Chapter 4: Rescue and Shock (4)
She wasn't lying. The very day she returned to China, Councilor Yang had taken her straight from the border crossing to the hospital. That night she was issued two critical condition notices; they'd had to contact her next of kin. Before surgery they called her family, and her father had indeed said those words.
The other two people in the ward went silent, trapped in awkward stillness. After a pause, Wei Shu tried again, refusing to give up:
"Perhaps... your mother could come?"
She smiled—not a defiant smile, but a kind of rueful apology for brushing off someone's good intentions.
"Officer, didn't you look into it...? My current mother is a stepmother. They're a family of three, and there's another daughter—she should be in her senior year of high school by now."
Her glass-like eyes went briefly hazy. She was still looking at her own hand—that thin, flat palm, its intersecting lines carrying a solitary, lethal intensity.
The deepest line transectated her palm entirely.
"If my mother were still alive, my father wouldn't have... told me to go die."
She turned her hand over and loosely closed it into a fist—just bones, really—and placed it on the blanket.
Zhou Mi asked: "Why were you waiting for the Charlie Group's people?"
This time Elyse lifted her head—Wei Shu noticed that whenever the questions turned to Myanmar, she looked directly at them and answered seriously.
"Because I keep seeing them. And I know they won't let me go. They'll definitely find a way to come for me."
Zhou Mi narrowed his eyes. He felt that although she was meeting his gaze, she was actually looking at something slightly behind him.
At someone.
He leaned slightly, asking: "Can you see them now?"
Elyse nodded. Her breathing quickened slightly—she realized it herself, so she lowered her gaze to the pattern on the blanket, her lashes veiling the flash of fear, and said:
"I can see them."
She adjusted herself, forcibly suppressing the tremors running from her body to her fingertips, turning her face slightly away as if avoiding eye contact with someone who wasn't there.
Wei Shu instinctively placed his hand on his captain's shoulder—a warning. She was triggered.
Severe PTSD patients could experience full-blown hallucinations. According to the doctors, Elyse had suffered multiple episodes of conflating trauma with reality—mistaking medical staff for criminals from Myanmar, or seeing people who didn't exist.
At her worst, they'd had to use restraints.
Wei Shu grew increasingly nervous. Any more stimulation and the sedative might not hold. Per her medical records, Elyse in a triggered state exhibited some capacity for violence and aggression.
Mostly toward herself.
Zhou Mi had surely considered all this, but he didn't stop pushing. He even leaned closer, shortening the distance between himself and the patient, taking in her slightly dilated pupils and the goosebumps rising on her skin.
He used his height to impose pressure deliberately.
"Elyse, are you seeing Black Moses right now?"
Without warning, Elyse turned her head, and a pair of empty, cold phoenix eyes locked directly onto his gaze.
Captain Zhou's expression didn't shift, but something lurched inside him.
He'd seen that look before.
On the face of a victim pushed to the absolute brink in a vicious case—said victim had become a suspect in another major case, wanted for the murder of seven members of the family that had killed his own. After his arrest, sitting in the interrogation room, that was the look.
Equally empty. Equally cold.
As if his soul had already died completely.
Without realizing it, Captain Zhou had half-risen from his chair. His right hand was unconsciously rubbing its fingertips—the gesture of a man ready to reach beneath his jacket for his sidearm at any moment.
Elyse gazed up at him. She seemed not to notice the movement of his hand, and answered the previous question with an expressionless face:
"Captain Zhou, what are you talking about?"
Elyse stared at his face with that inorganic, appraising gaze, her lips forming words that felt like a slow suffocation:
"What Black Moses?"
There was no way to continue. Zhou Mi's face went cold, his gaze sharp and substantive beneath his blade-like eyelids, pressing down on this girl. She was employing the clumsiest of tactics—Zhou Mi thought—confronted with an investigator she couldn't fool, why resort to such childish denials?
Completely useless.
A person who could survive in Northern Myanmar wouldn't have only this much ability.
Unless—this was something she deliberately wanted them to know.
But couldn't say through normal channels.
Captain Zhou had a vague sense of catching a thread. He looked at Elyse deeply—she was an extraordinarily unusual witness. In over a decade in criminal investigation, Zhou Mi had seen every kind of person except someone like Elyse...
How to put it. She placed each step with precision, right on the line where different matters intersected.
She had secrets. And those secrets were momentous.
Elyse watched them in silence. Her eyes had never wavered, never shown evasion or guilt. Zhou Mi gave a rare smile:
"Little lady, this habit of talking nonsense—make sure it doesn't flare up in front of anyone else."
He was moving past the subject.
But his eyes held no warmth—harsh, even: "They won't be as easy to deal with as me."
Elyse didn't respond to the warning.
A moment later, Zhou Mi received a message—his phone vibrated. He swiped to read it, then slipped the device back into his pocket. Both officers rose, carefully pushed their chairs back into place, and departed under her silent regard.
The door clicked shut. The ward went quiet. Elyse leaned against the headboard, her posture unchanged throughout.
No one knew that in her field of vision, a skirt hem of rose-red fluttered like a butterfly, and a distant, sorrowful sigh wound around her ears, clinging stubbornly.
There was no medicine that could cure her.
She stared with glazed eyes, her whole body numb. And the woman gazing at her said:
"Didn't I tell you not to look back?"