Did She Come Back

The gunshot exploded in the concrete space of the hydroelectric station, the echo stacking four times before fading away.

Lin Shen didn't close his eyes. He watched the bullet fire from Lu Yan's muzzle, watched the warhead trace an almost invisible trajectory through the air, watched it pass through the two-centimeter gap above Su Wan's shoulder and strike the outer wall of the teleportation pod.

Sparks flew. A small dent sank into the metal panel.

Lu Yan's gun was still smoking, but his body tilted to the right. It wasn't an active tilt—it was gravity dragging an off-balance body downward. He looked down at his chest. A deeper color was slowly spreading over the left chest area of his dark suit. Not dust, not water stains—it was blood.

He had been shot.

But not by his own gun.

When Lu Yan knelt down, his knee hit the concrete floor with a muffled thud. His gun slipped from his hand, spun two meters across the floor, and stopped beneath the base of the teleportation pod. He reached for it, but his body was no longer obeying.

Rapid footsteps echoed from the corridor. A figure rushed in—Jiang Fei, covered in dust, the bandage on her right arm hanging loose, its original color unrecognizable. Her left hand held a gun, the muzzle still hot.

"You..." Lu Yan turned his face toward her, his lips moving faintly.

Jiang Fei said nothing. She holstered the gun, leaned against the doorframe, glanced down at her arm, then slowly slid to the floor.

A-Line Lin Shen rushed in right behind her. He first saw Su Wan in Lin Shen's arms—breathing, heartbeat steady, her body no longer translucent. Then he saw Lu Yan kneeling on the ground.

"You came around through the rubble?" Lin Shen asked him.

"Jiang Fei left the side ventilation duct open before blowing the entrance." A-Line Lin Shen said, crouching down to check Su Wan's pulse. "She didn't destroy the whole structure, only blocked the main passage. It took us some time coming through the ventilation duct—"

He stopped mid-sentence. Because he saw the blood on Lu Yan's chest.

The bullet had gone through his back and exited his chest, missing his heart by a few centimeters. But the blood loss was severe. The white shirt beneath the suit had already turned deep red. Lu Yan's silver-gray hair had fallen loose, covering half his face. He was still trying to maintain his composure—kneeling on the ground, but his back held straight.

"You didn't have to," he said to Jiang Fei. His voice was weaker than usual, like a long-distance phone call.

"You came to kill her," Jiang Fei said, leaning against the doorframe, her voice equally faint. "I saw you raise your gun."

Lu Yan didn't deny it.

The control room fell silent. Outside the hydroelectric station, it had started raining again. Raindrops dripped through the cracks in the collapsed ceiling, one by one, hitting the concrete floor in a slow rhythm.

Su Wan stirred in Lin Shen's arms.

Lin Shen looked down and saw her eyelashes trembling. Then her eyes opened into a slit, her black pupils slowly focusing in the dim light.

"Lin Shen..."

Her voice sounded scraped by sandpaper.

"I'm here," Lin Shen said. He hung his head, his forehead almost touching hers, the sweat at his temples dripping onto her cheek.

"I feel like... I had a very long dream," she said, lifting her hand to touch his face, but her arm gave out halfway and fell back to her chest. "I dreamed you came for me."

"It wasn't a dream."

Su Wan looked at him. The corner of her mouth twitched—she wanted to smile, but the smile turned into tears. Transparent liquid slid down from the teardrop mole beside her left eye, across her cheek, dripping onto the back of his hand.

Her body temperature was slowly returning. From a cold, translucent state, bit by bit back to the warmth of thirty-seven degrees. The channel gap had consumed too much of her, but resonating with the normal world was helping her recover.

Lin Shen held her tight. So tight that his own arms were trembling.

Then Su Wan's eyes slowly shifted and saw Lu Yan kneeling on the ground.

Their gazes met.

Su Wan's expression changed. It was something complex, something indescribable—not hatred, not fear, more like an acknowledgment. An acknowledgment that the man before her was the reason she had nearly dissipated, the reason she had been separated from her beloved—but at the same time, he too was someone torn apart by the same accident.

"Lu Yan," she said.

Lu Yan lifted his head. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth, mixing with his chin. He looked at Su Wan for a long time, until the rims of his eyes reddened.

"You look like her," he said.

His voice was very soft, as if talking to himself.

"When you smile... the dimple on the right side... it's exactly the same as hers."

Su Wan said nothing. She just looked at him, her fingers gently clasping Lin Shen's hand.

Lu Yan's breathing grew heavier. The hand propping him on the ground began to tremble—not from cold, but from his body losing its last strength.

"Her name was Shen Mu," he said. "The last character is Mu. As in 'admire.'"

No one in the control room moved.

