The Unscreened City

CHAPTER 001

The Unregistered Reel

The scream came from somewhere below them. It wasn’t human.

The message appeared at 3:17 AM. No sender. No subject.

Just coordinates. At 2:11 in the morning, Liang Xu was crouched at the restoration bench on sublevel two of the Lomond Cultural Heritage Bureau’s Restoration Hall, his gloves still wet with spent fixer. The night roster had him down as the only person on shift—his name alone in the cell, neat and unquestioned. At this hour the entire building should have contained exactly three sounds, no more: the low-frequency hum of the ventilation fan, a sound so constant it had become a kind of silence; the dehumidifier’s click every seven minutes, sharp as a knuckle cracking; and the dry rustle of archive paper when he turned a page, the friction of cellulose fibre grazing against itself, a whisper that belonged to no living throat.

He heard a fourth.

A second person breathing.

He was not imagining it. He switched off the fan. The hum died. The dehumidifier chose that exact moment to cut out—slipping into the gap between its cycles as though on cue. The room dropped into a silence that lasted three full seconds, the kind of silence that presses against the eardrums from the inside.

The breathing was still there.

It came from behind him, somewhere between the two rows of steel archive cabinets that ran the length of the sublevel. Light and steady. Too regular for wind working its way through old ductwork, too soft for water moving inside a pipe. It was human breathing—the even, unhurried rhythm of someone deep in sleep, each exhale carrying a faint nasal tremor at its tail, the sort of sound a body makes only when it has fully let go of the waking world.

Liang Xu tightened his grip on the screwdriver. He rose. He walked around the restoration bench.

A man lay curled on the floor between the archive cabinets.

Thirtyish. He wore the Restoration Hall’s grey work uniform, the collar frayed to a soft fringe. Liang Xu did not recognise his face. The man’s eyes were shut. His breathing was level, undisturbed. One hand was tucked under his cheek, a makeshift pillow. The other hand was closed around a film reel.

The grip was fierce. The knuckles had gone white, the fingernails bitten deep into the flesh of the palm—four small crescents pressed into skin. This was not the loose, careless arrangement of a sleeping body. This was a person who had taken every remaining unit of strength in his frame and channelled it into those fingers, holding onto the reel the way a drowning man holds onto something that floats.

Liang Xu’s first thought was not Who is he.

His first thought was How did he get in.

The Restoration Hall at night required two security barriers. Old Zhou, the guard on the ground floor, did a full patrol every hour on the hour. Liang Xu’s own access card had just been reauthorised that week—he had signed the form himself. The second interior door still demanded a fingerprint scan. These were not ornamental measures. The Bureau treated its film archives the way a bank treats its vault.

None of it mattered now. The man was already inside. He was breathing the same air. He was sleeping on the same floor. He was holding a reel of film that, by every regulation and procedure Liang Xu could name, should never have left its storage cabinet.

Liang Xu did not wake him.

He knelt. He took hold of the reel and began to ease it from the man’s grip, slow and steady, the way you draw a splinter from skin. The film came free.

The hand that had held it—clenched for what must have been thirty minutes or more—went slack in the same instant. But the timing was wrong. The hand relaxed not after the reel was withdrawn, but halfway through, a fraction of a second before the pull was complete. As if it had been waiting for exactly this motion, and the moment it sensed the intention, it no longer needed strength.

The film was warm. Body temperature. Thirty-six degrees Celsius and then some. The kind of warmth that comes only from prolonged contact with living skin.

He looked down to check the film’s protective layer. The acetate surface, the sprocket perforations, the leader tape. Three seconds. Maybe four.

When he lifted his head, the floor was clean.

The depression where a human body had pressed against the tile—gone. No imprint in the fine layer of archival dust that settled on everything down here. No trace of the faint condensation that breath always leaves on cold stone, the small damp patch that should have marked where the man’s mouth had been. Even that was gone.

The man was not there.

Not had departed. Not had slipped away while Liang Xu’s head was down. The door had not opened. The corridor had not received footsteps. The man had simply ceased to occupy the space. The absence was absolute and clean, the way a frame of film goes missing from a reel—one moment an image, the next the black splice where an image used to be.

Only the film was real. It was real because it was still in Liang Xu’s hand.

He stood. His knee gave a click. He was twenty-six years old. Knees should not click at twenty-six. His father had once told him, years ago, that when you spent too long underground your bones aged ahead of the rest of you—the damp got into the joints and the cold accelerated whatever clock the body kept. Liang Xu had never believed it. Every time Old Zhou, the night guard, launched into another story about the old Restoration Hall—equipment that switched itself on, items that migrated between shelves, shapes in the corner of your eye that did not resolve into anything—Liang Xu filed the stories as entertainment, nothing more.

