Chapter Two: Coordinates of the Wing Bone

Police sealed the garage at four in the morning. Wu Hai, a member of the cleaning staff, had died from a broken neck. Security footage showed him climbing a maintenance ladder alone, then falling six meters. There was no floating corpse, no upward-flowing blood, and no hummingbird badge. The recording was seamless. It even showed Lin standing ten meters away, motionless, like an indifferent witness. "Reality is manufacturing evidence for it," Su Mi said after watching the footage three times. "Or someone is rewriting evidence by a method we don't understand." They sat in the corner of an all-night noodle shop while rain ticked against the glass and Shanghai entered rush hour. Lin wrote the coordinates on a napkin and sketched the city.