Where She Came From

Many years later, if anyone asked Lin Shen when he first started believing in the existence of parallel worlds—he wouldn't say it was the moment Jiang Fei spoke. He would say it was when she poured him water. On the hand holding the glass, there was a faint white ring-shaped scar on her finger, exactly where Su Wan used to wear a ring.

The address Jiang Fei gave was in an old apartment building on the west side of town, seventh floor, no elevator.

Lin Shen stood downstairs for about two minutes. The hallway walls were like half-torn old newspaper, exposing moldy brick joints behind. The light fixture at the stairwell entrance was shattered—the bulb was still there, exposed. He took the pencil out of the side pocket of his backpack, held it tight, and walked up the stairs.

By the time he reached the seventh floor, he was panting. Not because he was tired—he climbed three floors every day to his office—but because his heart was racing too fast.

Apartment 703. The door was an old inward-swinging metal door. There was a pinhole camera at the upper right corner of the door frame, its red light on. He didn't knock. The intercom speaker next to the camera came on by itself.

"Come in."

The door lock clicked open.

When Lin Shen pushed the door open, the first thing he saw was the windows. The curtains in the entire apartment were drawn—dark gray blackout curtains, forcibly turning broad daylight into dusk. The only light source in the room came from a low-wattage reading lamp on the coffee table, its shade pressed downward, the light falling only onto a spread-out city map.

Jiang Fei sat on the sofa, one leg crossed over the other, trimming her nails with a nail clipper. Hearing his footsteps, she didn't look up—just ran her fingers through her short ash-blue hair, pushing it back, revealing three silver earring studs on her ear bone.

"Eight minutes earlier than I thought," she said. "You lost that black car in two traffic lights."

Lin Shen took off his shoes at the entrance. Out of habit, he scanned the entire room—the living room, the kitchen on the right, a hallway leading further in, probably a bedroom. On the coffee table, the map was circled in red ink at four or five spots. Next to it sat a cup of black coffee, cold, a thin film of oil congealed on the surface.

"Sit." Jiang Fei gestured with her chin toward the folding chair across from the coffee table.

Lin Shen sat down, his back against the wall. The folding chair's seat was narrow; he could only sit on the front half of his hips.

Jiang Fei put down the nail clipper, tilted her head, and studied him for about three seconds. Her eyes were very bright in the dim light, the slight upward tilt at the corners giving her a perpetually appraising look. Her lips were dry. She pressed them together, then pushed the coffee aside on the coffee table and slid the map in front of Lin Shen.

"These five red circles. Every single one is a place the Correctors have handled in the past three years."

Lin Shen looked down at the map. The five red circles were spread far apart—one in the old industrial district east of the city, one in a downtown commercial building, one by the river, one near the high-speed rail station, and one less than two kilometers from his apartment.

"Correctors." Lin Shen repeated the word. His teeth clicked inside his mouth.

"You heard me right." Jiang Fei picked up a crumpled pack of cigarettes from the sofa armrest, shook one out, and put it between her lips without lighting it. "An organization. Very professional. Their job is simple—make sure things that shouldn't exist, don't exist." She bit down on the filter, twisting it. "People included."

Lin Shen placed his pencil next to the map. He didn't tap the cap—just rubbed his thumb repeatedly over the "L&S" engraving.

"Su Wan is not a hallucination."

"No shit." Jiang Fei took the unlit cigarette out of her mouth. "If a hallucination could make you drive all over town in broad daylight, you wouldn't need me."

She stood up, walked to an old desk against the wall, pulled open a drawer, and took out a thick folder stuffed with papers of all sizes—printed webpage screenshots, handwritten notes, several newspaper clippings, and a few pages of copied research papers. She dropped the folder onto Lin Shen's lap.

Lin Shen opened the first page. It was a newspaper clipping with the headline: "Chengbei Quantum Laboratory Accident Injures Three, Officials Cite Equipment Malfunction," dated two years ago, March.

He continued flipping. The second page was a hand-drawn diagram, very rough, like classroom notes: two ellipses connected by a dashed line. Inside the left ellipse was written "This World" and in the right, "Mirror A." An X was drawn on the dashed line.

