We Who Survived

Xie Qingcheng was the last one down, following the firefighters along the rope ladder.

By the time his feet touched the ground, the fire had already begun pushing toward their side of the building, the rolling black smoke so thick it was nearly impossible to keep his eyes open. The moment he landed, rescue workers rushed over to check him for injuries.

In the crowd, Xie Qingcheng spotted Xie Xue — several medics clustered around her. He pushed through at once. 'How is she?'

'And you are —'

'Her brother.'

'Oh, oh — please don't worry, she's fine. Vitals are stable. She'll come around once the sedative wears off.'

Only then did Xie Qingcheng let out a breath.

The paramedic looked him up and down — this tall, bare-chested man. Human nature being what it is, the timing was awful, but a face like that made the work go faster.

Xie Qingcheng, for his part, had no idea how striking he looked: the clean lines of his shoulders and back, the narrow, lean taper of his waist disappearing into a silver-buckled belt. He was the cold, unhurried sort — never much given to thinking about his own appearance, never much interested in other people's eyes.

Case in point: the paramedic couldn't stop staring, yet after checking on Xie Xue he had already turned away from her entirely, his gaze fixed on Chengkang Psychiatric Hospital, still deep in the heart of the fire.

Xie Qingcheng tilted his head back and looked up at the burning rooftop, a hundred feelings moving through him at once. And everywhere his gaze fell, he could see patients who had not yet been saved — screaming on their windowsills, beating their palms against windows sealed shut with iron bars.

'Help! Help us!!'

'Save us! Fire — the fire is coming!!'

'I don't want to die — save me! Somebody save me!!'

The bars had been installed to stop patients from jumping; now they were the single greatest obstacle to rescue. The option of throwing rope ladders directly to the windows was gone. The only way in was to charge through the blaze room by room, unlocking each door at the cost of your life.

The screams were like the cries of vengeful ghosts. Chengkang Psychiatric Hospital had become exactly what Jiang Lanpei had cursed it to be: a living hell on earth.

In the ward closest to the linen room, an old man kept crying out — but he was calling for his parents. He was demented, prone to fits of madness. His children had grown tired of him and sent him here.

Perhaps somewhere in the fog of his mind he understood: they would only be happy once he was gone.

Only his long-dead parents had ever truly loved him. On the edge of death he wept and wailed like a child, calling out for his mother and father, again and again and again —

Firefighters tried to force the window, but there was no time. His room was too close to the source of the blaze. In full view of everyone watching, the fire swallowed him whole — one hand still frozen in its last posture, reaching out through the bars of its iron cage.

No one would ever know what he was in that final moment: an old man abandoned because of illness, or a child crying for his parents.

A firefighter's lips were trembling. He spun toward the crowd and shouted: 'The keys — did anyone get out with the keys?'

'No — no, I don't think — who would have thought to —'

'They're hanging in the director's office on the third floor!'

Another deafening explosion. Window glass and splinters of wood flew outward together.

One of the rescued orderlies scrambled to his feet. 'Comrade — don't go back in there!! It's too dangerous!!'

'It's true — there's no time left — there's no way to get them out —'

And then, someone said quietly: 'Those are all serious cases anyway. The higher the floor, the worse the condition. Even if you pulled them out, it wouldn't do much good —'

Chaos everywhere.

Then Xie Qingcheng caught sight of a solitary figure in the disorder — standing still, head tilted back, watching the burning building for a moment, then turning and slipping away toward the north gate through a stretch of trees where no one was looking.

Xie Qingcheng's heart lurched —

He Yu?!

'Excuse me — I need to borrow a mask.'

He said it as he was already moving, reading the fire in one quick glance, snatching two protective respirators, and running after He Yu.

'Hey! Comrade!' The paramedic snapped back to herself — goddamn it, being handsome was no excuse for this. She shouted after him: 'What do you think you're doing?! Don't go back into that fire!!'

Xie Qingcheng didn't hear her. Eyes locked on He Yu's retreating back like a hunting cat, he ran.

It made no sense — why would he go back in? What was he trying to do?

