2. Red Snow

The station woke to violence, and violence reshaped it before the first cup of tea had been poured.

By 06:30, Luo Heng had sealed the equipment shed. By 07:00, Jiang Ziming was confined to his quarters under guard—a makeshift arrangement overseen by the station’s logistics coordinator, a barrel-chested man named Ma Zhong who had once served in the Longyuan Republic’s coastal patrol and still carried himself like a soldier. By 07:45, every crew member had been ordered to assemble in the mess hall, and by 08:00, the rumors had already begun to curdle into something resembling fact.

Lin Yue sat at the corner table, his back to the wall, watching the crew process what they had seen and heard. He had not slept. The images from the equipment shed replayed behind his eyelids every time he blinked: Xu Wei’s dark hair fanned across the bloody snow, Zhao Kai’s outstretched hand frozen in a gesture of futile defense, and Jiang Ziming’s face, wet with tears and terror, mouthing words that made no sense unless you already knew what Lin Yue now suspected.

He said the lie was better. For everyone.

Who was he?

Luo Heng stood at the front of the mess hall, his broad frame blocking the serving counter, his voice carrying the weight of absolute authority. He informed the crew that Xu Wei and Zhao Kai were dead. He informed them that Jiang Ziming had been found at the scene, covered in blood, holding a weapon. He did not use the word murderer, but the implication hung in the air like frost.

“Jiang has confessed to the killings,” Luo Heng said, his tone flat and final. “The motive appears to be personal. A romantic entanglement involving Xu Wei. Zhao Kai apparently intervened, and Jiang killed him too.”

A murmur rippled through the room. Lin Yue watched the faces: shock, grief, but also something else. Relief. The explanation was tidy. It fit. A love triangle gone wrong—a story as old as human weakness itself. No one wanted to dig deeper, because digging deeper might uncover something that could not be easily contained. In a station cut off from the world, containment was survival.

Zhang Li, the meteorologist, began to cry softly. Gu Jing, seated two tables away, sat perfectly still, his expression unreadable, his silver-rimmed glasses masking whatever lay behind his eyes. He did not look at Lin Yue. He did not look at anyone. He simply sat, hands folded on the table, as if waiting for a lecture to end.

Lin Yue forced himself to breathe evenly. Xu Wei had come to him twelve hours before her death. She had shown him the file—the redacted history, the fabricated credentials, the fifteen-year void. She had been investigating Gu Jing. And now she was dead. Zhao Kai, the communications officer, had been with her, which meant he either knew what she knew or had stumbled into the wrong place at the wrong time. And Jiang Ziming, the confessed killer, had spoken not of jealousy or rage, but of a lie. A lie someone else had convinced him was necessary.

The pieces did not fit the tidy narrative Luo Heng was constructing. But Lin Yue said nothing. Not yet. He needed to understand what Jiang had meant. He needed to see Gu Jing’s medical records. And he needed to do it before the lie hardened into official truth.

After the assembly, the crew dispersed to their duties, or what remained of them. The station’s research projects were suspended indefinitely. Survival protocols took precedence. Ma Zhong organized ration inventories. The cook, a gaunt woman named Fang Hui who rarely spoke, began recalculating meal portions. The electrician Sun checked the heating systems. Everyone moved with the mechanical efficiency of people who had been given a script and were grateful for it.

Lin Yue made his way to the medical bay. The door was unlocked, and the interior was as he had left it—sterile, orderly, and cold. He sat at the terminal and pulled up the crew medical files. His fingers hesitated over the keyboard. Accessing a crew member’s records without a valid medical reason was a violation of protocol, but the station’s isolation meant that protocol was now whatever Luo Heng decided it was. And Luo Heng had already decided what the truth would be.

He typed Gu Jing’s identification number. The file opened.

The physical examination records were thorough. Blood work, cardiovascular health, vision tests, dental charts. Lin Yue scrolled through them, searching for the anomalies Xu Wei had mentioned—surgical scars, bone irregularities, anything that suggested reconstruction. The records were clean. Suspiciously clean. A man in his mid-fifties should have some medical history, some accumulated damage from a life lived. Gu Jing’s file showed perfect health, as if his body had been assembled from spare parts and polished to a shine.