The Restoration Hall was an institution of verifiable fact. It trusted accession numbers, date stamps, cross-reference indices. It did not trust anecdote. When something could not be seen, an archivist did not say it existed. Did not say it did not exist. Said only that it fell outside the search parameters. This formulation was precise, institutional, and had served the Bureau for six decades. Liang Xu had always found it sufficient.

He set the film onto the inspection table. He adjusted the tension arm until it held the reel at the correct resistance. He switched on the cold-light viewer.

“Don’t touch it.” Simon’s hand shot out, blocking Liang Xu’s arm. “Don’t touch anything until we know what room this is.”

The first frames came up as snow. The granular flicker distinctive to old acetate stock leader—random noise, black and white and grey, like a blizzard compressed into two dimensions, every flake a particle of silver halide that had never been exposed to anything but its own chemistry. Then, without transition, an image resolved.

A narrow staircase.

The Old Bathhouse. The employee access passage.

Liang Xu knew those wall tiles. White ceramic glaze, laid during Lomond’s textile-manufacturing boom a hundred and thirty years ago. The glaze was now crazed with hairline fractures, a web of cracks so fine it looked almost organic, like the veins of a leaf printed onto clay. Sometime in the building’s middle age a maintenance crew had brushed a coat of grey industrial paint over everything—rough, uneven, applied with the hurry of men who had been given a budget and told to make it stretch.

In places the paint had lifted, curling back from the wall in brittle flakes, exposing the old white glaze beneath, still glossy after all that time. Liang Xu knew these details because he had compiled the Old Bathhouse’s architectural-materials dossier the year before, cross-referencing construction invoices against city building-code violations. The tiles had been fired at twelve hundred degrees Celsius—a hundred below the industry standard. They began to crack within three years of installation. The textile mill that built the bathhouse had never spent a single yuan more on infrastructure than the law forced it to.

“This is wrong,” Simon said. He was staring at the screen. “The timestamp is wrong.”

The passage was not long. The camera pushed slowly downward, the operator’s footsteps bouncing off the curved walls and returning a half-beat delayed, the acoustics of a space that had not been built for sound. Liang Xu had not known, until that moment, that the Old Bathhouse corridor was curved. The original blueprints showed a straight line.

The construction firm had changed the design to save money. A straight corridor required more reinforcement at the joins. A curve distributed the load more cheaply. No one had corrected the blueprint. For a century, the official record of the building had described a geometry that did not exist.

The passage ended at a circular underground chamber.

“Who’s there?” Liang Xu said.

The archive cabinets gave back no answer. But the breathing—the second breathing—stopped for a beat, as if his voice had brushed against something in the air and that thing had flinched.

“I’m turning on the light.” His voice came out steadier than he had expected. “If you’re hurt, make a sound.”

Three seconds passed. A small, hollow clatter: an empty film canister rolled out from the foot of the nearest cabinet and came to rest against his shoe. Taped to the inside of its lid was a strip of paper, narrow as a fortune-cookie slip. Two characters, handwritten in a script that was neat but not practised, the kind of handwriting that belongs to someone who writes rarely and with care:

unscreened.

What the camera showed next was not a ceiling. It was the Old Bathhouse drainage vault, an arched brick dome whose curve had been shaped not by aesthetics but by the physics of water moving through stone. Three kinds of brick were set into the arch: Roman-era red, porous and darkened by a century of seepage; industrial-revolution grey, hard-fired and vitreous; and raw cement block from the postwar reconstruction, patched in where the original masonry had failed.

Three materials, three geological eras, one surface. The joints between them were still weeping water. A slow, patient seep that had been underway since before anyone now working in the building was born.

Thirty chairs stood on the stone floor, all facing the same direction. No two matched. There was a folding chair of the kind used in school auditoriums, its plywood seat stamped with a manufacturer’s logo that had gone out of business in 1974. There was a café chair with a woven-rattan back, the weave coming undone at one corner.

There was a plastic stool of the sort found in public-clinic waiting rooms, pale green and lightly scratched. There was a union-hall leather armchair, its upholstery cracked in the pattern of a dried riverbed. None of these chairs had been made for this room. None of them belonged together. But they had been gathered here, chair by chair, from separate corners of the city, and arranged into rows with a precision that could only have come from a single organising intelligence—the same hand, patient and methodical, repeating the same act of transport until the room was full.

