Chapter Four: The White Ward

The fourth photograph did not wait for dawn. At 2:14 a.m., burning inside Lu Chen's wrist woke him. Silver silk crawled from his skin and pulled the shutter of the empty camera. A photograph emerged slowly: a web spread over a lung X-ray, its dew encoding 07:30 and Linjiang First Hospital. Seven red beads surrounded a cracked oxygen cylinder. The upper-right corner had been deliberately torn away. “We have the location but not the floor.” Tang Guo studied the scan, dark circles beneath her eyes. After learning the truth, she had cursed Lu Chen for three minutes and dismantled his camera in the fourth. “Someone isn't warning you. They're setting an exam.”