Choice and Escape

The moment the motorcycle burst out of the tunnel, the evening wind slammed into Lin Shen's face. He suddenly thought of something very cold—Su Wan once said she hated riding motorcycles the most, that helmets would flatten her hair. And then he realized, he remembered the scene when she said it was last summer, standing at the stairwell entrance complaining to him for about two minutes. And that was the one thing the Correctors could never take away. Memories aren't photographs. Memories are alive.

The motorcycle ran on the elevated expressway at dusk for about ten minutes.

Jiang Fei's riding was excellent—not the showy kind, but the kind where you could tell at a glance she'd run through the city's nights countless times. She could predict a three-car gap in advance, finding a slit just wide enough for the motorcycle to slip through in the parallel traffic. Her ash-blue hair was pressed into a horizontal line by the wind, occasionally a few strands drifting to brush against Lin Shen's helmet visor.

Lin Shen gripped the rear handrail and leaned his body a little closer to her back. He didn't ask where they were going.

"Did you receive Lu Yan's business card?" Jiang Fei shouted from the front seat, the wind swallowing half her voice.

"What business card?"

"Not for you. It was in the car—your passenger seat."

"I got it."

"The number on that business card. 0327—that's the Corrector's Correction File Number." The motorcycle tilted sharply to the left, cutting into an on-ramp to the highway. "Not randomly assigned. The sequential numbers are based on the order of the Boundary Crossers' crossing times. I'm 0326. Su Wan is 0327."

Lin Shen stiffened on the back seat. "You're sequentially named."

"That's right. The 'Boundary Crosser Registry' in the Corrector system—numbered by projection arrival time. The earlier the arrival, the smaller the number. I'm 0326, Su Wan 0327. The two of us are only one number apart." Jiang Fei accelerated at the end of the ramp, leaning her head forward a bit to reduce wind resistance. "That means I was projected in just a few seconds ahead of Su Wan. The lab accident two years ago—two people were projected at once. One coordinate drifted to Mirror B, the other to Mirror A. Working backwards—the two of us were sent here by the same incident."

Lin Shen turned this passage over in his mind for about five seconds.

"So you can sense her."

"Can't sense her." Jiang Fei merged into the far-right lane of the highway, bringing the speed up to one hundred and ten. "But there's data—the projection source was the same energy pulse from the same incident. Theoretically, if she goes back through the channel, I can use the same channel to go back too."

Lin Shen didn't respond. He pushed his helmet visor open a crack, and the evening city wind poured in—the smell of gasoline, the burnt scent of asphalt roads, the cement dust from some construction site in the distance. Every smell was concrete.

"The five sets of coordinates on the bottom paper of the diary cover—can you remember them?" Jiang Fei asked him.

Lin Shen closed his eyes and recited the five sets of coordinates. Not a single word wrong.

Jiang Fei whistled under her helmet. "Your brain is wasted on being an architect."

"One of them is the hydropower station—related to the Corrector's old experiment site. And there's one with Old Zheng's place name. That Old Zheng—"

"Zheng Jun. A retired physics professor. Early member of the Mirror Plan. Lu Yan's advisor." Jiang Fei accelerated again, overtaking a truck loaded with sand and gravel. "Back then he didn't agree with Lu Yan establishing the Correctors, so he withdrew. Lu Yan has been keeping people on his location. We have about an hour. In an hour, when they've checked Old Zheng's location, we'll lose the initiative."

The motorcycle tires rolled over a pavement joint, the whole vehicle jolting, and Lin Shen's stomach lurched once. "How much longer can your backup number hold out?"

"At best, a day. At worst—" Jiang Fei glanced at the rearview mirror, her words cut off before she finished.

Lin Shen followed her gaze to the rearview mirror.

In the distant highway traffic, about three or four black cars' high beams were forcing their way out of the traffic flow. Not using turn signals—just forcing their way, honking at cars in adjacent lanes and making them yield. Four cars formed a search formation in two rows, sweeping lane by lane from slow to fast traffic.

"They're not tracking the motorcycle anymore." Jiang Fei's speech suddenly sped up. "They're tracking my phone."

