Chapter One: Beyond Seven Minutes

Silence. “Shen Yan, nine-oh-seven began seven minutes ago.” At the intersection, an entire street stood stunned. A bus rested crooked across two lanes. A courier held up his bicycle as though waking from a shared dream. On a shopping-center screen, a news anchor shuffled pages and announced that every feed between 9:00 and 9:07 had vanished. Dash cameras, surveillance systems, livestreams—everything jumped from one time to the other. No one could say what they had done during the missing minutes. Lin Wan ran across the street. A documentary editor, she hated blank frames in a timeline more than most people hated lies. Her kitchen camera showed her cutting a lemon at 8:59:59.