The monitors had gone back to normal.
That was the worst part, Lin Yue thought. Not the flatline. Not the single unbroken tone that had filled the corridor from every direction at once. It was that a full minute later, every screen in the ward was ticking along again as if nothing had asked them to stop.
The wall clock above the nurses' station still read 3:17. It had read 3:17 since the hallway light and the dying woman's voice and Han Xu's hand reaching for a shoulder that had no face above it. It would probably read 3:17 for the rest of the night. Lin Yue had stopped expecting the clock to do anything else.
"Every monitor," Bei Cheng said, for maybe the third time, like repeating it would make it smaller.
"We saw it," Fang Ning said, quiet.
"No." Lin Yue's voice was even. "I mean every monitor. Not just this floor."
Nobody answered that. There wasn't a way to check it that didn't involve walking corridors none of them wanted to walk tonight, and nobody suggested it.
