Ding Jia forgot the dead woman from earlier almost entirely. Until she stepped back into her own apartment that night and felt the temperature drop the moment she crossed the threshold.
She checked the thermostat. Unchanged. She adjusted it anyway, bumping the temperature up several degrees, but half an hour later the chill had only deepened, settling into her bones in a way no air conditioner should manage.
Annoyed, she reached for the intercom to call downstairs and got only static for her trouble.
"Hello? Hello?" She pressed the connect button repeatedly. Nothing.
Of course. Of course both the thermostat and the intercom decided to die on the same night. Grumbling, she headed for the door, intending to march down and file a complaint in person, and stopped cold the second her hand touched the knob.
Frost. A thin, delicate crust of ice coated the metal entirely, despite the fact that it was the height of summer outside and her apartment had never once frozen, even during actual winter. Her house was cold, but not ice-cold.
That's not possible, she thought, watching her own breath begin to fog faintly in the air. This isn't possible.
She reached out anyway, hand hesitating, and twisted.
The lock clicked uselessly, again and again, refusing to open no matter how hard she fought it.
Panic climbed steadily up her throat. Why wouldn't it open? Why—
Then, all at once, the panic drained out of her, replaced by something heavier. A thick, instinctive certainty that she wasn't supposed to fight this. She let go of the doorknob.
Slowly, she turned to face her own living room.
Blood. A wide, dark pool of it spread silently across her floor, and standing in the center of it was the same woman. The woman from the hallway, the woman from the police barricade, very much not finished with her yet.
The woman didn't seem to notice her at first, swaying slightly, gaze fixed on nothing. Ding Jia held her breath, irrationally hoping that if she stayed quiet enough, this might simply pass her by.
It didn't.
"Help me." The voice arrived not through the air, but somewhere directly inside her skull. "This is the only place I can still reach. Please. Can you help me?"
Ding Jia turned her head, slow and unwilling, and met the woman's eyes. Eyes weeping something dark and viscous down hollow cheeks.
"They killed me." The words came faster now, ragged with old fury. "I only wanted what they had. To be loved. Admired. And they pushed me. They pushed me!"
Whether that was fact or feeling, Ding Jia couldn't tell. The air around them thickened and dropped several more degrees as the woman's composure cracked entirely.
"They screamed at me. They cursed me until I couldn't breathe right anymore. I couldn't—"
The woman began to thrash, and with each violent motion, something slammed into Ding Jia from several feet away — grief, fury, a crushing, suffocating helplessness that wasn't hers and yet pressed against her chest like a physical weight. She gasped, struggling for air under an ache that had no obvious cause.
Why did this hurt so much? Why did it feel like her own heart breaking?
She knelt there for what felt like an eternity, absorbing wave after wave of someone else's unbearable grief, until — gradually — the storm began to ease. The thrashing slowed. The cries softened into something closer to exhaustion than rage.
And as the emotion drained out of the room, so did the blood. It receded into nothing, taking the bruises and the hollow eyes with it, until the woman standing in her living room looked less like a corpse and more like someone who had simply, finally, stopped suffering.