Chapter 16: Ghost hunting

"I couldn’t feel you anymore." Wen Ruo’s eyes stayed on him, steady in a way that didn’t match the rest of her. "Then there was a light. I followed it, and I ended up here."

"I don’t care about that right now." Lian’s gaze had already slid past her, fixed on his own shoulders. "Look at these two tiny little shits."

"I think they’re ghosts." She tilted her head, studying them the way someone studies a stain they can’t quite place. "Spirits, still lingering. Something unfinished is keeping them here."

"Get these tiny ghost bastards off me!"

It came out louder than he meant it to. Much louder.

The room went dead silent.

Lian’s stomach dropped somewhere around his knees. He’d forgotten, for one full second, that a hospital room came with other people in it.

"You," Wen Ruo said, almost admiring, "are so fucked."

"Lian?" His mother’s voice, sharp with alarm. "Sweetheart, what happened?"

"Is something hurting?" His father was already half out of his chair.

The doctor stepped closer, pen paused over the chart. "It could be the trauma resurfacing. Head injuries can do that, disorientation, outbursts. Let’s stay calm."

Lian opened his mouth to say something and never got the chance.

The woman behind the doctor moved.

Her neck stretched first, far past where a neck should stop, dragging her head forward through the air in one long, unbroken pull. It didn’t slow near the two infant shapes on his shoulders. Her jaw kept opening as she came, wider than a human jaw had any business going, and for one endless second Lian couldn’t tell if she meant to save them or eat them herself.

He never found out which. Wen Ruo got there first.

She didn’t hurry doing it. One small shape was already between her teeth before the woman’s jaw had finished opening, and then the second, chewing without any particular urgency, the way someone eats something they’ve already decided belongs to them. Lian’s stomach turned watching her — small crunching sounds, a clawed hand twitching somewhere inside her cheek before it finally went still.

"Do you have to do that in front of me?"

She didn’t stop chewing to answer.

The woman’s mouth snapped shut around nothing. She threw her head back and screamed without sound, a raw, silent shape of grief that Lian felt more than heard — not grief for the infants, he understood a beat too late, but grief for the meal she’d just watched get taken from her.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

S̸u̷c̴c̷e̶s̷s̸f̶u̷l̴l̸y̷ D̴e̸v̷o̸u̸r̴e̷d̶

2 low-t1er sp1rits ○ut of 2/30

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

r̷e̶w̷a̸r̶d̷ 1 @b1l1ty

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

"Lian." The doctor’s voice again, closer now. "Why are you spacing out on me?"

He couldn’t answer. His eyebrows had drawn together on their own, something between fury and terror moving across his face before he could stop it. The window sat there in his vision, patient, indifferent to the fact that his entire family was watching him stare at nothing.

"What the hell do you want from me?"

He hadn’t meant to shout that either.

The slap landed before he even saw his mother’s hand move, her palm catching him hard across the cheek.

Lian blinked. The window was gone. His mother was standing over him, chest heaving, hand still raised like she hadn’t decided yet whether to hit him again or pull him into her arms.

"M-mom?"

She was crying. Not quiet, composed crying. The kind that came out in broken pieces, like it had been building since the moment they’d gotten the call about him.

"Why are you doing this?" Her voice cracked wide open. "Why?"

"Ma’am." The doctor got between them gently, a hand on her shoulder. "Let’s step back, let’s breathe."

It took a few minutes to get her sitting again, his father’s arm around her while Jun hovered close, red-eyed and, for once, not saying anything smart at all. The doctor crouched down near the bed until he was level with Lian, his voice dropped low enough that it felt like just the two of them were in the room.

"Lian, you need to get better, and soon." He glanced back once at Lian’s mother, still shaking against his father’s shoulder. "She’s barely holding together because of you. She’s terrified. You can’t keep scaring her like that."

Lian said nothing. There wasn’t anything to say that wouldn’t make it worse.

"I need you to be honest with me," the doctor said, quieter still. "Do you see something here? Right now, in this room. Have you seen anything?"

Lian’s eyes flicked, just once, to where Wen Ruo stood picking something dark from between her teeth with total unconcern. He looked back at the doctor quickly, hoping it had been quick enough.

"No," he said. "I don’t see anything."

The doctor held his gaze a beat too long, a look that meant he didn’t believe it and had already decided not to push tonight. He straightened, turned toward Lian’s parents instead.

"I’d like to run a few more tests, and it tends to go smoother without an audience. Would you mind stepping out for a bit? Ten minutes, maybe less."

His mother’s hands were still shaking. "I don’t want to leave him alone."

"He won’t be alone. I’ll be right here." The doctor’s voice gentled further. "You need the air more than he needs the company right now."

She didn’t move at first. When she finally did, she pressed her palm flat against Lian’s cheek, the same cheek she’d slapped ten minutes earlier, like she was trying to memorize the shape of it before something changed it.

"He won’t be like other kids anymore." The words broke apart halfway through, not quite aimed at anyone. "Whatever this is, he’s never just going to be a normal kid again, is he."

Nobody answered that, because nobody could.

Lian didn’t trust himself to say anything. He reached up and pressed his hand over hers, just for a second, before she pulled it back and let his father guide her out.

Jun trailed after them, pausing once in the doorway to look back scared, in a way he usually didn’t let himself look.

The door clicked shut. The doctor moved to the chart at the foot of the bed, giving Lian something that might have passed, in a better-lit room, for privacy.

"Talk fast," Wen Ruo said, dropping into the chair his mother had just left. "That man isn’t going to study his clipboard forever."

"How did you know I wanted to ask you something?" It came out before he’d decided to say it. "I hadn’t even opened my mouth."

"I didn’t need you to." She said it plainly, like it should have been obvious. "I’m bound to you. Soul to soul, whatever’s left of mine to whatever you’ve got. I feel what you feel. Most days I know what you’re about to say before you’ve finished deciding to say it."

"That’s not creepy at all."

"It’s efficient." She examined a fingernail. "You should be thanking me. It’s the only reason I got to those two before she did."

His stomach turned again, a full beat behind the memory. "Please don’t remind me you ate that."

"Devoured," she corrected. "The System called it Devoured. I’d stick with its word choice. It sounds better than ’ate.’"

"It really doesn’t."

Across the room, the doctor’s pen paused over the chart. He didn’t look up right away, and when he did, it was straight at Lian, his expression gone carefully neutral in the way of someone choosing not to react to something.

Because from where the doctor stood, Lian understood a second too late, he’d just watched a boy argue quietly with an empty chair.

The window opened again before he could recover.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

4̸b̷i̴l̷i̶t̷y̸ U̶n̷l̴0̸c̷k̶i̷n̸g̷

Pr0ceed?

[Yes] [N0]

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

He touched [Yes] before he’d finished thinking it through, the way you press a button just to see what it does.

Wen Ruo’s whole face changed.

"You absolute—" She was on her feet, whatever composure she usually carried sitting somewhere behind real fury now. "You do not accept things from that window without telling me first. Do you have any idea what could have been on the other side of it?"

"I wanted to know what’s actually happening to me." He kept his voice low, aware of the doctor two feet away pretending very hard not to listen. "So I chose yes."

She stared at him a long moment, anger working through into something closer to fear for him, before she let it out through her teeth instead.

"Fine. Nothing exploded. This time."

"Doctor wants me to stay here a while anyway." Lian managed something close to a smile, mostly for his own benefit. "Guess that gives us time. Ghost hunting. Was that cool?"

"That was so corny."

He laughed, short and surprised out of him, the first thing that had felt easy since he’d woken up in this bed.