Dawn arrived not as light but as a mechanical shriek. A bell embedded in the dormitory wall tore Mei from a dream she could not remember, though the taste of rust lingered on her tongue. She sat up, the cot's thin mattress doing nothing to cushion the ache in her back, and touched the number pinned to her collar. Twenty-nine. It had become heavier overnight, as if the paper had absorbed the dark.
The other girls emerged from their rooms like shadows given temporary permission to exist. Number 27 was a wiry girl with a shaved patch behind her ear, a scar Mei had noticed on the bus but had not dared ask about. Number 28—the girl who had come to her door—kept her eyes fixed on the floor, her braids undone, her fingers trembling slightly. Number 30 was the youngest, perhaps fourteen, with a round face and a perpetual expression of bewilderment, like a lamb that had been told it was attending a banquet and had only just begun to suspect it was the meal.
Matron Wu was waiting in the common room. She had changed her gray uniform for an identical gray uniform, as if she were a piece of furniture that had been reupholstered overnight. She led them outside into a morning so thick with fog that the academy's walls seemed to float, untethered from the earth. The air smelled of wet stone and something else, something chemical, like the disinfectant they used in Mei's mother's hospital ward.
"The dining hall is in the eastern courtyard," Matron Wu said. "Scholarship students eat first. You have twenty minutes."
They walked in a line, their footsteps muffled by the fog. Mei noticed other students now—girls in dark blue blazers and boys in gray suits, all moving in the opposite direction, toward a larger building with arched windows. These students did not wear numbers. Their clothes were new, their shoes polished, their faces unmarked by the particular exhaustion that came from poverty. They glanced at the scholarship group and looked away quickly, the way people in nice cars looked away from beggars at intersections.
The dining hall was a converted stable, long and narrow, with wooden tables scarred by decades of knife marks. Breakfast was rice porridge and a single boiled egg, laid out on metal trays that reminded Mei of the ones in her grandmother's hospital. She sat beside Number 28 and ate in silence, counting the scholarship students at the other tables. Eight, including themselves. Nine chairs empty.
"Where are the others?" Mei whispered.
Number 28—her name was An, Mei had learned, a syllable that meant peace and weighed on her like an irony—shook her head almost imperceptibly. "Don't ask," she breathed. "The walls have ears."
Mei wanted to press, but a shadow fell over their table. She looked up to see a tall man in a charcoal suit, his hair slicked back, his face handsome in the way a scalpel is handsome. He was smiling, but his eyes were doing a different calculation entirely.
"I am Instructor Cui," he said. "You will address me as Teacher Cui. I teach Tang-dynasty history and ethical governance. Scholarship cohort, you will report to the West Lecture Hall at the first bell. Do not be late. Lateness is a form of disorder, and disorder is the first step toward dissolution."
He lingered for a moment, his gaze moving across each girl's face as if memorizing their features for a future identification parade. Then he was gone, his footsteps precise and deliberate, echoing in the stone corridor long after he had disappeared.
An let out a breath she had been holding since the man arrived. "His family founded this place," she whispered. "The Cui family. They've been here since the Tang dynasty. At least, that's what they say."
Mei thought of the bronze statue in the plaza, the stone eyes, the figure of Chairman Cui standing beneath it the night before. "And what do you believe?"
An's fingers tightened around her spoon. "I believe my cousin is dead."
The bell rang before Mei could respond, a deep bronze toll that seemed to vibrate in her chest. They cleared their trays and followed the other scholarship students to the West Lecture Hall, a cavernous room with a vaulted ceiling and wooden benches arranged in concentric semicircles. On the wall behind the lectern hung a scroll, ancient and brittle, its calligraphy so faded that only fragments were legible: ...for the tree to flourish, the dead branches must be...
Mei sat in the back row, as far from Instructor Cui as she could manage. An sat beside her, their shoulders almost touching, a small defiance.
"Today," Instructor Cui began, "we will discuss the Taiji era. Specifically, the administrative philosophy of Governor Cui Riyong."
The name hit Mei like a slap. She felt the textbook in her bag, the faint pencil notes, the forty names and the absent bodies. Instructor Cui continued, his voice smooth and hypnotic, laying out a narrative she had never heard in any classroom: Cui Riyong not as a tyrant but as a visionary, a man who understood that society was an organism and that some cells, by their very nature, threatened the health of the whole.
"The exiles in Yuezhou," Instructor Cui said, "were not political prisoners, as popular history would have you believe. They were criminals. Recidivists. Individuals whose removal from the body politic was not merely justified but necessary. Governor Cui understood that the emperor's mercy had been mistaken for weakness, and he acted with the decisiveness that his position required. Forty names. A swift execution. And order was restored."
He paused, letting the silence stretch. "Can anyone tell me what lesson we might draw from this?"
