The blackness was absolute, a velvet compression that pressed against Lu Chengen's eyelids and made him doubt whether his eyes were even open. He heard the splash recede into a ripple, then silence. Then Duan's voice, raw and furious: "Who pushed her? Who the hell pushed her?"
No one answered. The single candle had been extinguished, and no one had a lighter that worked in the damp. Jiang Feng's hands fumbled in his bag, producing a small waterproof flashlight—the kind journalists used for night shoots—and clicked it on. The beam cut through the darkness like a blade, revealing a cramped platform, six terrified faces, and the empty space where Sun Yi had been.
The water below was now a metre deep, dark as ink, with only a few floating debris—a broken pencil, a scrap of oilcloth—to mark the surface. No sign of Sun Yi. No bubbles. No hand reaching up.
Lu Chengen knelt at the platform's edge and swept the flashlight beam across the water. He saw nothing but reflections of his own trembling hand. "She fell," he said, but the words came out hollow, unconvincing.
"She didn't fall," Mrs. Cheng said, her voice steady with rage. "She was pushed. I felt the platform shift—someone moved to her side and there was a grunt, then a splash. It was deliberate."
"Who was next to her?" Jiang Feng demanded, turning the flashlight on each face in rapid succession. The beam caught Duan's reddened cheeks, Qiu Wei's ashen terror, Tan Weiming's implacable calm, Mrs. Cheng's sharp glare, and Lu Chengen's own wrinkled brow.
No one confessed.
Tan Weiming spoke, his voice unnaturally level. "Sun Yi was sitting between me and the edge. If anyone pushed her, I would have seen it. I saw nothing. The darkness was complete. She may have slipped. The platform is wet, and she was already unstable from her wrist injury."
"Her wrist was splinted, not unstable," Lu Chengen countered. "She had better balance than any of us—she climbed up here with one hand and a crowbar. She didn't slip."
"Then she jumped," Tan Weiming said. "Perhaps the guilt of her bribe finally overwhelmed her. Or perhaps she saw the tally mark and understood that her name was first on the list. Suicide is not implausible."
Jiang Feng stepped toward Tan Weiming, his jaw tight. "You have chalk in your bag. And you were the only one who went to the washroom alone. You drew that tally mark. You're the judge."
"Accusations without evidence are libel," Tan Weiming replied, unruffled. "I have chalk because I use it to mark evidence bags. It's standard investigative procedure. And I went to the washroom to relieve myself—a natural human function. Do you deny me that?"
The logic was thin, but in the pressing darkness, thin logic was better than none. The group fell into a tense, fractured silence. Lu Chengen knew they could not stay on the platform—the water was still rising, and the ceiling was only two metres above them. They would soon be compressed into a shrinking bubble of air.
"We need to find a higher point," he said. "The cable gallery above the relay room—there's a maintenance ladder on the south wall. It leads to a roof hatch. If the hatch is not rusted shut, we can get to the roof."
"And if it is?" Qiu Wei asked.
"Then we dig through it with whatever we have."
Duan had already retrieved his wrench and was scanning the south wall. The ladder was visible in the flashlight beam—rusty, but intact, bolted to the concrete. It ascended to a steel hatch that was, mercifully, not padlocked. "I'll go first," Duan said. "I weigh the most. If the ladder holds me, it holds everyone."
He climbed, his weight making the rungs groan but not break. At the top, he examined the hatch mechanism—a simple handwheel, corroded but not seized. He gave it a turn. It moved, grinding but yielding. A gust of wet wind blew through the crack, bringing the smell of rain and salt. The outside world was still there, still storming, but it was air—fresh, breathable, alive.
"Open," he called down. "One by one. Move fast."
The group climbed in reverse order of weight: Qiu Wei first, then Mrs. Cheng, then Jiang Feng, then Tan Weiming, then Lu Chengen. Just as Lu Chengen's foot touched the bottom rung, a hand grabbed his ankle—cold, wet, and shockingly strong. He yelped and looked down.
Sun Yi's face emerged from the water, pale and dripping, her eyes wide with panic and fury. She was clinging to the ladder's lowest rung, her splinted wrist bleeding through the gauze. She had not drowned. She had been holding her breath, waiting for the moment when everyone's attention was elsewhere.
"Don't let them leave without me," she hissed, pulling herself up. "And don't trust the inspector. He shoved me—I felt his hand between my shoulder blades."
Lu Chengen hauled her onto the ladder, and together they climbed to the top, emerging onto the substation's flat concrete roof. The wind hit them like a physical blow—typhoon-force gusts that made standing upright a fight. Rain lashed their faces, horizontal and stinging. The city of Haigang lay beyond, its lights dimmed by the storm, but visible—a sign that civilisation still existed, still breathed.
