Chapter Four: The Second Scene

The living room showed a rescued man trying to resume his life: his burned helmet beside the television, follow-up appointments on the refrigerator, and his daughter's drawing under a glass. A silver web held a red car above the words THANK YOU FOR GIVING DADDY BACK. Zhou knelt over the kitchen tiles, his golden irises tightening. “The report says Zhao combusted here. But the fire didn't travel outward from his body.” With chalk he mapped the forces. The expressway explosion should have entered Zhao from his left. Three days later, the same blast arrived from every wall at once, as if the apartment had squeezed an old catastrophe back into him. Every arrow ended at a Zenith smart router.