A hand went up in the front row. A scholarship student, Mei saw, a boy with hollow cheeks and desperate eyes. "That sometimes, for the greater good, sacrifices must be made?"
"Precisely." Instructor Cui smiled. "You see, even the most unpromising material can be shaped by proper instruction. Five points to your cohort."
Mei felt her stomach turn. She thought of her grandmother's version of the story, the one told in whispers: how the exiles had been rounded up without evidence, how their families had been forbidden to mourn, how the governor had been rewarded with a promotion and a golden seal. History is written by the executioners, her grandmother had said. The executed do not get to write.
After the lecture, Mei lingered in the hall until the other students had filed out. She needed to find the yearbook room, the archives, something that would tell her what had happened to the missing scholarship students. She had memorized the academy's layout from a map in the dormitory: library, east wing; administrative offices, central hall; records and archives, basement of the main building.
The basement was colder than the rest of the academy, the air thick with the smell of old paper and mold. The door to the archive room was unlocked—a small mercy, or a trap. Mei slipped inside and found herself surrounded by shelves of leather-bound volumes, each spine stamped with a year. Yearbooks. Decades of them, going back to the academy's founding.
She pulled down the volume from the previous year and flipped through the pages. The first half was devoted to the paying students: portraits with names and biographies, clubs and sports teams, smiling faces preserved in glossy ink. The second half was thinner, printed on cheaper paper, the scholarship section. Group photographs, no individual portraits. Names listed in small type, as if they were footnotes to the main text.
And there, on the page for the fall cohort, something was wrong. Mei ran her finger down the list of names. Twenty-one names in the group photo, but three of the faces had been excised with surgical precision. Not ripped or crossed out—cut, cleanly, with something sharp. The paper beneath was smooth, unblemished, as if the faces had never existed. The names were gone too, replaced by blank spaces where the ink had been chemically removed.
She checked the previous year's volume. Same thing. The year before that. Always three or four faces missing, always the same clean cuts, always the same blank spaces.
Mei's hands began to shake. She pulled out the current year's draft, a binder of unbound pages waiting to be printed. The scholarship section listed only eight names, including her own. But there was a second list, handwritten, tucked into the back of the binder: Transfer Candidates, Fall Intake. Four names. She recognized two of them: An's cousin, listed only as Number 22. And Number 26, a name she didn't know. Below the names, a date: December 15. Below the date, a code: EU-EX-7.
European Exchange, Mei thought. The special program An's cousin had supposedly entered.
She heard footsteps in the corridor outside. Quickly, she replaced the binder and slipped behind a shelf, pressing herself into the shadows. The door opened, and a figure stepped inside—Instructor Cui, still in his charcoal suit, holding a small flashlight. He swept the beam across the shelves, paused on the spot where Mei had been standing, then moved on.
"Rats," he murmured, and left.
Mei waited until his footsteps faded, then counted to a hundred before she dared to move. Her heart was pounding so hard she could feel it in her teeth. She had what she needed: dates, codes, a connection between the missing girls and a program that shipped them overseas. But she needed more. She needed to know where they went. She needed to know if they were alive.
She needed to know if she was already on the next list.
That night, she sat on her cot and laid out the evidence in her mind. Three missing girls per year, every year, going back at least a decade. All scholarship students. All from families too poor or too broken to ask questions. All officially transferred to a European exchange program that, as far as Mei could determine, had no website, no brochure, and no alumni.
She thought of An's cousin. Number 22. She thought of the note in her textbook: Forty names. No bodies. She thought of Instructor Cui's lecture, the way he had smiled when the desperate boy talked about sacrifices for the greater good.
And then she thought of the blank space in the current draft, the four names for December 15, and the fact that her own number, 29, was not yet on any list she had found.
Not yet.
A soft knock at her door. She opened it to find An, her face pale and streaked with fresh tears.
"I found something," An whispered. "In my cousin's old room. They let me visit it—said I could have her books. But there was a loose floorboard, and underneath..."
She held out a crumpled piece of paper. Mei took it and smoothed it flat. It was a receipt, printed on cheap thermal paper, the ink already beginning to fade. But the important words were still legible: a shipping company's name, a container number, a port of departure, a port of arrival. And, scrawled in the margin in a handwriting that matched the notes in Mei's textbook: 22. 23. 24. 25. Macau. Then gone.
Mei looked up at An, and in that moment, something shifted between them. They were no longer two frightened girls. They were two data points in a pattern that stretched back centuries, two names on a list that had been written before they were born.
"Tomorrow," Mei said, her voice steadier than she felt, "we're going to find out what's in the administrative building."
"Mei—"
"We're already on the list, An. The only question is when."
Outside, the fog had thickened into something almost solid, swallowing the academy whole. Somewhere in the darkness, a ship was docking. A container was being loaded. And the blank space where a name should be was waiting, patient as a grave.
No comments yet. Be the first to comment!