She pulled her phone out of her pants pocket, riding one-handed, and tossed it to Lin Shen behind her. "Take off the back cover. Throw away the battery and SIM card in three separate places. Hurry."

Lin Shen caught the phone, pried open the back cover by the edge, and used his fingernail to pop out the SIM card tray—the card fell onto the seat, and he caught it. He arranged the phone's back cover, battery, and SIM card in order of disposal, three separate throws—the back cover into the drainage ditch on the right side of the road, the battery into a pile of sand in a truck's cargo bed, and the SIM card—he hurled it hard over the elevated bridge. The card was caught in the airflow and flew off at an angle, disappearing into the evening sky.

Less than ten seconds later, the formation of four black cars scattered.

"They've switched the tracking system to license plate recognition." Jiang Fei's right ear twitched—from this angle, Lin Shen could see a small patch of skin beside her temple was taut. "Fork left ahead—do you know the way?"

"You ride. I'll navigate."

Lin Shen pulled out his phone. No GPS on the map, so it couldn't be tracked—he had Jiang Fei change direction every two intersections. From the ring road exit onto a six-lane city arterial road, then cutting through a narrow road in the old town, squeezing through a loading alley beside a wholesale market, and when they emerged from the other end, they were already on the opposite side of the city.

"Pause for a moment." Jiang Fei turned the motorcycle into a dead-end alley with no streetlights, killed the engine, and lifted her helmet visor. Her forehead was covered in fine beads of sweat.

Lin Shen got off the bike. His legs had been on the motorcycle too long; the moment his butt left the seat, his entire thighs were trembling.

"How much do you know about Old Zheng?" He leaned against the red brick of the alley wall, feeling his vertebrae, one by one, stick to the temperature of the brick.

"Not much." Jiang Fei pulled a bottle of water from her backpack, unscrewed the cap, took two gulps, then pointed the bottle bottom at her temple. "My information is locked in my head—anything written on paper was all in the apartment, already subject to Recovery by the Correctors. But I remember some key information: Old Zheng, Zheng Jun, first-generation member of the Mirror Plan, Lu Yan's doctoral advisor. He withdrew after the accident ten years ago. When Lu Yan established the Correctors, he didn't join, and Lu Yan didn't touch him either. The teacher-student bond—maybe it's the one piece in this whole thing that hasn't been corrected."

"How do you find him?"

"Don't need to find him. He knows we're looking for him."

Lin Shen looked at Jiang Fei. Jiang Fei screwed the cap back on and put the bottle back in the side pocket of her backpack. When she'd come out, she'd put on a thin windbreaker jacket over her dark gray coat, and a small piece of dried hemostatic cotton was stuck to her collar. He hadn't seen when she got hurt.

"When did you get that?"

"When you were on the top floor of the office building. They had three teams clearing the area. When I climbed up from the west-side ventilation duct, the duct opening was sealed. I used the backup fire escape—there was a layer of感应线 (sensor wires) installed on that ladder. When I climbed over, my left foot got caught on it. It's nothing."

Lin Shen didn't press further. Things Jiang Fei didn't talk about, pressing was no use.

The route Jiang Fei gave him went north into the outskirts of the old town and then doubled back—they stayed in the dead-end alley for about ten minutes, estimating that the Correctors should have chased along the southern industrial avenue, then they restarted the bike.

The straight-line distance from the city area to the highway was about fifteen kilometers, but he deliberately made her take more detours. The sheet-metal factories of the industrial zone gleamed with a cold metallic luster under the evening sky, the rose-colored sky edge pressing toward gray-blue. These last two days, dusk had come exceptionally fast—not an illusion, but the change of seasons. Late spring to early summer, the nights getting shorter but the day's spread hadn't yet passed that inflection point.

When they reached the southernmost elevated entrance of the city, beside a gas station under a bridge tunnel, Jiang Fei slowed the motorcycle to thirty. She pulled the bike onto a graffiti-covered empty lot behind the gas station. As the motorcycle slowed, the engine sound resonated under the tunnel-like elevated bridge into a series of muffled roars.

"Switch vehicles first."

