The Girl in the School Uniform

Fei Qiang got to them as Hui Nan was pulling Zhu Hua out of the pit. He helped drag her clear, and the dog stood at the treeline watching. Zhu Hua was shaking badly and her fingertips were bleeding from the scrabbling. Otherwise she was uninjured.

Wang Qin stood in the doorway of the building behind them.

Zhu Hua, when she had enough breath to speak, looked at Wang Qin and said: "You were supposed to be dead."

"Yes," Wang Qin said.

"I poisoned you." Zhu Hua's voice was shaking and defiant at once. "I put it in your tea. I know how much I used. You should have died."

Wang Qin's expression didn't change. "I found out. I substituted the cup."

A silence. Hui Nan looked between the two women.

"You didn't die," Zhu Hua said. "So why—"

"Did I frame my own death? Move my own body? Kill Tang Sui?" Wang Qin descended the two steps from the doorway. "Because I needed to disappear. Because someone was going to kill me eventually and I preferred to be in control of when and how." She stood in the clearing. Her voice was measured and very clear. "But also because the poisoner was one of my own colleagues. Someone I had worked with for years. And I wanted to understand why."

"You know why," Zhu Hua said.

"Tell me yourself."

Zhu Hua didn't answer.

"You poisoned me because of what happened to your daughter," Wang Qin said. "Her complaint. The one I told her was insufficient. The one I refused to escalate." A pause. "She was right that it was insufficient, Zhu Hua. There wasn't enough documented evidence. If I had escalated it and it had been dismissed again at the next level, it would have made things worse for her, not better. I made a judgment call. I may have been wrong. But it was not malice."

"She took her own life," Zhu Hua said. Her voice had gone flat and very quiet. "After the complaint was closed, she took her own life."

No one spoke.

Then from the treeline — the dog. It whimpered once, sharply, and Fei Qiang spun around.

A girl was standing at the edge of the clearing.

She was young — no more than fifteen, in the standard school uniform of No. 4 Middle School. She stood very still. Her face was in shadow; the flashlight beams didn't quite reach her. But the outline of her was sharp: the uniform, the short dark hair, the slight build of an adolescent.

It was not a face any of them knew.

But Wang Qin knew. Hui Nan watched Wang Qin's face change — the composure crumbling, the color going out of it, her hands coming up as if to ward something off.

"That's not possible," Wang Qin said. Her voice had changed completely, thin and high. "That's not — you're not—"

The girl in the clearing said nothing. She only stood there.

Wang Qin backed away. One step, then another, her eyes fixed on the girl. The clearing had an edge — the steep drop down the mountain's face. Her heel went over it. For one second she was balanced between the mountain and the air, arms wide.

Then she fell.

The sound she made falling was very brief.

The girl in the school uniform was gone. The clearing was empty.