The third page was an abstract of a paper published in some physics journal—in English. Lin Shen could roughly make out a few words: "quantum mirroring," "reality membrane," "projection events."

"This is—"

"Read through it first." Jiang Fei sat back down on the sofa. This time she lit the cigarette. The smoke rose slowly in the reading lamp's beam of light, spreading into a thin layer when it hit the ceiling.

Lin Shen flipped to the middle of the folder. Handwritten notes began here, the handwriting very messy—several continuous pages with similar content: dates, places, names. One page was dedicated to a list of "Crossers." He counted: nine names. The last one was Su Wan.

Below the list was a horizontal line drawn in red ink, followed by: "Eight have been corrected. One survives. Unknown."

A question mark was written after Su Wan's name.

"These people are all—"

"All fell in from other mirrors. Just like your girlfriend." Jiang Fei's smoking posture was lazy, a cigarette held between her index and middle fingers, tapping the ash only when it was nearly at the filter. "Nine. Eight are already gone."

Lin Shen felt the back of his head go numb. He picked up the pencil and tapped it twice on the seat. "What does 'gone' mean?"

Jiang Fei didn't answer directly. She flicked off a bit of ash, which fell onto the unfolded newspaper on the coffee table. "Gone means gone. Their families don't remember them. Their friends don't remember them. Their phone numbers become disconnected. Their IDs can't be found in the system. All records of them in the world where they were born are wiped clean." She paused. "As if they never lived."

"Who did it."

"You just said it. The Correctors."

Lin Shen tapped the pencil again. "Why."

Jiang Fei stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray. The ashtray was the bottom of a coffee cup, already filled with half a cup of cigarette butts. "Because of order. The barrier between the two worlds is very thin. Every crossing tears a hole in the barrier. Too many holes—both worlds are done for. The Correctors' stance is: no crosser can be allowed to stay in the wrong world. They must be corrected." She flipped the folder to a page near the back and pointed to an organizational chart.

"Lu Yan." Her fingernail tapped on a name. "Leader of the Correctors. Ten years ago, his wife died in a mirror experiment accident—not died, completely dissipated between the two worlds. He founded the Correctors, vowing that no one would ever cross over again. From a certain angle, his original intentions weren't bad."

Lin Shen looked at the organizational chart. "But they kill people."

The corner of Jiang Fei's mouth twitched upward, but only enough to be called a "slight twitch." "To them, killing isn't called killing—it's called 'restoring order.' If a person isn't in their world, legally speaking, there's no 'elimination.' Kill someone no one remembers, and it's about the same as not killing."

Lin Shen remembered the torn piece of paper in his phone that he could never photograph. Remembered the blue pigment on the torn paper turning pure white in the camera lens. Remembered Gu Yang saying "When did you start dating?" and the landlord saying "It's always been just you living here."

"So she's disappearing—not because she's choosing to. Someone is erasing her."

"Right." Jiang Fei stood up, walked to the curtain, parted it with her finger, and glanced outside. A sliver of light leaked through the gap, falling across her face. Then she pulled the curtain back together.

Lin Shen lowered his head and flipped through the last page of the folder. The last page was the list of all "Corrected" individuals. Behind each of the eight names, the same sentence was written in the same black ink: "Correction complete."

Only one name had a blank space after it. Su Wan.

"She's still alive."

"Right." Jiang Fei returned to the sofa, but she didn't sit. She stood beside the coffee table, arms crossed over her chest, looking at Lin Shen. "But not for long. The correction mechanism works in stages—step one is deleting records and physical traces, step two is erasing others' memories, step three—" she paused, "erasing the person's own existence, including their body."

The air seemed to freeze in the reading lamp's beam. Lin Shen noticed the dust particles suspended one by one in the light, not falling.

"What's step four?"

Jiang Fei's gaze moved from Lin Shen's face to his hands—the pencil he held in his right hand, the faint engraving on the cap that was almost invisible.

"Step four is what you're going through right now." She also lowered her voice. "The Correctors can't erase your memory—you're too damn stubborn. So they might use a more direct method."

Lin Shen placed the pencil on the map, the tip pointing exactly at the red circle closest to his home.

