’ I took in is someone who was framed, or a pawn deliberately released by some organization to bury a scandal.”
The words struck the deepest, most untouchable corner of Xie Qingqiu’s heart like a needle. She lowered her eyes, her throat tightening, and for a moment she could not speak.
Throughout the past three months of running, she had never dared hope that anyone would investigate these things on her behalf. She had long since grown used to facing every gun barrel and every hostile intent alone, used to being treated as a threat that had to be eliminated immediately rather than as someone worth asking “why.”
“So you believe me?” she finally rasped. “You believe I was framed?”
“I don’t know whether ‘believe’ is the precise word.” Pei Yan shook her head, her honesty almost cruel in its calmness. “I simply think that before reaching a conclusion, we should at least put every suspicious point on the table. It’s a habit I developed from appraising antiques. Anything proclaimed to be ‘priceless’ or ‘beyond redemption’ usually has something behind it that’s been simplified or twisted.”
Xie Qingqiu looked at her. Suddenly, she felt that the woman’s almost pathological habit of examining everything as though it were a collection piece had, unexpectedly, become the first way anyone in her life had ever taken her seriously.
“There’s one more thing.” Pei Yan suddenly brought up another document. “The starting point of your flight—the ‘poisoning incident’ three months ago. According to the official record, the victim was a level-three Alpha police officer, and the cause of death was ‘poisoning by an unidentified biological agent.’ But I found another unofficial record stating that the officer’s time of death was a full six hours earlier than the time officially announced.”
Xie Qingqiu’s head snapped up.
“Six hours.” Pei Yan repeated it word by word. “In other words, that body had already been there for half a day before you were identified as the ‘killer.’ Ms. Xie, where exactly were you at the time?”
Xie Qingqiu stared at the document. The chaotic night three months ago flashed rapidly through her mind—the fluorescent lights of the interrogation room, the sudden alarm, and the body she had glimpsed from the corner of her eye at the end of the corridor when she was forcibly shoved into the test chamber, already collapsed and convulsing violently.
“I’m not the killer.” Her voice was hoarse but exceptionally firm. “That person had already gone down before I was dragged into the interrogation room. I didn’t poison him. He was—”
She stopped abruptly, as if realizing she had said too much, or as if the memory itself was too fragmented for her to piece together what came next.
“He was what?” Pei Yan pressed, a rare trace of urgency entering her voice.
Xie Qingqiu closed her eyes. When she opened them again, only exhausted confusion remained in their depths.
“I don’t know,” she said softly. “That memory… it’s so blurry. It’s as if something deliberately won’t let me remember.”
Pei Yan remained silent for a long time before slowly putting away the tablet. Her tone returned to its usual calm, but beneath that calm was unmistakably a gravity that had not been there before.
“There’s no rush,” she said. “You can recover your memories slowly, and we can keep investigating the files. For now, drink your porridge.”
Xie Qingqiu looked down at the bowl of white porridge, already completely cold, and suddenly experienced a strange illusion—as if from the moment she had stepped into this antique shop, what she had been desperately hiding from was not only the hunters relentlessly pursuing her, but also a past whose memories had been stripped away even from her.
And this unfathomable woman before her had somehow become the only person willing to help her recover, piece by piece, those fragments someone had deliberately erased.
She lifted the bowl and finally lowered her head to take a sip. The warm liquid slid down her throat, strangely dispelling some of the chill that had lingered through the entire night.
“Pei Yan,” she suddenly said, her voice very soft.
“Hmm?”
“If…” Xie Qingqiu paused, as though choosing her words. “If, after investigating everything, you find out that I really did something unforgivable, what will you do?”
Pei Yan looked at her, not the slightest hesitation in her eyes.
“Then I’ll put the truth, along with you, into my collection.” Her tone was so serious it was almost absurd. “Ms. Xie, whatever the truth is, you’re already something I’ve decided to keep.”
Xie Qingqiu was speechless for a moment. She turned her face away, but an uncontrollable flush spread across the tips of her ears.
Outside the window, the daylight gradually brightened. The fear and chill that had hung unresolved through the night seemed to melt away little by little along with the warm bowl of porridge.
After breakfast, Pei Yan cleared away the tray and rose to leave, but her steps stopped at the door. She turned around as if remembering something else.
“I’m going out this morning,” she said. “I’m meeting an informant who may be able to confirm the body’s actual cause of death.”
Xie Qingqiu’s brows drew together.