"She was also a quantum physicist. There was an accident during an experiment—the channel went out of control. She pushed everyone away and stood right in the center of the rift." He paused, coughed, blood splattering on the concrete floor. "She could have survived. I reached my hand in, tried to grab her, but—"

He raised his right hand. The old burn scar gleamed like twisted iron in the dim light.

"I only caught air."

Lu Yan suddenly laughed. It was the first time Lin Shen had seen him laugh since they met—not the polite, restrained, social kind of laugh. It was a bitter laugh, a self-mocking laugh, the kind of laugh a person reveals when they finally shed all their armor before death. Ugly, but real.

"Can you believe it," he said, looking at Lin Shen, then at the Su Wan in his arms, "I've never envied anyone. But I envy you. I envy that you at least had the chance to come save her. I envy that you could at least still find her."

He looked down at the blood on his chest. There was more and more of it, already soaking through his suit, flowing down along his trousers.

"When she dissipated... I couldn't even find a single person to look for."

Outside, the rain grew heavier. Water streamed down through the cracked ceiling, pooling into shallow puddles on the control room floor. Lu Yan knelt in that puddle, the knees of his suit completely soaked, the fabric sticking to his skin.

His body began to lean forward. He instinctively braced himself with his hand, but his arm could no longer support his weight. He slowly tilted and collapsed, leaning against the base of the control console.

"Jiang Fei," he said.

Jiang Fei looked up.

"The correction mechanism... shut it down. The password is in—" He coughed again, a long fit. When the coughing stopped, his voice was almost inaudible, "In the inner pocket of my jacket. That USB drive."

Jiang Fei pushed herself up from the doorframe, walked over, and pulled a small USB drive from the inner pocket of his suit. It had a matte black shell with no markings.

"Thank you," she said, though she didn't know why she was thanking him.

Lu Yan didn't answer. His eyes were still open, but his pupils had begun to dilate, staring at the rain leaking through the crack in the ceiling. His silver-gray hair stuck to his forehead, the blood on his face being diluted by the rain.

"If there's a next life..." he said.

Then he stopped.

The unfinished sentence hung in the air like a severed recording, broken off mid-stream. His breathing stopped. His deep gray eyes were still open, but that frozen lake surface had finally thawed.

Raindrops hit his face and slid down, as if crying for someone.

---

Lin Shen gently laid Su Wan on the clean ground beside the teleportation pod, took off his jacket, and covered her with it. Her breathing had stabilized, her eyes closed, her lashes resting quietly against her eyelids.

"I'll go look for a first aid kit outside," A-Line Lin Shen said. He could tell Su Wan was merely weak, not in danger. He turned and left the control room.

Jiang Fei leaned against the wall, looked down at the USB drive, then at Lu Yan. She had been projected here from Mirror B three years ago, and for these three years, everything she had done was to go back—find coordinates, find clues, find anything that could open the channel. But now the channel was open, and the USB drive in her hand could shut down the correction mechanism. It was all over.

"What do you plan to do next?" Lin Shen asked her.

Jiang Fei spun the USB drive in her palm, then put it in her pocket. "Go to the hospital first. My arm is about to fall off."

"And then?"

"Then?" She stood up, walked to the door of the control room, and glanced back at Lin Shen. "Haven't decided yet. Maybe find a place to open a café. Like your 'Nomad.' Anyway, I'm done being a journalist."

Her tone had returned to her usual casual cadence, but Lin Shen saw her glance back at Su Wan once more before walking out.

That look was brief, less than a second. But Lin Shen caught it.

Jiang Fei had never said who she was before coming from Mirror B, or whether anyone was waiting for her to return. She had never said that all along, she was helping with two people's story—but that story had no place for herself.

---

Only Lin Shen and Su Wan remained in the control room. And Lu Yan.

Lin Shen sat beside Su Wan, watching her breathe. Each rise and fall was small, but steady. Her brows were slightly furrowed in her sleep, as if she was solving some calculus problem. He reached out to smooth the crease between her brows. The moment his fingers touched her skin, she instinctively nudged toward his palm in her dream.

He had seen this gesture before.

On the bed in his apartment, every weekend morning, when she was still asleep, she would turn over and burrow her face into the crook of his neck. She would mumble something unintelligible, then go back to sleep. He would lie perfectly still every time, waiting for her to wake up on her own before getting up, afraid that any movement would disturb her.

Back then, he didn't know this would all disappear.

Now he knew.

Lin Shen stood up and began pacing around the control room. He needed to make sure the area was safe, to check for other exits, to inspect the teleportation pod's condition—he found every professional reason an architect could have to stand up.

But in truth, he was just searching.

He went through every corner of the control room. Behind the teleportation pod, next to the distribution cabinet, beside the pile of collapsed rubble, under the control console.

There was nothing left behind by Su Wan.