"What's the direct method?"

"Kill you." Jiang Fei said those three words without any pause. "Or get you in a car accident, or make you fall from a seventh-floor window, or give you a sudden heart attack. They're very good at these things. If you die tomorrow, your colleagues will say 'Lin Shen hasn't been in good spirits lately,' your friends will say 'he kept talking about a person who doesn't exist,' and everyone will think—he was too deep in obsession and pushed himself to death."

Lin Shen didn't answer. His fingers rested on the pencil, his thumb rubbing the engraving on the cap.

Jiang Fei took out another cigarette. She tapped the glass surface of the coffee table twice with her lighter, as if emphasizing something. "You choose. Turn back now—throw away the business card, pretend you never saw me, go back to your life. They probably won't touch you."

"Or."

"Or—" she lit the cigarette, took a drag, "work with me. Together we find the location of the passage and pull your girlfriend back."

Suddenly, a long car horn sounded from downstairs outside the window. Jiang Fei quickly walked to the window, lifted a corner of the curtain, and looked down. Lin Shen heard her mutter a short curse.

"The black one." She closed the curtain. "They found me."

Lin Shen stood up, folded the map, and stuffed it into his backpack. "We're leaving now."

Jiang Fei stubbed out the cigarette, walked quickly into the bedroom, and came out carrying two backpacks—one black, one dark gray crossbody. She tossed the crossbody to Lin Shen and put on the black one herself.

"Fire escape. Out the back door, right for two alleys, there's a black motorcycle. Keys are in my pocket."

She paused, turning back to look at Lin Shen. "Have you made up your mind?"

Lin Shen had already slung the crossbody bag on and put the pencil back in the side pocket. "I have."

Jiang Fei looked at him for a second, then pulled the door open. "Then don't make me regret helping you."

The motion-sensor lights in the fire escape were broken all the way down. The two ran through complete darkness, their footsteps overlapping, impossible to tell whose was whose. Lin Shen followed behind Jiang Fei, catching the occasional curse mixed into her heavy breathing.

By the time they ran out of the back alley, it was completely dark. Jiang Fei pulled the motorcycle keys from her pocket, swung onto the bike, and Lin Shen sat on the back. The sound of the motorcycle starting in the quiet old-town alleyways was like a knife scraping across sheet metal.

"Hang on tight," Jiang Fei said.

The motorcycle shot out of the alley and turned onto the main road. Lin Shen looked over her shoulder—in the rearview mirror, the front lights of the black car cut into the street corner.

"There's more than one." Jiang Fei shouted. "Two of them. Right at the next intersection into the basement garage."

The motorcycle sped into the underground parking lot of a commercial street. Jiang Fei didn't even kill the engine—she braked directly, turned, charged down to level B2, leaned the bike against a wall at a corner, and both of them jumped off.

The motion-sensor lights in the underground garage all lit up in sequence, illuminating pipes and ventilation ducts everywhere on the walls. Jiang Fei pulled him through a maintenance door. Behind it was an electrical room, very small, only big enough for the two of them to stand sideways.

In their ears was the low hum of circuit boards and the sound of both of them panting.

After about three minutes, there was no sound outside.

Jiang Fei put a cigarette between her lips but didn't light it. In the darkness, only the cold white light of her phone screen illuminated half her face.

"Listen carefully." She lowered her voice. "The Correctors won't stop at erasing her traces. The memory in your head—that's the last thing she has left in this world. If you don't go crazy, they'll make you crazy. If you don't die, they'll make you die."

Lin Shen didn't answer. He pulled the pencil out of the side pocket and traced his finger along the pencil cap in the darkness.The notch remains.

"Then we need to hurry," he said.

Jiang Fei let out a laugh in the darkness. It was brief, the tone rising at the end—not like mockery, but more like an animal's challenge.

"Alright. Let's go then—the warehouse at 76 Donghe Street. She left something for you, didn't she?"

Lin Shen touched the edges of the three Polaroid photos in his chest pocket.

"Yes."

Jiang Fei took the cigarette from his mouth and tucked it behind his ear. He stood up and pushed open the access door.