Then Lin Yue found the imaging scans. The facial bone structure had been documented during the standard pre-deployment physical. He enlarged the images on his screen, studying the orbital sockets, the zygomatic arches, the mandibular angles. He was not a forensic anthropologist, but he had studied enough anatomy to recognize when something was subtly wrong. There were faint lines in the bone—healed fractures, perhaps, or surgical modifications. The kind of alterations that might result from extensive facial reconstruction.

Lin Yue sat back in his chair, his heart beating hard. Xu Wei had been right. The man calling himself Gu Jing was not who he claimed to be. And now Xu Wei was dead.

A knock at the medical bay door made him flinch. He closed the file hastily and turned to find Gu Jing himself standing in the doorway, his hands clasped behind his back, his face arranged in an expression of gentle concern.

“Doctor Lin,” Gu Jing said, his voice soft and measured. “I hope I’m not interrupting. I wanted to ask if you had any sedatives. The events of last night have left me quite unsettled. I doubt I’ll sleep without assistance.”

Lin Yue stared at him. The man’s composure was flawless. No tremor in the voice, no flicker of anxiety in the eyes. He might have been asking about the weather. Lin Yue felt a chill that had nothing to do with the station’s temperature.

“Of course,” Lin Yue said, his own voice steady despite the adrenaline coursing through him. “I’ll prepare something mild. Please, sit down.”

Gu Jing inclined his head and settled into the examination chair, crossing his legs with the casual elegance of a man who had spent years learning to appear harmless. Lin Yue turned to the medication cabinet, his mind racing. He could confront Gu Jing now, demand answers, but what would that accomplish? Gu Jing would deny everything, and Lin Yue would have revealed his own hand. No. He needed more evidence. He needed to understand what Jiang Ziming had meant.

“Terrible business,” Gu Jing said, his tone conversational. “Young Jiang always seemed so stable. One never knows what passions lurk beneath the surface, I suppose.”

“One never does,” Lin Yue agreed. He filled a small bottle with a low-dose sedative and handed it to Gu Jing, carefully avoiding direct eye contact. “Take one tablet before bed. No more than one. The supply is limited.”

“Thank you, Doctor.” Gu Jing pocketed the bottle and rose to leave. At the door, he paused and looked back over his shoulder. “I understand you were the one who found them. The bodies. That must have been difficult.”

Lin Yue said nothing. The question felt like a probe, a test. Gu Jing smiled faintly, a smile that did not reach his eyes, and slipped out of the medical bay without another word.

The moment the door closed, Lin Yue let out a breath he had not realized he had been holding. His hands were trembling. He looked at the terminal screen, now dark, and thought about what Gu Jing had not said. He had not asked about the investigation. He had not asked what Xu Wei had told Lin Yue before her death. He had simply observed, measured, and retreated—like a predator testing the perimeter of a trap.

Lin Yue needed to speak to Jiang Ziming. The mechanic was the only person who could explain what had happened in the equipment shed, and he was currently locked in his quarters under Ma Zhong’s supervision. Getting to him would require a pretext, and Lin Yue was the station’s physician. A medical check on a prisoner was entirely reasonable.

He gathered his kit and made his way to Jiang’s quarters, a small room at the end of the eastern corridor. Ma Zhong stood outside the door, his arms crossed, his expression hard. He regarded Lin Yue with open suspicion.

“Commander’s orders,” Ma Zhong said. “No one goes in without his authorization.”

“I’m the station physician,” Lin Yue replied evenly. “Jiang was in a state of extreme distress when I found him. He may be a danger to himself. I need to assess his condition.”

Ma Zhong hesitated. Medical authority carried weight even in the frozen wilderness, but his loyalty to Luo Heng was absolute. Lin Yue waited, letting the silence stretch until Ma Zhong finally grunted and stepped aside. “Five minutes. And I’ll be right outside.”

Lin Yue opened the door. Jiang Ziming sat on his bunk, his back against the wall, his knees drawn up to his chest. He had been cleaned up, the blood washed from his hands and face, but his eyes were hollow and vacant, fixed on some point in the middle distance that only he could see. He did not look up when Lin Yue entered.

“Jiang,” Lin Yue said quietly, pulling up a chair and sitting across from him. “I need you to tell me what happened. Not the story you gave Commander Luo. The truth.”

Jiang’s lips moved, but no sound came out. He was rocking slightly, a rhythmic motion that spoke of deep psychological fracture. Lin Yue waited, his physician’s patience overriding his investigator’s urgency.

