The hospital, Lin Yue understood, hadn't just spoken.
It expected an answer.
Nobody moved. The name still hung somewhere in the air of the common area, even though the speaker above the archway had already gone quiet, its little red light dimming back to standby the same way it always did — as if reading a stranger's name into a room of fourteen frightened people was nothing more than another line item in its nightly routine.
"Who was that?" Yun Shu asked again, shorter this time.
Nobody answered her the second time either.
Lin Yue's eyes moved toward the corridor without any real decision behind it. He didn't expect anything to happen. That was, he would think later, exactly the mistake the hospital seemed built to encourage — the assumption that a name read once, calmly, into an empty hallway, was simply going to be left there.
Then he heard it.