Duan had already secured the hatch cover with a length of wire from his duffel, preventing it from being closed from below. He turned to the group, soaked and shivering. "We're out. Now what? We're on a roof in a typhoon, with no shelter and no way down."
"The perimeter wall has a fire escape," Jiang Feng said, shouting over the wind. "I surveyed the exterior before I came in. It's on the west side—an iron staircase, leads to an alley. Might still be intact."
They moved as a huddled mass, leaning into the gale, across the rain-slicked roof. The fire escape was rusted but functional, and one by one they descended to the alley below. The alley was narrow, flanked by brick walls, and provided a merciful break from the wind. They found a recessed doorway—the back entrance of an abandoned warehouse—and crowded inside, gasping, shivering, dripping.
Sun Yi collapsed against the wall, clutching her bleeding wrist. Her coverall was torn, and there was a bruise blooming on her cheek. Mrs. Cheng knelt beside her, tearing a strip from her own raincoat to bind the wound. "You're alive," she said, and there was something like relief in her voice.
"I almost wasn't," Sun Yi said. She looked at Tan Weiming with naked hatred. "He pushed me. I saw his hand in the flash of the last candle. He had a glove on—a black leather glove. He thought I would sink and never surface."
Tan Weiming stood apart, drying his glasses with a handkerchief. "You are hysterical, young woman. You slipped, you fell, and now you invent an attacker to cover your embarrassment. It's a classic trauma response."
"Classic," Duan repeated, with a snort. "You talk like a textbook. What else is classic, Inspector? Classic cover-up? Classic bribe? Classic destruction of evidence?"
Tan Weiming did not answer. He simply folded his handkerchief and placed it back in his pocket, with the studied composure of a man who had weathered far worse than the accusations of a dockworker and a disgraced apprentice.
Lu Chengen stepped between them. "We have three problems. One: we're all wet and cold, and if we don't find dry shelter soon, hypothermia will kill us faster than any killer. Two: the storm will last until dawn, and we have no communications—my jeep had a radio, but it's parked by the substation, which is now underwater. Three: we still don't know who the judge is, or what their endgame is. We only know that they want us to confess. And they have already tried to kill Sun Yi."
"Or she tried to fake her own drowning," Tan Weiming murmured, but no one paid him attention.
Jiang Feng had been writing furiously in his waterproof notebook, even in the dim light. He stopped and looked up. "I've been reviewing the timeline. Every clue appeared when at least one person was out of sight. The coat in the tunnel—that happened during the initial argument, when Duan was checking the windows and Tan Weiming was in the corner. The toy boat appeared during the search, when Qiu Wei was alone in the relay room for three minutes. The rope appeared when Lu Chengen and Sun Yi were in the pit, but Tan Weiming was in the west corridor—and Duan was in the east. There were two unobserved periods for each item. That means the killer does not need to be alone with the item—they just need to be unobserved at that moment."
"Then the killer could be any of us," Qiu Wei said, his voice hollow.
"Or more than one of us," Lu Chengen said. That silenced the group. The possibility of a conspiracy—two or more people working together, each covering for the other—was more terrifying than a single killer. It meant trust was not just broken; it was a weapon.
Mrs. Cheng stood up, her face set with grim resolve. "I didn't come here to die. I came here for the truth. And the truth is that Ma Zhigang killed my husband—not with his own hands, but with his negligence and his lies. The rest of you were accessories in different ways. But none of you are the judge. The judge is someone who lost more than any of us. Someone who loved the diver more than a divorced wife, more than an apprentice, more than a colleague."
She looked at Lu Chengen. "You were on the inquiry board. You read the personnel files. Did the diver have a brother? A son? A close friend who might have gone mad with grief?"
Lu Chengen thought back. The diver, Cheng Guanghua, had been a quiet, solitary man. His personnel file listed a mother (deceased), a father (unknown), two wives, and one child—a daughter, who had been three at the time of his death. There was no brother. No son. No named friend.
But there was something else—a footnote in the file, a crossed-out line. He had seen it years ago and dismissed it as a clerical error. Now, with the storm howling outside and the group huddled in the dark, he remembered the line: "Cheng Guanghua—former military service, 1975-1978. Unit: unknown. Discharge: honourable. Remarks: trained in underwater demolition." That footnote had been struck through with a single red pen mark, and above it, someone had written "NOT RELEVANT."
Underwater demolition. That meant the diver was not just a repairman; he was a combat-trained frogman. He had skills that no civilian repair job required. And that meant he had connections—other veterans, other divers, a brotherhood of men who had served in the same classified units.
