Chapter Four: Detached HEAD

On paper she wrote four checks: Shen Zhou was twenty-four. Lin Wan was twenty-six. Zhou Jiming had been deleted. They had come to bring him back. The ink of the fourth sentence blurred as soon as she finished. They followed the parent objects of `7ac91e4`. At every door, Shen Zhou acquired another life: drowning at seventeen, waiting for a school bus with his daughter at thirty, loving Lin Wan, signing her fatal accident report. Pain made the false lives harder to reject than dreams. Lin Wan stopped before a charred door. Beyond it lay White Tower in 2009. Her twelve-year-old self crouched in a storeroom as smoke poured underneath. A man in a lab coat ran past without turning. “No one saves me in this one,” she said.