Her phone had been taken long ago. From the holding cell, she couldn't see the clock on the main hall's wall. Going by her gut feeling, after what seemed like twenty or thirty minutes, Jin Xueli realized this was bad.
The lightbulb in the cell suddenly went out. The faint, dim light from the main hall seemed to breathe its last on the way down the stairs, never even reaching the bottom.
She fumbled her way to the iron bars. Before her was nothing but a hazy, deep darkness.
'...It's not a power outage.'
The ever-present, fluctuating clamor of voices in the Central Police Station had vanished at the exact moment the lights died. Not a single cry for help was heard, as if every single person had melted into the darkness.
The temperature plummeted, but it wasn't the cold of winter or air conditioning. The air grew thick and sticky, as if a layer of saliva coated her skin, sending waves of sickeningly cold shivers through her in the breeze.