She parked the motorcycle on the lot, pulled a utility knife from her backpack, and scraped off a QR code stuck in a hidden compartment beneath the fuel cap. Then she pulled Lin Shen around the cement wall behind the gas station, to a black SUV parked in a dilapidated lot.

"Yours?"

"Rental. Used a dead person's ID."

She opened the driver's door, slid in, and adjusted the seat. Lin Shen sat in the passenger seat and closed the door. The leather smell in the SUV was brand new. On the back seat floor sat an unopened case of bottled water and a few packs of compressed biscuits.

Jiang Fei started the engine. The SUV's ignition sound was much gentler than the motorcycle's.

"The highway entrance is at the next intersection. Get on the highway and head northwest, about two hundred kilometers—Old Zheng's courtyard is next to an abandoned apiary in the suburbs. Can't use navigation. I've memorized the route—just listen."

As she shifted gears, the SUV's front and rear wheels cushioned a jolt, and the body gently bounced over the gravel at the edge of the lot.

The car got on the highway. Outside the window, the sky was almost completely dark. On the highway, the taillights of long-haul trucks converged into a red river, slowly surging on the black asphalt. The SUV was in the minority on this side of the road—most traffic was heading into the city.

"Are they catching up?" Lin Shen asked.

Jiang Fei checked the rearview mirror for a moment. "Not yet."

About forty minutes into the drive, two beams of white headlights that shouldn't have been there appeared in the right-side rearview mirror. Moving fast, no longer just ordinary traffic following behind—the trajectory of those two headlights was completely unconstrained by lane markings. They were switching lanes aggressively.

Jiang Fei swore and jerked the steering wheel to the left. "The second team has caught up. They must have checked the surveillance at the gas station. Brace yourself in the car." She pulled her seatbelt tighter by one notch and floored the accelerator—the SUV shot forward instantly, hitting 140 on the highway.

Lin Shen looked out the right-side window. The car catching up was a dark gray sedan—not black, but dark gray, deliberately not using the Corrector's standard color scheme. The windows were all tinted extremely dark, making it impossible to see the driver inside.

"How many?"

"One. But someone in the passenger seat."

The SUV weaved wildly through highway traffic—this time Jiang Fei was no longer hiding her driving skills. She used the most direct lane-change method—squeezing a half-car-width gap between two semi-trailers, overtaking a row of small cars from the emergency lane, then reinserting into the main road before the ramp entrance.

The gray car clung tight. It didn't even hesitate to scrape its body—once, Lin Shen saw in the mirror its side mirror scraping against the guardrail, throwing off a stream of sparks.

"Who's in that car?" Lin Shen gripped his seatbelt. The seatbelt's locking mechanism jerked tight against his chest once, making him gasp.

Jiang Fei looked at the rearview mirror again. "Xiao Lu."

Lin Shen had never heard that name, but the tone of Jiang Fei's voice shifted when she said it—not fear, but some kind of discomfort. "The Corrector pursuit team's top ace. Young, doesn't use guns—at least he didn't used to. He stops people by forcing them off the road—pure driving skill."

Bang. Bang.

Two gunshots. They hit the right rear fender of the SUV. The echo of metal and bullet impact lasted less than a second inside the cabin.

"He uses them now." Jiang Fei jerked the steering wheel hard to the right—the SUV's center of gravity was thrown to both sides, the two outer wheels emitting a piercing screech on the highway. An unopened bottle of water flew out of the storage compartment above the windshield and smacked Lin Shen in the shoulder.

Gunfire rang out again. This time he didn't hear the trajectory, but he heard Jiang Fei's grunt—very short, like someone had punched her silently.

The bullet came in through the left rear window of the driver's side, piercing through the outer side of her left upper arm. The blood didn't spurt—it was that deep red color seeping slowly from the wound's edges. She released the steering wheel with one hand for a second, let her left hand drop onto the gear stick, and the knuckles of that hand trembled uncontrollably.