He Yu didn't head for the north gate where the firefighters were gathered. He grabbed a rope ladder that hadn't yet been taken down and went straight back up to the rooftop they'd only just escaped. Xie Qingcheng climbed up behind him. By the time anyone else thought to follow, it was already too late — the flames had reached the lower half of the rope and turned it to ash in seconds.

He Yu vaulted over the rooftop railing and looked down toward the water tower. Only a charred, curled mass remained burning there: Jiang Lanpei's body.

He shoved open the door with a bang, read the fire, and ran toward the director's office.

Xie Qingcheng thought he was insane — though of course he always had been — and grabbed his arm the moment He Yu pushed open the fireproof door, voice sharp and hard: 'What the hell do you think you're doing?! Do you have a death wish? Come with me to the north gate right now. The fire hasn't reached this side yet — there's still time.'

He Yu stared at him as if he didn't recognize him. 'Why did you come up here?'

Xie Qingcheng was done wasting words. His eyes were cold and cutting: 'Get the hell back downstairs with me.'

'No. This time is different. This time I'm going to save people.'

'You —'

'They're my kind. Only I can do this — only I can get them all out in time. You heard what those people were saying down there. That old man burned alive right in front of them. There are more people up here waiting to die, and their answer is — forget it.'

Something in He Yu's eyes was almost frightening.

He said it softly. 'Psychiatric patients aren't worth saving. When something like this happens, they get left behind. They might as well all be dead.'

He held Xie Qingcheng's gaze, and a thin, bone-cold smile spread slowly across his lips. 'Is that what you think too, Dr. Xie?'

'That's because there really isn't time — be rational about this. You can't go door to door.' Xie Qingcheng's voice had gone raw. 'There is no time left.'

He Yu said nothing more. He was strong — he broke free of Xie Qingcheng's grip in one sharp movement and ran toward the office.

Fortunately, a wide stretch of bathroom tiles separated the office wing from the worst of the blaze. Whoever built this place had cut every corner — not a single wooden fixture in the bathrooms — and now that same shoddy construction had made this corridor the slowest place in the building for fire to travel.

He Yu found a large ring of keys jangling on its board in the office and headed for the section of third-floor wards the fire hadn't yet reached.

'Help —'

'Save us!!'

'I don't want to die — I don't want to die!!'

'The devil's fire is coming — it's the devil's fire!!'

The hallway lights had long since gone out. Weeping filled both sides of the corridor — but in many of the rooms beyond, there was no sound left at all.

The key board was labeled by door number. He Yu took the nearest set and started opening doors.

By the time Xie Qingcheng caught up, the first door was already open. A woman came running out, hair streaming loose, shrieking wildly — and one look told Xie Qingcheng this was already out of hand.

Anyone would lose their reason in a situation like this. These were psychiatric patients.

The woman was screaming, running blindly — straight toward the fire. Xie Qingcheng moved to stop her, then saw He Yu reach out and yank her back —

'Not that way!'

'She won't listen to you —'

'Fire! Fire fire fire!!'

In the middle of the chaos, Xie Qingcheng caught a flash of cold light.

He Yu was holding a blade — he'd brought it out from the office — and he drew it across his own palm.

Blood welled at once from the cut. Xie Qingcheng didn't yet know why, but somewhere deep in his mind a distant data-memory was stirring, pressing forward — he hadn't retrieved it yet, but instinct had already raised every hair on his body.

The next second, he watched He Yu unclip one of the key rings from the board, press it into the blood on his palm, and then speak to the hysterical woman — quietly, with an authority that left no room for argument: 'Take this set and open doors. Every door you open, give the people inside another key and tell them to open more. Fast. The faster you all move, the more people make it out. Go.'

What happened next was terrifying. The woman who had been screaming herself hoarse a moment ago seemed to receive an injection of sedative at that exact instant — the moment she caught the scent of He Yu's blood, her eyes went completely calm —

As if his blood, through smell alone, had triggered some reflexive response deep in her skull, pulling her emotional state in line with his.

The woman took the keys and ran immediately toward the other iron doors.

The whole exchange had taken almost no time. But Xie Qingcheng watched it with a cold that spread across his entire body, down to the tips of his fingers —

Case No. 4, He Yu. The pathological ability that had emerged in his adult years was —

The one the data files had always marked as unconfirmed: blood gu.

