Chapter 5: The Grafting Studio
The dark passage wasn’t a passage at all. It was a duct, narrow and lined with fibrous insulation that stuck to his clammy skin. He crawled on elbows and knees, the pain in his scalded arm a bright, screaming sun around which all other thoughts orbited. The only light was a faint, greenish glow seeping from junctions ahead.
He emerged, not into another cavern, but into a space so clean it felt blasphemous after the boiler room’s organic filth.
The light was a shock. A single, stark surgical lamp suspended from the ceiling, its beam concentrated on a cold steel table at the room’s center. The air was dead. Silent. It hummed with a frequency that vibrated in his teeth, swallowing all sound except the frantic thud of his own heart. The smell was antiseptic, overwhelmingly so, layered over a sharper, more visceral scent like old blood and rusted metal.
He pushed himself to his feet, his back against the smooth, tiled wall. The room was small, a surgical cell. Tools hung on the walls—not polished like in the workroom, but functional, brutal. Bone saws with teeth stained brown. Clamps with serrated jaws. Long, thin probes that ended in cruel hooks.
His glasses were fogged. He wiped them on his torn silk shirt, the movement clumsy with pain. When he put them back on, he saw the figure on the table.
It sat upright, propped against a metal support. It was male, or had been. The torso was mostly formed, skin the color of unbaked dough, stretched taut over a rack of ribs. One arm was complete, ending in a hand whose fingers were stitched together at the tips, like a mitten. The other arm ended at the elbow in a messy nexus of threads and a protruding nub of yellowish bone.
But the face.
The face was a smooth, featureless oval. No eyes, no nose, just slight indentations where they should be. The mouth was a simple, lipless slit, currently slack and open.
And from within that dark slit, a voice whispered. Hoarse. Strained. But unmistakable.
“子轩?”
陈子轩’s breath froze in his chest. The voice was clogged, wet, as if speaking through a mouthful of mud, but the intonation, the familiar way it shaped his name—
“赵明远?” The word was a puff of air, no sound behind it.
The figure’s head lolled slightly on its neck. The mouth-slit worked. “Don’t… come closer.” It was him. It was 明远’s voice, but stripped of all its warmth and laughter, reduced to pure, agonized effort. “It’s… a trap. For seeing. He uses… the pieces he doesn’t need yet.”
陈子轩 took an involuntary step forward, his shoes squeaking on the polished floor. “明远, what did they do to you? I saw you in the tank—”
“Not me.” The voice hissed, urgent. “That’s just… the wetware. The raw… material. This is… the draft. The prototype.” A shudder went through the torso. A line of clear fluid leaked from the seam where the collarbone met the sternum. “He’s talking through林晓. He can talk through… anything he’s stitched. He’s listening.”
陈子轩’s eyes darted to the door on the far side of the room—a heavy, sealed thing with a wheel lock. “How do I get you out?”
A wet, choking sound came from the figure. It took a second to realize it was a laugh. “Idiot. Look at me. I’m not… coming with you.” The head tilted. The smooth, eyeless face seemed to point toward the wall of tools. “Top shelf. Left. The silver… syringe. It’s empty. For draining… ocular fluid.”
“What? Why?”
“Because I can’t blink!” The voice rose, a sudden, startling burst of 明远’s old frustration. It dissolved into a gurgle. “He’s growing eyes… inside. Behind this… canvas. He’s going to… put them in. And then he’ll see everything I see. Forever.” The voice dropped back to a desperate whisper. “Get it. Inject it. Into the neck seam. It’ll… spoil the tissue. Make it reject the grafts. Do it.”
“I can’t.” 陈子轩’s own voice broke. This was his friend. His best friend who used to steal his breakfast dumplings and towered over everyone on the court.
“You have to. It’s the only play left.” The figure’s hand—the finished one—twitched, the stitched fingers curling in a pathetic mimicry of a fist. “I’m already gone,子轩. But you can… gum up the works. For a little while. Now move. The door’s gonna open.”
A low, hydraulic hum filled the room. The wheel on the sealed door began to turn, slowly.
Panic electrocuted him. He lunged for the tool wall. His scalded arm screamed in protest as he reached up, fingers scrambling over cold metal. He found the syringe. It was heavy, cold silver, with a needle as long as his finger.
He turned back to the table.
The figure sat, waiting. A thin trail of that clear fluid now ran from the neck seam down the chest.
“Do it,” the mouth-slit whispered.
陈子轩’s hand shook violently. He stepped forward, raised the syringe. He pressed the needle against the pulsing, threaded seam at the side of the neck. The synthetic skin resisted, then gave with a soft pop.
He plunged the plunger.
The figure jolted. A long, sighing exhalation came from the slit, this one devoid of words, just pure, final relief. The doughy skin around the injection site immediately began to darken, a bloom of greyish-purple necrosis spreading outward like spilled ink.
The hydraulic hum stopped. The door seal broke with a hiss of equalizing pressure.
陈子轩 dropped the syringe. It clattered on the floor, rolling under the table.
He had nowhere to go. The door was swinging open, revealing a well-lit corridor beyond. The duct he’d crawled from was behind him, a dark hole in the wall.
From the table, the thing that spoke with his friend’s voice gave one last, ragged whisper, so faint he almost missed it.
“The duct goes to the linen chute. Drops to the laundry. Go.”
He didn’t hesitate. He dove for the dark opening just as polished black shoes stepped into the room. He didn’t look back. He scrambled into the duct, kicking himself forward, the insulation tearing at his clothes.
Behind him, in the sterile room, he heard the庄园主人’s voice, not angry, but thoughtfully cool.
“Aesthetic sabotage,” the voice mused. “How… passionate.”
Then the sound was cut off as陈子轩 wriggled around a corner. The duct sloped sharply downward. He lost his grip, and slid into utter darkness, the air rushing past him, the smell of bleach and hot cotton rising to meet his fall.