“You’re leaving me here alone?”
“The access-control system to this room recognizes only my biometric signature.” Pei Yan’s tone was calm. “Even if you wanted to run, you couldn’t get out. Rather than warning you not to do anything reckless, I’m telling you so you can rest easy.”
Xie Qingqiu turned her face away without answering, but a strange displeasure rose in her heart—not because she was trapped, but because those words, “rest easy,” concealed an almost matter-of-course trust, as if all her attempts to escape over the past few days were, in Pei Yan’s eyes, nothing more than expected little tricks unworthy of concern.
That unwillingness drove her to her feet almost the moment Pei Yan left, and she began scrutinizing every inch of the glass room all over again.
Her movements were light, careful not to tug at the wound on her shoulder, which had not yet healed. She moved slowly along the glass walls, her fingertips meticulously rubbing over every seam as she tried to find even the slightest flaw she had overlooked the day before.
The room was small. Apart from the door fitted so seamlessly into the walls that its outline was nearly invisible, there was only the bed, a table and chairs, and an instrument panel in the corner for monitoring vital signs. Several lines of shifting numbers glowed on the panel, displaying her heartbeat, body temperature, and pheromone concentration with utter clarity—as if she had been stripped naked and even her breathing had been seen through.
She stared at the panel for a long time before a thought suddenly occurred to her. If she could somehow interfere with those readings, could she create the illusion of “resting” in Pei Yan’s monitoring system and buy herself a window in which to make a real attempt at escape?
She tried digging her fingernail into the seam around the edge of the panel, but the metal casing was exceptionally sturdy. Forget prying it open—she could not even make the smallest gap.
After nearly an hour of struggling, her fingertips had begun to ache, and her shoulder wound throbbed from bending over for so long. Still, she refused to stop, as if this nearly futile persistence could prove that she had not completely abandoned the possibility of escape.
It was only when familiar footsteps sounded outside the room that she abruptly straightened and quickly retreated to the bedside, pretending to be perfectly obedient.
When Pei Yan pushed open the door, her brows drew together almost imperceptibly. Her gaze paused for a moment on Xie Qingqiu’s reddened, trembling fingertips, then swept over the several fine new scratches along the edge of the monitoring panel. Clearly, she had seen everything.
“Enjoy yourself?” There was a faint smile in her voice, with no hint of reproach.
Xie Qingqiu’s expression stiffened slightly. She held her chin up and refused to admit fault. “I was just looking around.”
“Just looking around, and what did you discover?” Pei Yan approached and took Xie Qingqiu’s hand, carefully examining the fingertips she had scraped raw. A trace of barely perceptible exasperation entered her voice. “This panel’s casing is made of a special alloy. Forget these hands of yours—even a power drill might not get through it. Next time you want to escape, save your strength for healing.”
Xie Qingqiu yanked her hand back and turned her face away, her ears burning again—not from embarrassment or anger, but from the awkwardness of having all her little schemes seen through so easily.
“What about the informant?” she asked, changing the subject in a hard voice. “What did you find?”
Pei Yan’s expression darkened slightly, clearly weighing how to begin.
“The autopsy report was tampered with.” She finally spoke. “The original time of death was pushed back by six hours. And the person responsible for altering the record belonged to an ambiguously organized ‘special observation group’ inside the Joint Defense Bureau. Even my informant had never heard of the department before.”
Xie Qingqiu’s heart sank.
“Special observation group…” she repeated under her breath. Fragments of that broken memory surfaced again, faintly taking shape—fluorescent lights, metal chamber walls, and a sentence she could never remember who had said: “This sample must be handed over to the people upstairs for personal handling.”
“Did you remember something?” Pei Yan keenly caught the change in her expression.
Xie Qingqiu gripped the bedsheet tightly and shook her head. Her voice carried a tremor she could hear herself. “Not completely… Just a few fragments, and a vague designation—the people upstairs.”
Pei Yan’s gaze sharpened slightly, as if committing the phrase firmly to memory.
“There’s no rush.” She said the same words she had that morning, but this time her tone held a weighty seriousness. “We’ll figure it out piece by piece—what kind of cage you escaped from, and who deliberately drove you onto this dead-end path.”
Xie Qingqiu looked up at her. The faint daylight outside had fully brightened, spilling through the gaps in the ventilation shaft and into the airtight glass room. For the first time, she felt she was no longer facing alone the boundless darkness that had shrouded her for three full months.