Mental Ebola had no clinical data to draw from. Prognosis had to be extrapolated from the first three case files and a series of computational simulations. What could be established was this: beyond the baseline characteristics shared by all patients, each one also developed a unique pathological ability — a disease-ability.

Put simply: the illness mutated differently in each individual. Each person's genome pushed the mutation in a different direction. These mutations tended to develop alongside the patient's age, emerging fully in adulthood and then stabilizing.

Case No. 1's disease-ability, when it manifested, was olfaction.

The illness had altered her olfactory nerves. Her sense of smell became unnaturally acute — in general, the surface area of a dog's olfactory epithelium is four times that of a human's; after mutation, Case No. 1's smell reached more than eight times the human baseline. Every trace of scent in the air pressed in on her olfactory nerves without mercy, driving her further and further into madness.

Cases No. 2 and No. 3 had each displayed their own distinct disease-ability before their deaths.

As for Case No. 4, He Yu — before Xie Qingcheng left his position, He Yu had shown no sign of any pathological mutation whatsoever.

Xie Qingcheng had begun to think that perhaps individual mutation was not an absolute feature of Mental Ebola — that He Yu might be the exception.

He had never imagined that He Yu was in fact the worst mutation the computational models had projected.

Blood gu.

Blood gu, in plain terms, meant this: under the right conditions, He Yu's blood had an inducing, paralyzing effect on psychiatric patients specifically. Like serotonin, it could bring a patient's emotions to an immediate calm. At the same time, like a drug, it stimulated the brain's reward circuitry, producing in the patient the illusion that compliance would bring more — more of this feeling, more of whatever the blood promised — and this caused the patient to become controlled by He Yu's words, as if they had been 'hexed.'

At the time, the laboratory's conclusion had been purely theoretical. When the simulations first produced 'blood gu' as a possible mutation direction, some researchers hadn't even believed it.

And yet, right now —

The doors were being opened, one after another.

The speed was astonishing — crack one door, free one person, gain one more pair of hands to help with the next. Keys were distributed and gone in moments, and those frenzied patients, driven by the blood gu's relentless stimulation, moved like nothing so much as a trained Soldier Unit.

He Yu moved among them with cold composure — a commanding presence around whom all those disrupted minds had oriented themselves. He made his way to the far end of the corridor, toward the only viable escape: the north exit. The firefighters' voices were already echoing up the stairwell; they would reach the third floor any moment.

But at the same time, the fire at the tail end of the corridor had drawn close, roaring toward them like a dragon, driving banks of choking black smoke before it, as if it meant to suffocate them in this grim passage and scorch everything left to ash.

There was no water here, no way to wet cloth and cover their mouths. They could only move faster.

He Yu stood at the fire door, turned his face slightly to the side, and gave the order to every patient around him: 'Stay low. Head toward me. Go find the firefighters. Move.'

The patients surged forward like robots fed their instructions — at a speed and with an order that was stunning, funneling toward the emergency exit. The mind-controlled zombies of a science-fiction film could not have done better.

By the time the last patient ran through, the fire was very close. The smoke concentration had climbed to the point where breathing meant dropping to the floor. He Yu watched Xie Qingcheng walk toward him, face dark, and said nothing — only stepped to the side to let him through.

A heavy bang. The fire door of the emergency stairwell slammed shut behind them, cutting off the advancing flames for now.

Cold, almond-shaped eyes watched the stunned peach-blossom eyes in the dark. 'Xie Qingcheng. Don't tell anyone.'

Xie Qingcheng's face had gone a terrible ashen color. But in the end he said nothing at all — just held out one of the respirators in his hand and passed it to He Yu.

'Take it. Let's go.'

A sheet of flame slammed against the fire door. He Yu and Xie Qingcheng ran down after the rescued patients —

'Gege!! Gege!!!!!'

With the firefighters there to receive them, Xie Qingcheng and He Yu were the last two out. What greeted them were two voices screaming so hard they nearly broke. Xie Qingcheng pulled off his respirator and saw Xie Xue — already awake, face streaming with tears — hurling herself toward him, running so hard she lost the shoes the firefighters had found for her.

