At exactly six, Su Ding'an stretched, glanced at his watch, and walked to the card reader right on time, ready to clock out.
It had been a fairly smooth day covering the shift. No children had climbed onto windowsills, no anomalies had inexplicably wandered out of the assigned zone, and the weather was good. He had even found time to answer a few emails from Hongchang Trading. In a good mood, he was already thinking about dinner. The menu from the braised pork rice shop at the end of the alley had surfaced in his mind, and he was wondering whether to add a braised egg today as a reward for himself.
He tapped the clock-out button on Common Sense Connect.
The screen didn't display the words “Clock-out successful.” Instead, a line of red text popped up.
“The relief worker hasn't arrived. You can't log out.”
He froze for two seconds, assuming the system was lagging, then reflexively tapped it again.
The same line appeared, glaringly red and perfectly motionless in the exact center of the screen.
He tapped it a third time. The screen didn't even flicker. The red words remained pinned to the center, as if they had deliberately been waiting there for him.
He closed and reopened the entire app, entered his username and password again, and listened to the card reader beep once more. The screen still showed the same sentence.
The relief worker hasn't arrived. You can't log out.
He stood there staring at the red text. His first thought was that the system had crashed. Only afterward did a second thought slowly surface: this wasn't a crash. The rule was taking effect.
Su Ding'an picked up his phone and called Zheng Yang. It rang seven or eight times, but no one answered.
He glanced at the time. 6:03 p.m. Zheng Yang should have gotten off work too. That thought made his heart sink.
He called again. Still no answer. Finally, the call went to voicemail, and a prerecorded woman's voice asked him to try again later.
He called the staffing division's main line instead. After two rings, it went straight to voicemail—the same woman's voice, the same request to try again later. It sounded as if they had been off work for hours, and they hadn't even left him any room to leave a message.
He stood in the equipment room, the glow of his phone lighting his face. All around him, there was only the card reader's faint operating hum and the dehumidifier's steady buzz in the corner. Apart from that, there wasn't a sound. It was so quiet he could hear his own heartbeat mixed in with it.
The sky outside was beginning to darken. He looked up at the door without a window and suddenly realized he was trapped in a space with no clock and no daylight.
He lowered his eyes to his phone. The battery was still at seventy percent. Without a word, he turned down the screen brightness and decided to conserve it.
He opened the photo he had taken of the “Job Duties Delegation Procedures,” flipped to the section on the handover, and read it word by word.
“Before the end of a shift, the substitute must complete the handover. If no relief worker is present, the substitute may not leave the shift.”
He read the sentence twice, confirming that he hadn't missed a single proviso or exception. There was no supplementary explanation beneath it, cleanly blank as if the space had been deliberately left open. It bore an indescribable resemblance to the blank space on the last page of the contract.
He asked the air, his voice quiet. It didn't matter. No one could hear him anyway.
“What if I just leave?”
The rule didn't say.
He read the entire rule again, confirming that it truly said nothing about the penalty for leaving anyway—not even the slightest hint. The formatting before and after the clause was perfectly neat, as if the blank space had been intentionally left there for someone to figure out on their own.
He sat in the peeling chair beside the card reader, switched his phone to low-power mode, and began thinking about it. The more he thought, the more he understood.
The rule didn't say. Slowly, he figured out why. The cost of leaving wasn't really his to pay.
The moment he left, that sense of weight would vanish. No one knew what would happen to everything on the entire street. Maybe nothing would happen at all. Or maybe another child would climb out of some windowsill, or a car's brakes would suddenly fail. He would only be written up for being absent without leave, perhaps with another violation added on top.
The people who would truly pay the price were the ones walking, driving, and carrying children across the street—the people who had no choice and no idea who was protecting them.
The system hadn't written this into the penalties because it didn't need to. It had calculated that everyone who stayed behind would have their own way of doing the math. A ticket was only a few sheets of paper. Whatever might happen on that street was the real weight pressing on a person's heart.
He sat in the chair for a long time. In the end, he decided to stay.
The instant he made the decision, he did think that it was only one street and the odds of something happening probably weren't high. But the thought had barely surfaced before he forced it down. He remembered the child climbing out onto the windowsill. He remembered how terrifying those three seconds of hesitation had been. He didn't want to gamble a second time.
The next nineteen hours became the longest shift of his life.
By the seventh hour, he was so hungry he couldn't take it anymore. His stomach was growling so loudly that even he felt embarrassed, so he decided to order delivery.
He searched on his phone for a long time before barely managing to find a restaurant willing to deliver to such a remote address. In the order notes, he wrote three lines explaining in detail how to reach Basement 2, and even added a sentence apologizing for the trouble.
The delivery driver called three times from outside the metal gate, sounding more confused each time. He couldn't find the unmarked entrance to Basement 2 no matter what he tried. In the end, he had no choice but to hang the boxed meal on the outside handle of the metal gate, take a photo, send it to Su Ding'an, and leave.
Through the crack in the door, Su Ding'an looked at the boxed meal hanging outside. Across the boundary of the assigned zone, it might as well have been across an entire universe. It was clearly only one metal gate away, yet it seemed as distant as another world. He could even smell the aroma of pork chop rice drifting in beneath the door, and the scent made his stomach growl even louder.
He reached out and tried to open the door. The instant his fingertips touched the handle, that sense of weight immediately dropped by one notch, as if someone had pressed a pause button inside his head. Startled, he hurriedly shut the door, and the weight slowly returned.
He looked at the boxed meal through the crack in the door again. The plastic bag swayed faintly in the gap of the metal gate. It smelled like pork chop rice, probably. He swallowed, and in the end, he could only give up.
