Chapter 9

Chapter 9

On the way back, I told Old Zhang, Wang Cheng, and the others to go on ahead.

I parked my car somewhere near the hospital and waited until the sky gradually darkened.

Then I returned to Ruihe Hospital, avoiding people the whole way, and made my way back to that laboratory building.

I hadn’t expected the building to be brightly lit at night.

The people inside seemed to be taking advantage of the darkness to work on construction.

I hid in the grass on the slope behind the building and waited until almost midnight before the workers finally came out.

After they locked all the doors, I circled around to observe the place. In the end, I jumped from a rock on the hillside onto a platform on the second floor.

The window there hadn’t been sealed very tightly, so I pried it open.

I climbed in through the window. The room was empty. I carefully opened the door and glanced out into the corridor-then froze.

It was as if I had returned to Maternal and Child Hospital No. 3.

From the walls to the floor tiles, even the lights on the ceiling, this corridor was identical to the one in Maternal and Child Hospital No. 3.

Using the light from my phone, I walked forward for a while, and memories from twenty-six years ago came rushing back at me.

The doors of those wards, the occasional crack left open, even the scenes inside the rooms-they were exactly as I remembered them.

Now I knew where the floor tiles and stones Liu Wu and the others had transported here were being used.

But why? Why would Liu Wu and his people recreate Maternal and Child Hospital No. 3 here at Ruihe?

And in the past twenty-six years, had Maternal and Child Hospital No. 3 really not changed in the slightest?

Was someone deliberately preserving certain things?

Too many guesses jammed themselves into my head, tangling together until I couldn’t sort them out.

That night, I dreamed again of the day my little sister left us.

I followed Uncle Ye to Maternal and Child Hospital No. 3 and listened to the sobbing all around me.

In fact, it was only later that I learned why so many people had been crying that day: seven infants had died all at once the night before.

The families of those children were just like my parents, standing on the verge of collapse.

Once again, I came to my parents’ side and watched my mother rise stiffly to her feet before throwing herself at the nurse who had just walked out of the ward.

This time, the moment when I glanced toward the ward seemed to stretch out.

Back then, the cribs in the ward were the kind with wooden railings all around them.

Maybe to keep the room from looking so cold, those railings had been painted in all sorts of bright colors.

I saw the crib directly facing the door. A name card was still attached to the head of it-Long Xixi. That was my sister’s name.

I abruptly snapped back to myself, and when I turned my head, I found myself staring straight into the nurse’s eyes.

She should have been holding my mother’s hands and comforting her, but now everything had changed.

She stared blankly at me, then suddenly said, “She really was born…”

I woke from the dream with a start. It was already morning.

Whether it was instinct or reason, both seemed to be desperately warning me that what Liu Wu and the others were doing might be closely connected to my sister’s death twenty-six years ago.