'Gege, gege — do you want to give me a heart attack?! Do you want to scare me to death?! I thought even you didn't want me anymore!! I thought even you were leaving me behind!! Gege —'

She crashed into Xie Qingcheng's arms and held on with everything she had, squeezing his waist as if she meant to break it in half. All around them the explosions and screaming went on, and some people were beyond saving — she was shaking with a fear so total it was as if all the blood had been drained out of her, as if only a thin shell of her was left in the world. Only when she pressed herself against the solid warmth of her gege's chest, gulping air between sobs, breathing him in, did her heart seem to start beating again, blood flooding back into her body.

Tears poured down her face in streams, streaking her dirty, cat-smudged cheeks. She wept with her mouth wide open, every trace of composure gone, words tumbling out in a garbled rush: 'You can't leave me like Mom and Dad did!! You can't abandon me like Mom and Dad did, gege!! I was so scared — I was so scared — hold me, please hold me!!'

'It's all right. It's all right.'

It was rare for Xie Qingcheng to receive emotion this fierce. He was a man who understood family deeply, but the love he showed his family was always restrained — expressed, more often than not, as reproach.

Even so, this moment was almost more than he could hold. He wrapped his arms around his shivering sister, still draped in someone's oversized coat, and bent his head to press a kiss to the wild mess of her hair. His own eyes stung.

'It's all right, Xie Xue.'

Xie Xue had cried herself out a little in his arms when she spotted He Yu.

What small amount of calm she had recovered collapsed immediately. Sobbing, she threw herself toward He Yu — or, more precisely, she grabbed him and hauled him in, pulling him together with her gege into a single embrace, which meant He Yu was now pressed up against Xie Qingcheng whether he liked it or not.

A trace of awkwardness crossed He Yu's refined, handsome face. He had never been held this close to a man before — least of all Xie Qingcheng — and it was profoundly uncomfortable. One look at Xie Qingcheng's expression said the feeling was mutual.

But neither of them moved, out of deference to Xie Xue's feelings in the moment. They let her hold them both in her stubborn circle of reunion, carved out in the middle of all the chaos.

.

'Help me! Help! Comrade — someone's here! I'm here!!'

At the elevator bay of Chengkang Psychiatric Hospital, a grey-haired man was shouting in a panic. He was one of the hospital's oldest board members; a few weeks ago he'd broken his leg playing polo with Liang Jicheng and had been in a wheelchair since. He wouldn't have come back today at all if the office hadn't needed him for some urgent paperwork.

The man was shaking in his wheelchair, his trousers completely soaked through, urine running down his legs. For the first time he understood, with his whole body, what it meant to be helpless and trapped. The fire was closing in from his direction. He knew perfectly well that the elevator couldn't be used — knew it was already broken — and still his hand kept hammering the call button in a frenzy he couldn't control.

'Hurry — hurry — someone come — help me — I have money — someone save me — I have a great deal of money!'

The muscles of his cheek were convulsing with fear.

Then —

As if heaven had heard him, a figure in firefighting gear and a respirator came running up from the dark emergency stairwell and stopped at the sight of him slumped in the wheelchair.

The man looked up as if seeing a god. 'Comrade!! Save me!! Hurry — please save me!!'

His nostrils flared with desperate excitement. His pale skin was beaded with sweat. His pupils contracted sharply as they locked on the figure approaching him, carrying firefighting equipment.

Then he went still. His eyes snapped tight.

Through the visor, the figure in firefighting gear let a thin, cold smile pass across their face — and then opened what they were carrying. It was not a fire suppression device. It was —

Gasoline.

'You — you're —'

'Chengkang is a mess that can't be contained anymore. I was sent to do some housekeeping.' The voice that came from behind the mask was muffled and flat. 'As for all that money of yours — take it with you. Spend it down below, at your leisure.'

'No!!!'

The explosion shook the floor.

The gasoline and the lighter were thrown together onto the man's face — already twisted beyond recognition by sheer terror — and that face, in its final moment, became Munch's screaming figure, warped and oblique, consumed whole by the rolling fire.