“Ah—”
The sudden sight made me jump, and Zhao Zifeng shot me an odd look.
“Xixi, are you okay?”
“You… didn’t you see—” I stammered. I had clearly seen two thick rivulets of blood trickling from the eye sockets of the woman on the poster, the stench of iron heavy in the air.
“See what? Senior Wang? She should be in the dispatch room. I just messaged her a minute ago.” Zhao Zifeng was impossibly outgoing — she could make friends with someone she’d never even met.
Gu Fancheng held my hand and walked close behind Zhao. He tilted his head down and pressed his forehead lightly against mine; the contact was cool.
“You’re not like her. You have the third eye. It was blocked before — I helped you open it again.”
Heat rushed into my cheeks. I remembered Fanjing Manor, the shallow and deep marks he’d left across my forehead and body that night…
“Seriously, you two, stop gloating!” Zhao rolled her eyes.
We were already outside the dispatch room. Through the large, spotless glass I could see staff at their consoles. “There — that one,” Zhao said, pointing to a slender figure sitting with her back to us at the console.
As if answering us, that very Wang Anran slowly turned her head. A face made up with a faint, clean touch looked back at us.
I instinctively took a step back. Gu Fancheng glanced at me and smiled. “Afraid of what? She’s only human.”
“Wang senior!” Zhao bounded forward without hearing him, waving her phone like a flag. “It’s me! It’s Zifeng!”
Wang Anran glanced at us through the glass, spoke a few words to her colleague, then rose and came out to open the door. Up close her face was composed, innocent — anything but the thing that had claimed to be her up in the lab.
“Zifeng!” she greeted. Her makeup was neat, her expression polite. “We have tours every year. Why didn’t you wait for the group?”
Her tone was surprised but mild. Still, I pushed past Gu Fancheng’s shadow and stopped in front of her, staring at her straight on. “The roof of the lab building. Something’s coming for you.”
Wang Anran blinked. Her smile stayed warm. “Junior, what are you talking about? I don’t follow.”
“You might be in danger,” I said. I didn’t know how else to explain that a vicious spirit had slipped its bonds and might be hunting her, or what kind of soul currently inhabited the woman’s body standing before me.
“Take it or leave it. We just came to warn you.” Gu Fancheng’s voice was lazy, almost bored. “Play ignorant and you’ll be the one who gets hurt.”
Wang Anran’s smile thinned. She’d had enough of our sudden drama; she turned to Zhao. “Zifeng, why did you bring two random people with you?”
Zhao, confused by our abruptness, hurried to smooth things over. “My friend’s a little socially awkward — she doesn’t mean anything by it, Senior Wang…”
Before she could finish, the backlit posters in the subway corridor where Wang’s face smiled down at commuters all began to flicker. Every poster’s eyes spidered with cracks, like glass slashed by claws, and a black-red ichor seeped from the fissures.
People passed by without noticing. Even Zhao kept rambling, apparently unaware. My palms went slick with sweat; I gripped Gu Fancheng’s finger hard.
Then a high, grating laughter sliced the air. Locks of hair, slick with dried blood, unreeled from the ceiling and drifted down in strings. A strand of sinew attached to a single rolling eyeball appeared first, right above Wang Anran. Then a rotten, tomato-like face, its features a horror-show, descended. The thing — the self-styled “Wang Anran” from the lab — hung from the ceiling like a monstrous spider.
“…Finally. You found me…” it rasped.
Its blood-caked fingers reached for the real Wang Anran. I couldn’t pretend any longer. I grabbed her arm and shoved her toward the exit.
The station was three levels underground. I figured if we could get her to daylight, the gathered gloom and stale, concentrated yin that clung to the tunnels would be broken, and the ghost might lose its hold. My only thought was to get her above ground.
“What are you doing?!” Wang Anran protested, stumbling, then found herself running after me of her own accord.
We ran through the corridor, up long flights of stairs toward the elevator that led to the surface. There were still faces moving up and down around us; that gave me a sliver of hope.
“Hey, little girl, where do you think you’re taking me? I have work!” her tone was sharp.
“Outside. I’ll explain when we’re up there!” I panted as we turned a corner and saw the elevator door creeping open. I pulled her toward it — and then she suddenly stopped. Her pause wrenched me off-balance.
“Don’t run…” she sighed, exasperated. “Seriously… could you not do this for another two years?”
I frowned. When I looked again at the elevator shaft, it wasn’t an elevator at all. It had become the worn stairwell leading up to the lab building — the very stairs in the experimental block, shabby and familiar. And standing dead center on those stairs, blocking our way, was the headbanged, broken woman-ghost.
“You have no right to meddle!” the ghost spat, pointing with a ruined, jagged finger. “The underworld envoy warned me — don’t stir you up. I went to the trouble of finding a substitute… and you still come looking to die?!”
“Are you saying she… did this to people?” Wang Anran stepped forward, voice thick with disbelief and something like resignation.
I froze. Wang Anran could see the ghost? Hear it? Her words reached the spirit, and instead of anger she did something I never expected: she reached out and smoothed the ghost’s intact hair back from the ruined half of its face.
“You were always disobedient,” she said with a tired fondness. “Couldn’t you have given your mother even a little peace?”
“My—mom?” The syllables fell from my lips in complete disbelief. Wang Anran was… her mother?
The ghost shrieked and waved its head violently, its patched hair whipping. It loosed a high, tearing scream and lunged, claws toward Wang Anran’s throat. “Mom! How could you be my mom? How dare you—kill me! You made me suffer! Do you know what it’s like to have your head smashed into cold concrete every day? It hurts! It hurts so much!”
Before the ghost’s hand reached Wang Anran, a faint, pale yellow light bloomed over Wang’s chest. It was dim, fragile, but it held like a barrier. The ghost could only whirl around her, its movements thwarted by that soft glow.
“That’s what you begged me to get,” the ghost howled, fury erupting into a keening wail. “How can you wear it?!”
Every time the ghost tried to claw at Wang’s chest, the little halo stopped her. Then the rotted face twisted toward me. Those white, jagged teeth showed in a smile that was half hunger, half pleading.
“You!” it hissed. “Lend me your body! Let me use you!”
In an instant it became insubstantial, a vaporous cold that pressed in close. The air around my face chilled so sharply my breath smoked. I felt the pull — an invasive, possessive hunger aimed straight at my skin.