Chapter Three: The Stopped Clock

Shen Zhiwei saw the night her sister disappeared. It was not a dream or a recollection. She stood in rain three years earlier and looked through Zhixia's eyes at the Everday Restaurant. Wen Qi walked ahead beneath a black umbrella. Gu waited inside, his face colder than the rain. Zhixia kept a recorder hidden in her coat pocket. “Are all twelve subjects alive?” she asked. “Their bodies are,” Wen Qi replied. “Their names may not be.” The vision flipped: white lights, needles, a glass chamber. Zhixia lay on a metal table, twelve transparent tubes branching away from her. Under anesthesia she repeated four numbers: forty, one, one hundred fifty, two hundred. The quantities in Gu's public diet. And the codes to four cold-room doors.