She had teleported back with him, but in those final thirty-two seconds, he had felt it. He had felt her grip on his hand loosen for just a moment—a moment, less than half a second. He had thought it was the channel fluctuating. Now he knew it wasn't.

He returned to the control console and stood there for five minutes. Outside, the rain was loud, but inside the control room, it was very quiet.

Then he saw it.

A slip of paper was wedged in the gap between the control panel and its bracket, only a tiny corner showing. The paper was already damp, its edges curled, marked with water stains. He crouched down and carefully pinched it out of the gap with his fingers.

It was Su Wan's handwriting.

It had been a long time since he'd last seen her handwriting. Those diaries, sticky notes, drawing papers—all erased by the correction mechanism. This slip of paper was the last surviving piece. She had used pencil, so the rain hadn't washed it away, only leaving shallow indentations on the paper.

There was only one line on the paper.

The writing was messy—she always wrote messily. But every stroke was pressed hard, the pencil digging deep grooves into the paper—written during those thirty-two seconds she had in the transmission. The channel was collapsing, his heartbeat was pounding in her ears, and when she pulled her fingers away from his palm, she used those last seconds to write this sentence in her heart, then secretly tucked it into the gap of the control console.

She had written—

"Goodbye, my love. Thank you for coming for me."

And then below, there was another line, even smaller, almost too faint to see. The kind where after writing, she had hesitated, her fingers smudging the paper a couple of times.

"I'm sorry, I lied to you again."

Lin Shen flipped the paper over.

The back was blank.

The front only had two lines.

He crouched beside the control console, the rain roaring outside, water streaming from the ceiling cracks around his feet, soaking his pant legs. He raised the paper to the light and read it again, as if reading it a third and fourth time would make the words change into something else.

They didn't change.

In those final seconds of the transmission, Su Wan had traded her existence for a pulse of energy, pushing him alone through the channel's exit. He had survived; she had stayed behind in the gap. She had known all along that she couldn't come back. She had been lying to him the whole time. Lying, telling him to wait for her return. Lying, telling him they would go back together. Lying, telling him to hold her hand tight—and then letting go when he couldn't feel it.

"Su Wan."

He called her name.Not calling to her, not expecting an answer. Just wanting to say it once. To speak this name once more, let it exist in the air for a second, let the air vibrate once.

She turned over, and her brow furrowed again in her sleep.

She was still alive. Just sleeping deeply.

But she wasn't Su Wan.

She was the projected version of Su Wan sent back by Su Wan from Line A—the one who had waited for him at the滞留点 for two years. He found her there, held her hand, and she teleported with him. But she wasn't the one from his world. That Su Wan, two years ago, at the very beginning, had already chosen to stay in the crevice forever.

She came to his world, lived for two years, loved him for two years. And then, when the correction began, she walked alone into the crevice, pinned herself there, and maintained the last section of the passage. From beginning to end, she never thought of going back. She only wanted to keep that path open, so he could reach some place, find another version of herself.

But that other version couldn't come back either.

Lin Shen folded the note and put it into the inner layer of his wallet. Together with the original torn piece of paper. One was half of Su Wan's character "晚," and one was Su Wan's "goodbye." Neither item was complete, but both could still prove—she had existed.

He sat back down beside Su Wan (Line A projection version), looking at her face. A teardrop mole on the left, a dimple on the right. Hair was long, straight, and black. There were traces of paint on her fingers that wouldn't wash off. She was exactly the same as the original-line Su Wan in every way—but this teardrop mole, the original-line Su Wan also had it; this dimple, the original-line Su Wan also had it. Even the way she furrowed her brow in sleep was exactly the same.

They were two projections of the same person.

But to him, only one was his.

Lin Shen lowered his head and buried his face in his palms.

Outside, the rain was still falling. Inside the control room of the hydropower station, a dead修正者 leader leaned against the console; a woman who had crossed back from two worlds away slept beside the teleportation pod; an architect sat on the concrete floor between them, head bowed, shoulders trembling faintly.

There was no sound.

He cried for a long time.

---

When Line A Lin Shen returned, he didn't have a medical kit—he had found Jiang Fei in the corridor, and Jiang Fei said the one she had just used was the last one.

"There's still one in the Line A control room on the other side of the passage," Line A Lin Shen said as he walked through the door of the control room.

He saw Lu Yan's corpse, looked at it for two seconds. Then he saw Lin Shen sitting on the floor, saw his face.

Then he didn't speak again.

He just walked over, sat down next to Lin Shen, facing the same wall.

Two identical men, sitting shoulder to shoulder in the control room of the hydropower station, watching the sky grow darker outside.

One was wearing the gray work uniform unique to Line A, the other was wearing the old trench coat from the original line. One had calmness in his eyes, the other had eyes full of bloodshot lines.

They didn't speak.

They sat for a long time.

Until Su Wan opened her eyes.