6. Duan's Dilemma

The garden became Lin Zhanfeng's classroom. Every afternoon, for one carefully monitored hour, he was escorted from his room to the courtyard, where the tropical plants grew thick and the koi swam their endless circles and the sun fell warm on skin that had grown pale as paper. He was supposed to be relaxing. He was supposed to be healing. He was supposed to be grateful for this small mercy, this glimpse of the world outside his cage.

Instead, he was memorizing everything.

The service entrance on the far side of the garden had a pin tumbler lock, old and scarred with rust. Lin had worked construction for six years, and in that time he had learned that buildings were not fortresses. They were collections of compromises, shortcuts taken by contractors who were behind schedule and over budget. The Rebirth Bridge Annex was no different. The electronic security might be state-of-the-art, but the service entrance had been installed by someone who had cut corners, and the lock had never been upgraded.

The tree near the south wall was a banyan, its branches thick and gnarled, reaching toward the razor wire like gnarled fingers. The wall itself was three meters high, smooth concrete topped with coils of steel. But the banyan's highest branch was less than a meter from the wire, and Lin had spent enough time hauling rebar to know his own strength. If the cameras were disabled, if the guard rotation could be predicted, if the timing was perfect...

Too many ifs. But they were all he had.

He shared his observations with Xiaowei every night, tapping out details through the wall. The guard who patrolled the garden during the afternoon shift had a habit of checking his phone every fifteen minutes. The groundskeeping staff arrived at six in the morning and left at four in the afternoon. The koi pond had a filtration system that hummed loud enough to mask the sound of footsteps on gravel.

"The service entrance," Xiaowei tapped back one night. "I know where it leads. Before they put me in this room, they kept me in a holding area near the loading dock. There is a corridor that runs from the service entrance to the main hallway. It is used for deliveries. Medical supplies, mostly. Sometimes food."

"Can you draw it? In your head, I mean. A map."

A pause. Then, slowly: "Yes. I think I can."

Over the following nights, Xiaowei tapped out a blueprint of the facility's ground floor. The loading dock, the service corridor, the main hallway, the staff break room, the security office. The map was incomplete, pieced together from fragments of memory and overheard conversations, but it was more than Lin had before. He committed every detail to memory, adding them to the mental model he was building of the annex.

"There is an exit through the loading dock," Xiaowei tapped. "A rolling door. It is big enough for a delivery truck. But it is always guarded during the day. At night, it is locked from the inside. You need a key card to open it."

"Who has key cards?"

"Bai Tianyou. Dr. Xue. The head of security. Maybe the senior nurses. I do not know for sure."

Lin absorbed this. A key card was a problem, but not an insurmountable one. The staff were human. Humans made mistakes. The nurse who smoked in the stairwell left her master key on the desk sometimes. The orderly who was afraid of Dr. Xue might be manipulated. There were cracks in every system, and Lin was learning to see them.

But time was not on his side. The liver surgery had been three weeks ago, and his body was healing faster than Dr. Xue had anticipated. The next procedure was already being scheduled. A corneal donation, Bai Tianyou had informed him. A minor procedure, barely an inconvenience. Duan Zhenghong's eyesight was failing, and Lin's corneas were a perfect match.

"They are going to take my eyes," Lin tapped to Xiaowei. "Not the whole eye. Just the corneas. But after that, I will not be able to see properly. Not for months. Maybe not ever."

The tapping on the other side of the wall stopped. When it resumed, it was slower, heavier, each knock carrying the weight of two years of suffering.

"They took my corneas too. Last year. Gao Yulan, the woman I am being harvested for, she had scarring on her eyes from the lupus. I can still see, but everything is blurred at the edges. Colors are not as bright as they used to be."

Lin pressed his forehead against the cool plaster and closed his eyes. He tried to imagine a world without clear vision, a world where the faces of the people he loved were smudged and indistinct. His mother's pale, patient face. Xiaoman's shy smile. The photograph he had kept in his pocket, the one that had been taken from him during the arrest.

"We need to move faster," he tapped. "Before the surgery. While I can still see."

"Then we need allies. We cannot do this alone."

"The others. The other donors. Can we reach them?"

"I have tried. The old man in the room next to mine, the one who stopped tapping. He will not respond. The room on the other side of you, I think it is empty now. But there are two more on the far end of the hallway. I hear them sometimes, at night. A man and a woman. I do not know their names."

"Can you reach them?"

"Not through the walls. The rooms are not connected. But the air vents... sometimes I hear voices through the vents. If we could get into the hallway, if we could open their doors..."

Another if. Another piece of a puzzle that refused to come together.

In the city, Su Xiaoman was running out of time.

The photograph of Scar was still in her bag, burning a hole through the fabric of her resolve. She had made copies, distributed them to trusted contacts, hidden them in safe places. But photographs were not evidence. They were not testimony. They were not enough to bring down an organization that had spent a decade weaving itself into the fabric of the city's institutions.

She needed more. She needed records, witness statements, something concrete that could survive the scrutiny of a court. And she needed it before Scar decided that she was too much of a threat to leave alive.

Her investigation had led her to a name: Dr. Feng Yuanzhi. The whistleblower who had disappeared three years ago, the one Auntie Chen had mentioned. Officially, Dr. Feng had died in a car accident on a mountain road outside the city. But Su Xiaoman had found the accident report, and it was thin, suspiciously so. No skid marks on the road. No witnesses. No autopsy.

She had also found something else: Dr. Feng's widow, a woman named Liu Meizhen who lived in a small apartment on the outskirts of the city. It had taken Su Xiaoman two weeks to track her down, and another week to convince her to talk.