"His military service," Lu Chengen said slowly. "He was a frogman. And frogmen train in units where loyalty is everything. If one of them died—if one of them was killed by negligence—the others would not rest until justice was done. They would not care about courts or procedure. They would care about vengeance."
"The judge is a military friend," Jiang Feng said, his eyes widening. "Someone who served with Cheng Guanghua. Someone who knows the sea, knows knots, knows how to set a trap. That explains the rope, the timing, the precision. It also explains why they used chalk—a military surveyor's tool. And why they wrote 'Aggrieved'—that's a word that soldiers use for comrades who were betrayed."
Tan Weiming's calm finally cracked. His hand went to his satchel, and he pulled out a folded document—a service record, yellowed and stamped "CLASSIFIED." He held it up with trembling fingers. "I've had this for three years. I took it from the inquiry file because I suspected the same thing. Cheng Guanghua served in the 3rd Underwater Engineering Battalion from 1976 to 1978. His commanding officer was a man named Major Zheng Weiguo. Major Zheng was known for his fierce protection of his men. After the accident, he wrote a letter to the port authority demanding a full criminal investigation. The letter was ignored. He was reassigned to a remote coastal base and never heard from again."
"Zheng Weiguo," Jiang Feng repeated, writing it down. "Is he still alive?"
Tan Weiming shrugged. "I don't know. His file ended in 1984. But if he's alive, he would be about fifty-five now. Old enough to have planned this for three years. Old enough to be patient."
Lu Chengen felt a shiver that had nothing to do with the cold. He remembered the whisper in the substation, the voice that had said "Welcome to the wake." A wake was a military tradition—a gathering of comrades to honour the fallen. And the judge had said "wake," not "trial." That meant the purpose was not punishment, but remembrance. The deaths were secondary. The primary goal was to make each of them acknowledge the fallen diver's worth—and their own failures.
But if the judge was a veteran, then they would not kill indiscriminately. They would follow a code. A code that demanded a confession before any execution.
"We need to find out who among us is Zheng Weiguo," Lu Chengen said. "Or if he's outside, how to contact him."
Jiang Feng pointed to the fire escape. "There's a telephone booth at the corner of the alley—I saw it when we came down. If it's not flooded, we can call for help. But if the judge is among us, they'll stop us."
Duan clenched his wrench. "Then we go together. All of us. No one stays behind."
They left the doorway and braved the wind, moving in a tight cluster toward the corner. The telephone booth was there—glass shattered, handset dangling, but the line still crackled with a dial tone. Jiang Feng grabbed it and dialled the emergency number.
A voice answered—dispatcher, calm and professional. "Haigang emergency services. State your location."
Jiang Feng gave the address. "We're trapped—seven people, one injured, we need rescue. Substation No. 3, west alley—"
The line went dead. Not a cut—a deliberate hang-up. He tried again. The line rang once, then disconnected.
"Someone's blocking it," he said, his voice tight. "Or the storm is interfering."
"Or the judge has an accomplice on the outside," Mrs. Cheng said.
They retreated to the doorway, defeated. But as they huddled together, Lu Chengen noticed something on the wall of the warehouse—a new chalk mark, fresh and white, drawn in the same hand as the one in the substation. It was a simple arrow, pointing down the alley, toward a rusted door marked "Basement Access."
And beneath the arrow, a phrase: "The judge is not among you. The judge is above you. Look up."
They looked up. The warehouse roof was three storeys high, and in the swirling rain, a solitary figure stood at the parapet—tall, broad-shouldered, wearing a dark coat that billowed in the wind. The figure raised a hand, not in greeting, but in a military salute. Then it turned and disappeared over the roof.
"Major Zheng," Tan Weiming whispered. "He's been here all along. Watching. Guiding."
The group stood frozen, rain pelting their faces, the truth settling over them like a shroud. The judge was not a man in their midst. He was a ghost from the past, a brother-in-arms, a living accusation.
And he had just told them that the trial was only beginning.
Lu Chengen looked at the basement door. It was unlocked. And inside, he knew, there would be more clues, more tests, more chances for confession.
But also more chances for death.
He turned to the others, his voice steady despite the tremor in his hands. "We have two choices. We stay here and freeze, or we follow the arrow and face whatever he has prepared. I choose the latter. Because the storm will not last forever—but guilt does."
He pushed open the basement door. A staircase descended into darkness, and from the bottom, a faint light flickered—a candle, newly lit, waiting for them.
They descended, one by one, into the next chamber of the judge's design. And as Lu Chengen took the last step, he heard the whisper again, this time from the walls themselves: "Second tally. Who will it be?"
The candle flickered. The door above them slammed shut. And the water, fed by the typhoon's surge, began to seep through the basement's cracked floor, rising with the patience of a tide that had waited three years for this reckoning.
No comments yet. Be the first to comment!