Chapter Three: The Price of Desire

The emergency hall at Linjiang First Hospital was crowded with people who had no names. Their names existed, but the registration screens kept replacing them with asterisks. Nurses faltered halfway through calling them. Relatives began arguing over why they had brought strangers to the hospital. Security cameras panned across the room, yet their monitors showed wheelchairs moving without hands. This was how identity deletion spread, Cheng Ye realized. It produced no corpses, only absences no one could explain. Cheng Cheng had not vanished. She was resuscitating a seven-year-old boy, sweat on her forehead and blood at the edge of her mask. Cheng Ye called through the glass. She shot him an irritated look and gestured for him to stay out of the way.