A white fabric screen hung at the front of the chamber. It held no projected image. Only light: the cold, colourless beam of the projector lamp, passing through a column of suspended dust, striking the fabric and diffusing back into the room. The projector was running. Its reels were turning. But there was nothing on the screen except brightness.

“You saw it too.” Marta did not look up from the projector. “The man on the floor. Where did he go?”

“I do not know.” Liang Xu was still holding the reel. It was still warm.

There was no audience. Not a single person sat in any of the thirty chairs. Yet the projector was running, and someone had turned it on, and someone must have threaded the film—or would have, had there been film to thread.

A young man in a dark overcoat stood at the edge of the frame, his back to the camera. He was lifting the chair farthest to the side, hoisting it with both hands and carrying it away. His movements were unhurried, deliberate.

The body language of someone performing a task that belonged to him, that he had done before and would do again. Not theft. Maintenance. After he set the chair down somewhere outside the frame, he turned his head partway back.

The projector light struck his face dead-on. The exposure blew out. Where a face should have been there was only white—an overexposed absence, light erasing feature. What remained was a thin arc of jawline at the lower edge of the glare, and the curve of one ear, faintly backlit, like a fragment of a photograph torn along its subject’s outline.

Then the camera swung toward the entrance.

And Liang Xu saw himself.

Not the way a mirror shows you yourself. A mirror requires your complicity—you turn toward it, you meet your own gaze, you are the agent of your own seeing. This was different. On this film, Liang Xu had been captured by another person, from another angle, at a moment when he believed he was unseen. He was walking through the frame. He was breathing. He was doing something he had assumed was private—something only he knew about.

The Liang Xu on the screen was wearing a grey shirt. He had dropped that shirt at the laundry the afternoon before. It was still there now, uncollected, hanging on a rail behind the counter with a paper tag pinned to its collar. And yet here it was, on his body, in this image.

In his hand he held his Restoration Hall access card. He was standing in the entrance to the underground chamber, one foot already across the threshold.

Shooting date: tomorrow. Timestamp: 00:17.

The inspection table’s light tube gave a slow shiver. Not the rapid, nervous flicker of a fluorescent bulb dying—something else. A smooth, tidal dimming and brightening, deliberate in its rhythm, like an eyelid closing and then opening again, taking its time about it.

“Move.” Marta grabbed his arm. “Now.”

Liang Xu didn’t ask why. He moved.

In the corner of the room, a red diode ignited on the surveillance camera. That camera had a maintenance tag hanging from its mounting bracket. EQUIPMENT UNDER SERVICE, the tag read, in the Bureau’s standard block lettering. The camera should have been disconnected from power. It was not disconnected.

Liang Xu’s thumb came to rest on the pause button. He did not press it. Instead he reversed the film, turning the hand-crank on the inspection table counterclockwise, frame by frame, back toward the moment the light had erased the young man’s face.

The arc of the jaw. The left-weighted stance, one shoulder dropped half a centimetre lower than the other. The right thumb hooked habitually over the lip of the trouser pocket, a gesture so automatic its owner would not know he made it.

Liang Xu made it. The same thumb. The same pocket. The same half-centimetre drop of the left shoulder.

Identical. Not imitation. Not mimicry. The same piece of negative, exposed twice. Once of him—the him he knew. Once of a second man, a man he did not recognise, who shared every micro-gesture down to the level where conscious control does not reach.

His fingers began to tremble. Not the visible shaking of fear or cold. This was something beneath the skin—a fine, rapid spasm in the small muscles of the hand, the kind of tremor a damaged nerve produces, like a filament of copper wire sparking inside wet tissue.

He took his hands off the table. He pressed them flat against his own knees and held them there until the trembling stopped.

Inside the canister that had held the film, there was no accession number. The accession number was the archival system’s only means of recognising a record. Without one, an object did not appear in the search database. It did not appear in the catalogue.

It could not be cited in any official report. It had no location, no provenance, no entry in the chain of custody. Institutionally—legally—the object did not exist. It was a blank in the grid, and the grid had been designed not to register blanks.

The canister contained only a paper label, its original colour faded to the yellow-white of old newsprint, its edges softened and worn from repeated handling. Someone had touched this label many times. The two characters written across it were the same as the slip inside the lid: unscreened.

He called Eliane. No answer. At three-fourteen in the morning, nobody answered. That was not suspicious. That was the nature of three-fourteen in the morning.

He typed a message: Come to the restoration room first thing.