Lin Shen reached for the steering wheel, but Jiang Fei pushed him back with her shoulder. "No need!" She switched to her right hand, single-handedly steadying the vehicle, then jerked it hard right—the SUV's tail slid about half a turn and crashed into the right front fender of the gray car, forcing it against the highway guardrail. The guardrail let out a sharp, bone-chilling metallic screech, and sparks splashed out in a streak of gold in the dusk sky.The gray car's entire right front side was scraped by the guardrail, but it didn't stop. The other driver's ruthlessness wasn't the kind Jiang Fei had from street fighting—his ruthlessness showed in that even when he skidded, he didn't adjust the steering wheel a second time. He relied on the accelerator to straighten the car back onto the main road.

The two vehicles continued racing down the highway. The off-road vehicle's fender had been loosened by the two bullets that hit it earlier, now scraping against the ground rhythmically, making a sound like someone prying up the road surface with a iron shovel under the chassis.

In the rearview mirror, the gray car's front end began to slow down. It wasn't giving up—its hood had been sliced open by a steel plate from the guardrail, and from that angle, Lin Shen could see hot air rising from the radiator grille in wisps of steam. If they kept chasing, the engine would blow.

As the gray car slowed, it lowered its right window.

Half a profile emerged from inside—shoulder, jaw, half an ear. A young man, his lips pressed tightly together. His bangs were plastered against his brow bone by the wind, revealing a pair of eyes utterly devoid of expression.

He didn't fire. He drew his raised gun back slightly and—nodded once toward the off-road vehicle.

Not at Jiang Fei. At Lin Shen.

Then the gray car slowed down, turned off at an exit ramp.

"He's memorizing you." Jiang Fei's arm was still bleeding. She used her left hand to grip the wheel and steady the vehicle, while with her right hand she pulled down the sleeve of her jacket, wadded it in her palm, and pressed it against the wound on her left upper arm. "Xiao Lu never uses his gun when handling cases—so the fact that he fired today means Lu Yan will settle accounts with him when he gets back."

"Before he gets back—he already hit you."

"He got me." Jiang Fei pulled back her sleeve and glanced at the wound. "A graze from the bullet. Flesh wound. The bone is fine." She wrung the blood soaked into her jacket cuff, dark drops of blood falling onto the floor mat. She returned both hands to the steering wheel, her left hand trembling slightly but now able to hold it.

"You said Old Zheng is the only hope."

"Right. He knows where the passage is. Knows how to open it. Knows what really happened in the experiment accident back then. Without him—we'd only be going to the hydro station to die."

Lin Shen stared at the white lane markers endlessly receding beyond the windshield. Occasionally the headlights of passing trucks swept into the cabin, illuminating the gray-blue strands of Jiang Fei's short hair, plastered to her forehead by sweat, and her teeth as she bit her lip—one of her left teeth was slightly crooked compared to the others.

"Where's your stop-loss line?" Lin Shen asked her.

"What?"

"Your stop-loss line for helping me. At what point do you pull out?"

Jiang Fei fell silent again for a long time. The car radio had been knocked on at some point, quietly playing a folk song, the guitar's harmonics barely audible in fragments above the noise of the moving vehicle.

Then she laughed. It was a short laugh, the ending tone rising, exactly the same as the laugh in the electrical room last time.

"When you give up," she said.

The off-road vehicle continued northwest through the night. The sound of the fender scraping the ground kept going, occasionally letting out a sharp metallic screech when it hit a seam in the road.

Lin Shen looked down at the pencil in his hand. The engraving of "L&S" on the cap had become completely untraceable. He carved it again with his fingernail—the groove reappeared.

Then he looked up at the rearview mirror. The highway stretched farther and farther behind the vehicle, the city lights like batter poured into a basin—a sticky, uniform spread of orange coating the horizon.

He tucked the pencil back into the backpack's side pocket. In the rearview mirror, half of Jiang Fei's face was illuminated in a cold shade of blue by the dashboard lights. Her expression, for that instant, had shed the ferocity from when she was biting her lip and steering—and turned into something else.

Not pain. It was like a nail that had been driven in at some moment five or six years ago, and never taken out.

He was about to ask her—when she turned her head away.

"Don't look. I'm fine."

She shifted gears and stepped on the accelerator. The off-road vehicle charged into a mountain road with no streetlights.