Chapter 19: Truth Behind The Doctor

Light came thin through the blinds Lian hadn’t bothered closing, climbing slow from colorless to gold while birds worked at something outside the window. He’d been awake an hour already, watching it change, when Dr. Harwell knocked once and let himself in without waiting for an answer.

"How are we feeling?" He pulled the chart off the end of the bed, scanning it more out of habit than need.

"Fine." Lian kept his voice even. "Tired."

"I heard you had a walk last night." Harwell didn’t look up from the chart. "Supply corridor, around eleven. Ringing any bells?"

Something cold moved through Lian’s chest, but he’d had all night to build the lie, and it came out steadier than he expected. "I couldn’t sleep. I got turned around looking for the bathroom. I know how it sounds."

"It sounds like someone who hit his head hard enough to end up here." Harwell finally looked at him — nothing sharp in it, just a tired, professional patience worn thin at the edges. "I’m not going to lecture you. I am going to ask you not to do it again without telling someone. Deal?"

"Deal."

"Good." He hung the chart back on its hook. "Eat something. You look like you haven’t."

He left without waiting for a response, the door clicking shut behind him.

Lian sat with it a long moment after he’d gone. It wasn’t anything Harwell had actually said. It was how easily the whole thing had closed — no real questions, no follow-up, a man told his patient had been wandering a restricted hallway covered in something dark, settling the matter after one short conversation. That kind of ease didn’t come from trust. It came from a man who’d already decided, before he even walked in, not to look any harder than he had to.

"Wen Ruo?"

Nothing answered. He’d been calling her name on and off since he woke, quiet enough that no one passing the door would hear, and she still hadn’t come.

"Wen Ruo. Where are you."

She came apart out of the air beside the window all at once, not gradually, as if she’d been standing there the whole time and the room had only just agreed to let him see her.

"You’re back." He didn’t bother hiding the relief in it. "Where the hell were you? I called you all night."

"I wasn’t anywhere you could have reached." She didn’t sit so much as settle, weightless, on the edge of the windowsill. "When you’re not calling me, when you’re asleep, I don’t stay here. I get pulled somewhere else. Nothing to stand on there. Nothing to touch. I didn’t even know how long I’d been gone until your voice reached me and I saw the light again."

"The light."

"Your call. It’s the one thing that gets through. I follow it back." She said it like she’d explained it before, which, Lian realized, she might have, in one of the nights he’d already stopped being able to keep straight. "I always come back. I just can’t promise how fast."

Lian looked at the door Harwell had just walked through. "I don’t trust him."

"I noticed." Wen Ruo’s eyes hadn’t left the same spot on the floor since she’d arrived. "You’re not wrong to."

"Tonight. We find out what he’s actually doing here."

"Tonight," she agreed.

The day crawled the way days only crawl when every minute of it is being counted on purpose. Breakfast was cold eggs he picked at and complained about under his breath, Wen Ruo unimpressed by the review and even less impressed when a nurse caught him murmuring to himself and gave him a look. He kept his voice lower after that, lips barely moving, the two of them trading commentary nobody else could hear. Lunch came and went the same way — a tray of something beige he didn’t bother naming, eaten mostly to give his hands something to do. In the afternoon, Harwell cleared him to walk the halls under supervision, and Lian used the hour the way he’d use a map he wasn’t allowed to keep: counting doors, noting which hallway lights buzzed faintly and which stayed dead silent, memorizing a floor plan nobody had actually given him permission to learn.

Evening came late, the window sliding from gold through a flat, fading light before finally dropping into full dark.

At eleven, he opened the door the same way he had the night before — slow, patient, testing each inch of the hinge before trusting it with his weight.

The corridor was empty. He moved like it wasn’t anyway, hugging the wall, Wen Ruo a half-step ahead of him with nothing to hug.

Voices reached him before he could place where they were coming from — low, urgent, pitched to stay under the building’s hum. He eased around the corner and stopped.

Dr. Harwell stood at the far end of a service hallway, a bundle held out in both hands toward an old man Lian had never seen before, hunched in a coat too heavy for the season. The bundle was small. Wrapped. Still.

Lian’s eyes took a half-second too long to adjust to the dim light, and then understanding arrived all at once, with nothing gradual about it.

An infant. Dead.

He pulled back behind the corner fast enough that his shoulder cracked against the wall, breath catching hard in his throat.

"That was close," he whispered, barely any sound behind it at all.

Wen Ruo didn’t answer. She hadn’t moved. Her eyes stayed fixed down the hallway, locked on the old man with a focus that had nothing to do with staying hidden.

The old man’s head turned, slow, toward where they stood.

"What are you looking at?" Harwell’s voice, sharper now.

The old man said nothing.

"Hurry up." Harwell pressed the bundle into his arms, glancing over his own shoulder once, twice. "Give me the money. If anyone sees this, I’m finished."

Then the old man gave him money