They met in a park near the widow's apartment, sitting on a bench overlooking a pond that was choked with algae. Liu Meizhen was in her fifties, her hair prematurely white, her hands trembling as she clutched a worn leather handbag.

"My husband was a good man," she said, her voice barely above a whisper. "He believed in medicine. He believed in helping people. When he took the job at the Rebirth Bridge Annex, he thought he would be doing research. Developing new transplant techniques. Saving lives."

"What did he find instead?"

Liu Meizhen closed her eyes. "He found a factory. An organ factory. They were taking people, Miss Su. Poor people, homeless people, prisoners who had been falsely convicted. They were keeping them in those rooms and harvesting them piece by piece. My husband was horrified. He started keeping records. He was going to go to the police."

"The records. Do you still have them?"

The widow's hands tightened on her handbag. "I should have burned them. I should have burned them the day he died. But I couldn't. They were his work. His proof. I kept them."

"Can I see them?"

Liu Meizhen opened her handbag and withdrew a thick manila envelope, the same kind that Auntie Chen had used. She held it for a moment, her knuckles white, then thrust it toward Su Xiaoman as if it were contaminated.

"Take it. Take it and do what my husband couldn't. But be careful. The man who killed him, the one with the scar... he is still out there. He came to my door the day after the funeral. He told me that if I ever spoke to anyone about what my husband had found, I would join him in the grave."

Su Xiaoman took the envelope. It was heavier than it looked, weighted with three years of secrets. "Thank you. I know how hard this must be."

"No. You don't." Liu Meizhen stood, her movements stiff and jerky. "You don't know what it's like to live with this. To know the truth and be too afraid to speak it. My husband was brave, and he died for it. I am a coward, and I am still alive. That is the world we live in, Miss Su. Remember that."

She walked away, her figure growing smaller and smaller until it disappeared into the grey afternoon. Su Xiaoman sat on the bench for a long time, the envelope heavy in her lap. Then she opened it and began to read.

The records were meticulous. Dr. Feng had documented everything: the names of the donors, the dates of their procedures, the organs that had been harvested, the wealthy clients who had received them. He had recorded blood types and tissue matches and surgical notes. He had built a complete picture of the Rebirth Bridge Foundation's operation, a catalog of horror committed in the name of healing.

And at the back of the envelope, folded into a small square, was a single photograph. It showed a young man in a grey armchair, a bandage on his side, staring out a reinforced window at a garden courtyard. His face was gaunt, his eyes hollow, but he was unmistakably alive.

Lin Zhanfeng.

Su Xiaoman stared at the photograph, her heart pounding. Lin was alive. He was alive, and he was being held at the Rebirth Bridge Annex. Everything she had suspected was true, and worse than true. The execution had been a sham. The body in the coffin had not been Lin. He was still breathing, still suffering, still waiting for a rescue that might never come.

She folded the photograph carefully and tucked it into her pocket. Then she gathered the records and stood up, her legs unsteady beneath her.

She needed to call the police. She needed to call the newspapers. She needed to call everyone she knew and scream the truth from the rooftops. But the people who had killed Dr. Feng were still out there. Scar was still out there, watching her apartment, waiting for her to make a mistake.

She couldn't trust the police. The foundation had infiltrated every level of the justice system. She couldn't trust the newspapers; they would demand proof she couldn't provide without exposing herself. She needed allies, people she could trust absolutely, people who were beyond the reach of Duan Zhenghong's corruption.

She needed Detective Guan Zheng.

The thought surprised her. Guan had been the lead investigator on Lin's case. He had been the one who extracted the false confession, the one whose testimony had sealed Lin's fate at trial. But Su Xiaoman had seen something in his eyes during that testimony, a flicker of something that might have been guilt. And Auntie Chen had mentioned, in passing, that Guan had been transferred to a desk job shortly after the trial, a punishment for some unspecified infraction.

Maybe Guan was not the enemy. Maybe he was just another cog in the machine, one who had seen too much and been silenced.

It was a risk. But every option was a risk now.

In the Rebirth Bridge Annex, Lin Zhanfeng was dreaming of the garden.

In the dream, he was walking through Xiaowei's imaginary landscape, the river of crushed glass, the mountains painted in violet and gold. She was there with him, her hand in his, her face clear and bright despite the corneas they had stolen from her. They walked together through fields of flowers that bloomed in colors without names, and for a moment, just a moment, they were free.

Then the dream shifted. The sky darkened. The flowers withered. And standing at the edge of the garden was a man with a scar across his throat, his eyes cold and dead, his boots heavy on the dying grass.

Lin woke with a start, his heart hammering against his ribs. The fluorescent light was still on. The heart monitor was still beeping. The door was still locked.

But something had changed. He could feel it in the air, a tension that had not been there before. He pressed his ear against the wall and listened.

Silence.

"Xiaowei?" He tapped out the name, one letter at a time.

No response.

"Xiaowei, are you there?"

The silence stretched on, heavy and suffocating. Lin felt panic rising in his chest, cold and sharp. He pressed his palm flat against the plaster, willing her to answer, willing the tapping to resume.

And then it came. Faint, almost too faint to hear. Three taps.

Danger.

The door to his room clicked open, and Bai Tianyou stepped inside. He was not alone. Behind him stood a man Lin had never seen before but recognized instantly from Xiaowei's description. Tall, broad-shouldered, with a ridge of scar tissue that ran from his left ear down across his throat. His eyes were flat and dead, the eyes of someone who had long ago stopped being surprised by human depravity.

Scar.

"Good evening, Lin Zhanfeng," Bai Tianyou said, his voice smooth as polished stone. "I believe it's time we had a conversation about your little escape plan."