Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
Something rapped against wood, slow and patient, somewhere in the dark.
Ding Jia's eyes snapped open onto unfamiliar shadows, and fear closed around her chest before her brain could make any sense of her surroundings. The room was cold — colder than any room she had ever been — though she felt no draft, no open window, nothing that should have stolen the warmth from the air.
Where was she?
She sat up and turned in a slow circle. One look told her enough: this room had burned. A bed and a sofa sat gutted in the center, their stuffing spilling out through scorched fabric like wounds that had never closed. Ash dusted the floor in drifts, mixed with the unrecognizable, melted remains of things that used to have names. It was a complete opposite of the coldness she was feeling at the moment.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
The tapping continued. She couldn't find its source no matter how hard she searched, her eyes sweeping corner to corner until they landed on a door standing open on the far wall. She crossed to it and reached for the handle and froze, fingers closing around nothing.
There was no doorknob. Only a twist of metal, fused and warped by heat into something that no longer resembled a handle at all.
She drew back her hand, heart hammering, mind conjuring every terrible thing that might be waiting on the other side of that doorway. She had almost decided to retreat when the door groaned and swung wide on its own, with no hand and no wind to move it.
Every instinct in her body screamed to run. She turned to do exactly that and slammed into something that wasn't there. A force, solid and deliberate, shoved her forward from behind.
"No!" Her arm shot out, fingers scraping for the doorframe and finding only air. The world went black before she finished her words, and she fell — fell endlessly, soundlessly — into a darkness with no bottom.
A City Medical Hospital, VIP Floor
"Oh my god." A nurse froze mid-step in the doorway of one of the private rooms, her clipboard nearly slipping from her hands. She'd done this round a hundred times this past year, expecting nothing but silence and steady monitors.
She didn't wait to confirm what she'd seen. She pressed the button beside the bed, then bolted back toward the nurses' station, voice cracking with the kind of urgency reserved for miracles.
"Ding Jia's awake! She's awake!"
The station erupted. Phones were grabbed before feet had even finished moving: The Nation's Queen, comatose for nearly a year, had just opened her eyes. By morning, it would be the only story anyone in the country was talking about.
Inside the room, the woman on the bed looked less like an actress and more like a porcelain figure someone had forgotten to dust. Her doe eyes blinked at a white ceiling. Her lips, pale as the sheets beneath her, parted around a slow, confused breath. The sharp chemical bite of disinfectant stung her nose, and her face crumpled before she could stop it, though no sound of complaint escaped her.
She lay still, cataloguing the room with only her eyes. The soft luxury of the furniture, the unfamiliar machines blinking beside her bed. A hospital. She was fairly sure of that much.
But why?
She reached for her last memory and found nothing but a wall of white static, and the moment she pushed harder against it, pain lanced through her skull like a struck nerve.
Footsteps approached at a near-run. The door slid open, and three doctors and two nurses filed in like a small, urgent parade.
"Miss Ding, how are you feeling?" The lead doctor leaned over her, his voice carefully even.
She studied his face for a long moment before her mouth finally worked.
"...Did I die?"
It wasn't meant to be funny. She could feel a dull ache deep in her stomach, and beneath the confusion sat a colder certainty — something terrible had happened to her, and she had no memory of what.
"You were in a coma, Miss Ding." The doctor's voice stayed level, professional, the kind of calm reserved for delivering news that wasn't.
Her chest tightened. She'd known it was bad. She hadn't known it was that bad.
"...For how long?"
"Almost a year."
The number landed like a slap. Beneath the blanket, her hands curled into fists hard enough to ache. A year. An entire year of her life, of her career, of everyone who loved her — gone, swallowed whole, while she lay here breathing through a machine.
A single tear welled and was blinked away before anyone in the room could register it had ever existed. She had spent a decade learning to control her face for cameras. It served her well now, in front of an audience that mattered far more.
What followed was a blur of tests — for her mind, her reflexes, her memory — that ate up most of the morning. Somewhere in the middle of it, someone finally reached her parents.
They arrived in under thirty minutes, faces wrecked from a year of carefully held-together grief finally breaking open.
"Jia'er!"
"My princess!"
They folded around her at once, holding her like she might vanish again if they loosened their grip even slightly. For a year they had lived suspended in a single, terrible possibility. That their daughter might never open her eyes again, that they might never get the chance to say the things they'd left unsaid. Now that fear collapsed all at once, and they wept without shame into her hospital gown.
"Mom. Dad." She let herself be held, savoring a warmth she hadn't realized she'd missed until just now. Then, quietly: "What happened to me? Why am I here?"
She felt it the instant the question left her mouth. The subtle stiffening in both their bodies, the held breath, the silence that lasted one beat too long to be nothing.
Whatever had put her in that bed, her parents clearly weren't ready to say it out loud.