“She was going to tell everyone,” Jiang whispered finally. “Xu Wei. She found out the truth about him. She said she had proof. She was going to make it public. He told me if the truth came out, the station would be destroyed. Everyone would turn on each other. There would be no survival.”

“Who is he?” Lin Yue asked, though he already knew the answer.

Jiang’s eyes flicked up, meeting Lin Yue’s for the first time. They were red-rimmed and desperate, the eyes of a man who had been broken and reassembled wrong. “Gu Jing. But that’s not his real name. His real name is Tu Anjia. The Butcher of Nandao. He told me himself. He said it was a test, to see if I could be trusted. He said if I proved loyal, he would protect me. If I didn’t…” Jiang’s voice trailed off.

Lin Yue felt the world tilt. The confirmation was worse than the suspicion. Tu Anjia had been hiding in Xuanbing Station for years, living under a false identity, integrating himself into the crew, and no one had known. No one except Xu Wei, who had dug too deep, and Zhao Kai, who had been in the wrong place, and Jiang Ziming, who had been manipulated into becoming a killer to protect a monster’s secret.

“What happened in the equipment shed?” Lin Yue pressed.

“Xu Wei confronted him. She told him she had the files, the scans, the evidence. She was going to tell everyone at the morning assembly. Zhao Kai was there because he helped her access the old archives through the communications array. Gu Jing told me to stop them. He said if I didn’t, everything we had worked for would be destroyed. The station would devour itself. He said the lie was the only thing holding us together.”

Jiang began to cry again, silently this time, tears tracking down his hollow cheeks. “I didn’t mean to kill them. I only wanted to scare them. But Xu Wei wouldn’t back down. She said she would rather die than let a war criminal walk free. And Zhao Kai tried to take the wrench from me, and I swung it, and then she was on the ground, and there was so much blood…”

Lin Yue closed his eyes. The tragedy was immense and layered—a massacre that had been buried for decades, a fugitive who had escaped justice, and two young researchers who had paid for their courage with their lives. And at the center of it all was the lie. The convenient, comfortable lie that everyone wanted to believe because believing it was easier than facing the truth.

“Why did you confess?” Lin Yue asked. “Why did you tell Commander Luo it was a love triangle?”

“Because Gu Jing told me to,” Jiang said, his voice hollow. “He said a crime of passion would be understood. The crew could accept it. They could move on. But if the truth came out—if they knew a war criminal had been living among them, that their own government had let him escape justice, that the Nandao massacre had been committed by their own military and not the resistance fighters as the official history claimed—there would be chaos. He said some truths are too dangerous to be known.”

Lin Yue sat in silence, the weight of Jiang’s words pressing down on him. The lie was not just Gu Jing’s invention. It was a lie that had been nurtured for decades by institutions and governments, a lie that had become the foundation for a national narrative. To shatter it now, in an isolated station on the edge of survival, would be to risk everything.

But the alternative was to let a war criminal go free. To let Xu Wei and Zhao Kai’s deaths be remembered as a sordid romantic tragedy rather than an act of desperate courage. To let the lie stand.

“I’ll do what I can,” Lin Yue said, rising. “But you need to understand what you’re asking. The crew believes the story they’ve been told. They want to believe it. And Gu Jing is still out there, walking freely among us. If I challenge him openly, I’ll be challenging everything they’ve chosen to accept.”

Jiang nodded, his eyes closing. “I know. He’s already thought of that. He told me you would say exactly that. He’s been planning this for a long time, Doctor Lin. Longer than any of us can imagine.”

Lin Yue felt a new chill, deeper than any the Antarctic wind could produce. He left Jiang’s quarters and walked past Ma Zhong without a word. The corridor stretched before him, dim and cold and silent. Somewhere in the station, Gu Jing—Tu Anjia—was waiting, his silver-rimmed glasses catching the light, his soft voice ready to offer another sedative-laced reassurance, his hands clean and his conscience buried under decades of carefully constructed lies.

And Lin Yue realized, with a clarity that was almost physical in its intensity, that he was no longer merely a physician tending to a stranded crew. He was the only person standing between a war criminal and the truth. The only person who knew what Xu Wei had died to expose. And the only person who could still choose, despite everything, to believe that the truth was worth the cost.

He walked toward the medical bay, his footsteps echoing in the frozen silence, and began to plan his next move.