“No — Sister, look at me. I’m Tongtong. Don’t you recognize me, sister?”
The girl sobbed wildly, mucus and tears streaming together. She wore an old patched frock; a cartoon hairclip pinned her brow. Her face was streaked with dirt and small rough wounds. On the snowfields, such wounds rarely had time to fully heal before the wind would crack them anew — most of the children here looked like this.
Looking at the girl’s pitiful face, Tang Xin hesitated.
The other girl’s dull long hair was likewise covered in grime; on closer inspection it showed a near-black blue. Perhaps the child had the wrong person — maybe Tang Xin simply resembled her sister.
“Sister promised she’d be back to find Tongtong after a month,” the girl sniffled, her eyes puffy from crying. “It’s been half a year already and sister only just came back.”
On the snow plain, half a year without return likely meant the sister would never come back. After all, she was only a child and couldn’t reason through such complicated things, Tang Xin thought. As she gently stroked the girl’s head, thinking how to comfort her into accepting the truth, the next thing the girl said made both of them start.
“Mom and Dad and everyone have been acting so strange these last few days. I’m so scared, but I won’t tell the others. Sister, come home with me and see if they’ve gotten sick, okay?”
Tang Xin glanced at Xu Xiaoyou; the latter nodded.
She crouched down and wiped the girl’s tears with a gentle tone: “How are your parents? Tell Sister.”
Tongtong calmed only after a long while. Her nostrils twitched; her voice trembled with sobs.
“They’re sick — they just sit in bed and don’t move. They don’t eat. When Tongtong asks them things they don’t answer.”
Xu Xiaoyou’s mind immediately jumped to the talk at the dinner table about able-bodied villagers disappearing recently; she followed that thread to think of the puppeteer. Could those affairs be related?
She signaled Tang Xin with her eyes.
“Let’s take her home and have a look,” Tang Xin said.
“Okay,” the girl nodded vigorously.
Not long after the two young women followed the child, a man in the stilt house’s living room woke from the drunken table. He looked alert, as if the stupor had been only an act.
Chen San maneuvered past several passed-out men and rushed into a room. In the center of the room a stove of stacked bricks held a large iron cauldron above it. The cauldron looked fairly new; the black lacquer on its surface hadn’t peeled completely and it felt rough to the touch. Such a pot was used in the settlement for communal meals — big enough to stew an entire ox or sheep.
He recalled the whispering voice he had heard earlier and felt increasingly uneasy. In a sudden motion he lifted the lid of the cauldron.
His pupils constricted violently at what he saw.
Brownish scum bubbled and rolled on the surface of a simmering broth. Then two human heads bobbed up — faces he knew well: the two men from Station No. 3.
One of them had skin peeled from bone; his lips hung open in a familiar, astonished grin.
Chen San recoiled a step, a chill running over him. When he turned, he met two eyes filled with unfathomable emptiness.
A woman stood there smiling at him, a bloodied axe in her hand.
In the pale light filling the living room, the woman’s shadow changed grotesquely: it swelled and writhed as if countless limbs were growing out of her body. Her skull split open and caved to one side as though her chest had burst—horrifying transformation.
Meanwhile, on the way back, the girl seemed to pour all six months of grievance into the young women as they walked. Tang Xin was patient and played the good listener, offering gentle words of comfort from time to time.
They reached the child’s home quickly.
The girl’s house sat in a corner of the village; a lean-to over the doorway collected meltwater from the broken tile roof. When the snow melted, the runoff trickled onto that lean-to, where simple filters and boiling made it usable water for the settlement — for washing, cooking, even drinking.
Tongtong took the girls’ hands and pushed the front “door” open. It wasn’t really a door but a jagged scrap of metal whose rusted edges could cut. Wedged in against the wall it served as a crude barrier. It wouldn’t stop a ferocious beast — a strong shove or a kick would collapse it — but in this refugee settlement, such a door had great symbolic value: a wide-open house tested people’s character more than one with the door shut.
As they stepped inside, a thick, congealing stench of blood made them tense.
The girl, however, seemed unfazed and hurried into the inner room, still holding Tang Xin’s hand.
Tang Xin’s heart missed a beat at the sight in the inner room.
Two human puppets lay motionless on chairs, bound together with thin steel wires. The candlelight cast shadows in their hollow eye sockets; their chests still rose and fell, and beating hearts were visible.
Tongtong had, unknown to them, begun to change. Red veins appeared in her eyes; blackish blood trickled from them. Her entire body trembled with an excited frenzy:
“See? I wasn’t lying, Sister. Mom and Dad still breathe. I can see their little hearts beating!”
“They’re all sick. Sister, why don’t you join us?”
Tang Xin said nothing. She launched a full-force strike: a vortex of water hurled the child’s thin frame across the room, slamming her into the wall with a dull thud.
“Sister! That hurt, just like before — tee-hee,” the girl mocked.
But despite the impact, Tongtong seemed unharmed. She sprang up with inhuman agility, scampering along the ceiling like a spider. She dodged Tang Xin’s subsequent water attacks and let out a shrill, uncanny laugh. A small dagger had appeared in her hand; she slashed toward Tang Xin’s neck.
“So let me hurt you properly, Sister!”
A burning blade suddenly pierced the child’s neck from the side. Xu Xiaoyou stepped forward without hesitation and threw her long blade through the girl’s body.
The blade tore through the wall, leaving a wide, fractured hole. Even with her throat perforated and her body pinned to the wall, the girl kept laughing as she twitched her little dagger again and again. Then in an instant she lost all strength — limbs slackened and she dropped. The collision of wood-on-wood sounded like a stage puppet collapsing.
As the flesh dulled and rotted, maggots spilled from it. Both women felt their stomachs turn.
In a short span the girl, before their eyes, became a lifeless puppet: all signs of vitality drained away.
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