Five words. They took him a full minute. He changed come to please come, then changed it back. Please sounded anxious. It invited questions he did not yet know how to answer. He settled on the original five words, sent the message, and laid the phone face-down on the worktable. The gesture was not about avoiding replies. It was about avoiding the absence of a reply. A phone that is face-down cannot show you an empty screen.

The jar of instant coffee on the shelf above the workbench had solidified into a single brown brick. He chipped at it with the back of a spoon, knifed off enough granules for one cup. There was no hot water. The kettle had been unplugged since the previous afternoon.

He drank the coffee cold. The first swallow was too bitter. The second swallow was also too bitter. After the third he set the mug down on the tabletop, and the small ceramic sound of its landing coincided exactly with a water droplet falling somewhere far down the drainage system—two percussive events arriving at his ear in the same instant, perfectly phased, as though the building’s plumbing had been waiting for him to stop drinking.

The water dripped three more times at long, uneven intervals. Not a leak. Leaks are regular. This was air trapped in the old cast-iron pipes, pushing pockets of water ahead of it in sluggish surges. When you had spent enough time below ground, Liang Xu thought, these mechanical sounds became more legible than human voices. They followed physical laws. They did not dissemble. They did not try to help.

He ran the film from the beginning again.

This time he counted the chairs. He made a deliberate count, touching each chair on the screen with the tip of a pencil, numbering them under his breath. Twenty-nine.

But on the first viewing, he had watched the young man in the dark overcoat lift one of the chairs and carry it out of the frame. Which meant the original count was thirty. Remove one, twenty-nine remain—simple arithmetic. Except that on that first viewing, before he knew to count, he had looked at the rows of mismatched seating and thought: thirty.

He had counted an extra chair that was not there. Or he had counted thirty when there had only ever been twenty-nine. Or one of the chairs in that room held an occupant invisible to the camera, invisible to Liang Xu, a presence that registered as furniture because the alternative was not something the eye knew how to deliver to the brain.

There was no way to go back and check. The film showed what it showed. The first viewing was over.

The young man carrying the chair—Liang Xu paused on the frame where his hand was visible, gripping the chair back. On the webbing between right thumb and forefinger, a patch of scar tissue. Old. Well-healed, the surface smooth but the colour slightly off, a permanent stain on the skin. The placement was precise.

“Are you sure?”

“No,” Liang Xu admitted. “But I’m going anyway.”

Liang Xu knew that scar. He had an industrial-injury report on file in the very building where he was standing. Three years ago, while restoring a reel of factory-accident footage for the City Archive, a beaker of fixer had tipped and splashed across the webbing of his left hand.

The report contained photographs, a doctor’s note, a workmen’s-compensation filing, his own signature at the bottom. The Restoration Hall kept complete records. He had filled out every form himself.

Yet he had no memory of the burn.

No memory of pain. No memory of bandaging, of changing dressings, of the skin pulling tight as it healed, of the weeks it must have taken for a chemical burn across a joint to close. He remembered the forms. He remembered the pen in his hand, the date stamp, the photocopier’s green light sliding across the page. He did not remember the wound.

He turned his left hand over beneath the cold-light lamp. The skin across the thumb-webbing was smooth. Unbroken. A uniform colour from base to knuckle. Not a single line of scar tissue. Not even the faint white thread a healed burn should leave behind, the permanent ghost of injury that the body writes into itself and never erases.

The file said the burn had happened.

“How many?”

“Four. Maybe five.”

“Alive?”

Noel’s silence was the answer.

The film said the burn had happened—mirrored, reversed, but there, on the other hand, on the body of a man who moved like him and stood like him and held his thumb the way he held his thumb.

His skin said nothing had ever happened.

Three sources. Two of them agreed. Two of them were lying, or had been made to lie, or belonged to a version of events in which the burn had occurred and the third source—the smooth, unscarred hand he held open under the lamp—was the anomaly, the record that had been altered while no one was looking.

Or one of the three was not located on the same timeline.

Outside the window, past the shelves of chemical bottles and the stacked film cans and the dust-filmed glass, the sky was beginning to pale. At four in the morning in Lomond, the dark never goes all the way to black and the dawn never comes all the way to light. The city at this hour existed in a transitional grey, the colour of unprocessed film stock suspended in a developing tray—an image that had not yet committed to being an image, that could still go either way. The chimney of the bakery across the street was issuing its first white plume of the day. The baker fired his ovens at four-thirty precisely, a full three hours before the municipal street sweepers began their routes.