The boxed meal went completely cold outside. He didn't get a single bite, and his stomach growled more fiercely than before.
By the tenth hour, he couldn't hold it anymore and had to use the bathroom. The bathroom was in a corner within the assigned zone, so he could go. But he realized he couldn't bear to spend time too far from the card reader. What if another anomaly occurred halfway there and he didn't have time to react?
He hesitated for nearly ten minutes. In the meantime, he tried calling twice more—once to Zheng Yang and once to the staffing division. The result was the same both times: the same voicemail message. By the second call, he could already recite the request to try again later along with the recording. In the end, he dug the thermos he had won in last year's company raffle out of his backpack and solved the problem as a temporary measure.
Afterward, he stared at the thermos and suddenly regretted it. It had been the rare third prize he won at last year's company banquet. He had originally planned to use it for coffee. Now he could only silently put it at the very bottom of his backpack, deciding that he would wash it thoroughly three times when he got home—or maybe just buy a new one.
By the thirteenth hour, he was bored out of his mind. He was tired of scrolling through his phone, so he downloaded a gomoku app and played against himself, with his left hand representing black and his right representing white.
By the middle of the game, he realized he already knew what both sides would play next. So he started deliberately making bad moves, wanting to see whether he could stage a truly exciting match.
In the end, both sides lost, because he had been deliberately going easy on both of them. He was afraid that if either side won too easily, it would be even more boring. The board ended up a complete mess, and even he couldn't tell who had the advantage. He saved a screenshot of the game, thinking that if he ever had to explain how he had spent those nineteen hours, the screenshot would probably be more convincing than any words.
By the sixteenth hour, at three in the morning, the equipment room was so quiet that only the dehumidifier's buzz remained. He began talking to the machine in the corner, telling it about what had happened that day—the boxed meal, the thermos, the gomoku. Eventually, he even started talking about his day-to-day life at Hongchang Trading, complaining that the monthly report format had been changed three times recently and it was driving him crazy.
The dehumidifier didn't respond. It simply kept running steadily, dripping water one drop at a time into the basin below. The rhythm unexpectedly made him feel calmer. He even began counting along with the dripping, reaching past a hundred before starting over, using the method to pass the time.
He thought it was fine this way. At least he didn't have to wait for a response, and he didn't have to worry about saying the wrong thing. Even if he did, no one would write it down and dock his score.
A little after four in the morning, he even began imagining that the dehumidifier understood what he was saying but had chosen not to respond selectively, just like certain managers he had encountered at Hongchang Trading. When he voiced the thought, he laughed first. His laughter sounded unusually clear in the empty equipment room.
After daybreak, the hallway outside the equipment room began to stir. Duty officers passed by one after another, their footsteps following each other in succession. No one paid particular attention to the fact that Su Ding'an was still inside. The door was closed, after all, and no one could see what was happening in there. He listened to those footsteps approach and recede again and again. Several times, he almost couldn't resist opening the door to call someone over, but in the end he held himself back.
He made it through the early morning and the morning. His stomach had been hungry for so long that he could no longer feel it. His eyelids were as heavy as if weights had been hung from them, and he nearly fell asleep several times. Each time, he forced himself to stay awake by pinching his thigh hard. The insides of his thighs were covered in red marks. He even tried washing his face with cold water to wake himself up. The water from the little sink in the corner of the equipment room was ice-cold. It did clear his head for a few minutes when he splashed it on his face, but before long, drowsiness came crawling back.
Around ten in the morning, he briefly considered sleeping for five minutes. But the moment he imagined something happening in the assigned zone while he was asleep, he abandoned the idea. Instead, he got up and walked a few laps in place, slapping his cheeks as he went to keep himself awake.
At the nineteenth hour, at one the following afternoon, a sound finally came from outside the metal gate.
Su Ding'an shot to his feet. His knee cracked from sitting too long, startling even him.
Lao Zhou walked in. His movements were practiced: swipe his card, clock in, take over the shift, all in one smooth sequence without a single unnecessary motion, as if he did this all day, every day.
The instant Su Ding'an saw Lao Zhou successfully clock in, his own screen finally displayed the words “Clock-out successful.” The sense of weight that had held on for nineteen hours vanished all at once. His legs went weak, his vision suddenly blacked out, and he staggered forward, nearly falling.
Lao Zhou reached out and caught him. He was much stronger than he looked, steadying Su Ding'an in one move. His reaction was so quick it was as if he had expected this to happen.
“Everyone's like that their first time.”
Lao Zhou helped him stand securely, his tone utterly matter-of-fact, as if he were talking about something he had seen countless times. He didn't loosen his grip until he was sure Su Ding'an was truly steady.
Rubbing his numb legs, Su Ding'an limped over and sat down nearby. After forcing himself to regulate his breathing several times, he was just about to say something when Lao Zhou spoke first.
“My first time, I lasted three days.”
He said it lightly, without the slightest trace of boasting, as if he were reporting the most ordinary weather. Yet Su Ding'an felt that sentence weighed more than everything that had happened that day.
He looked up at Lao Zhou, unable to speak for a moment. In his mind, he placed nineteen hours beside three days and did the math. For the first time in his life, he realized that nineteen hours sounded pretty lucky. Lao Zhou didn't say anything else. He turned and walked to the card reader to check the duty roster, his movements so practiced that this all looked like the most ordinary handover in the world.
Su Ding'an lowered his head and looked at his trembling hands, then at Lao Zhou's unperturbed profile. Suddenly, he understood that Lao Zhou probably wasn't the only person on this street who had endured a night like this before.