Liang Xu had worked in this building for six years. He had never once stood at this window at this hour. For six years he had clocked in at seven, noticed the outside world at seven-ten, and then descended into the sublevels where there were no windows at all. He had not known what colour the sky was above the Restoration Hall at four in the morning. He had not known there was a bakery chimney visible from this window.

He looked down at the film reel, still threaded onto the inspection table, and in that moment he understood—not intellectually but physically, in the muscles of his own hand—the grip the sleeping man had used. The desperate clench of the knuckles. The fingernails in the palm. It was not possession. Possession was the wrong category. No one can possess an image torn from a timeline that does not contain them.

What the grip signalled was something older, something that predated the language of ownership. It was the act of placing into another person’s hands a thing you could no longer carry yourself—and then saying nothing. No instruction. No explanation. No plea. Just the transfer of weight from one body to another, in silence, because the weight itself was the only message that mattered.

Entrustment, Liang Xu thought. The word arrived fully formed.

Entrustment did not require words. It required hands.

Two knocks landed on the door.

He turned. The corridor outside was lit. The ventilation fan was running. The dehumidifier ticked into its active phase, right on schedule. Nothing out of place. He crossed the room and opened the door.

The corridor was empty. Wedged into the door handle, held in place by the pressure of the jamb, was a narrow slip of paper.

Ticket stock. The kind of heavy, fibrous paper used for cinema admissions in the decades before barcode scanners. Perforated along one edge where it had been torn from a roll. Seat number: B-17, stamped in faded red ink. On the reverse, a single line of handwriting, the ink so fresh it smeared under his thumb:

Tonight. Midnight. Old Bathhouse, rear entrance.

His phone vibrated. A notification from the Bureau’s access-control system. The message was automated, its phrasing indifferent:

Your credential has been used at location: Old Bathhouse, Drainage Level. Timestamp: current.

He was holding his phone in one hand and the ticket stub in the other. The credential the system was reporting was his own. The location was the Old Bathhouse drainage level. The timestamp was now—this minute, this second—while he was standing in a corridor on sublevel two of the Restoration Hall, a kilometre and a half away.

He slid the ticket into the pocket of his work coat. The pocket already held a small machine screw—he had dropped it in there the night before, while changing the fixer, a gesture so automatic he had not registered it until his fingers closed around the cool metal. The screw was warm now, heated by his body through the lining of the coat.

He stood at the junction of the corridor, where the main hall met the fire exit, for three seconds.

Three seconds is enough time to talk yourself into doing a thing. It is also enough time to talk yourself out of doing it. The two processes are almost identical—the same mental mechanism running in opposite directions, the same rapid cost-benefit analysis, the same voice in the head weighing risks against urgencies.

Liang Xu did neither. He did not talk himself into anything and he did not talk himself out of anything. He simply stood at the junction for three seconds, the screw warm in his pocket, the ticket stub tucked beside it, and then he pushed the bar on the fire-exit door and began descending toward the levels below.

Behind him, the corridor lights switched off in sequence. The farthest fixture first, then the next, then the next, moving toward the stairwell in a wave of darkness that perfectly matched the automatic timer’s programmed logic. The timer had been set to conserve electricity between the hours of midnight and six.

Liang Xu had read the maintenance memo. He knew the lights were functioning exactly as designed. But in the moment of descent, with the ticket stub in his pocket and the camera’s red eye still glowing in the corner of the restoration room behind him, the sequence looked less like energy conservation and more like pursuit—as though the darkness were following him down, door by door, checking each threshold before moving on.

In the ground-floor lobby, at seven o’clock exactly, the municipal cleaning cart hit the loosened tile just inside the main entrance and jolted on its axles, the same jolt it had produced every morning for the three years since the tile had come unseated.

The cleaning attendant, a woman in her fifties whose name Liang Xu had never learned, steadied the cart and pushed on toward the elevators. She did not hear the empty film canister on the restoration bench two floors below ring faintly in sympathetic vibration—a thin, metallic note, barely a sound at all.

The canister sat where Liang Xu had left it. The bench was empty. The cold-light lamp was still on.

He was no longer in the building. But he would be back. The screw in his pocket was a small thing, a piece of threaded steel no longer than a fingernail, and it meant nothing by itself. But he had not put it there.

He had not intended to keep it. And yet it was still in his pocket, warm from his own body, when he pushed open the fire door and the darkness came down behind him like a curtain falling on an empty stage. He pushed open the fire door and walked deeper into the dark. Behind him, the corridor lights went out one by one, following him down.