The chaos hit them like a wall of sound and smell.
By the time Jing Shu and Wu You'ai shoved their way through the grimy, overcrowded hallway of Building No. 1, the place was already packed to bursting, a pressurized can of human desperation. The air was thick with the odor of damp concrete, unwashed bodies, and the faint, ever-present reek of the red nematodes breeding in every available container of stagnant water.
Just like the cave assignments, placements had been brutally simple: by community. They crammed everyone from a given district into the same concrete honeycomb. If you were from Banana Community, you went to Building No. 1. If you didn't fit, you were stuffed in anyway, human tetris played with living pieces.
The math was obscene. The building had a little over two hundred skeletal units, yet more than three thousand souls had been assigned to its crumbling embrace. Each unit held fifteen to twenty people, making the Lunar New Year train station crush look like a spacious park. Every corner, kitchen, dining alcove, living room, bedrooms, was a mosaic of limbs, bundled possessions, and hollow eyes. In the rough-finished units without fixtures, the government had frantically organized "toilet installation details." Otherwise, with that many people, the sanitation math became apocalyptic. The bitter irony was palpable: no water shortage this year, but most of the city's actual toilets lay under meters of murky floodwater. Soon, you would see scavenger teams rowing downtown, their prize not food or medicine, but porcelain toilet bowls hauled back like treasure.
Otherwise, the floor would be paved with gold, and every footstep would sink into something soft. It was why Jing Shu wore her cracked yellow raincoat and knee-high rubber boots like a second skin, even indoors.
When they finally reached Unit 407, Wang Dazhao's unit, the door hung crooked on its hinges, pried open with clear, brutal force. Inside, three couples had already set up shop, with two grubby-faced brats in tow. The fact that a unit held only six adults and two children, instead of twenty, screamed one thing: connections. They were in the middle of a tense, greedy division of Wang Dazhao's leftover life, a moth-eaten quilt, a stained mattress, a few chipped bowls.
"Sis, I'm just saying, you took the quilt already. What's wrong with me taking the mattress? Fair's fair."
"Lao Liu, Lao Zhang, your families each grabbed a bed. The quilt should come to me, right? My old bones need the warmth."
"Xiao Li, you're young, tough it out! Besides, you have the sofa. It's soft. What else do you need?"
It was a standoff of petty avarice. No one would budge.
"I paid three hundred labor points to get in here! Be reasonable!"
"I gave a bottle of baijiu and a ten-pound bag of rice! Who didn't pay a premium?"
"My uncle arranged this unit! So what if you gave gifts? Be honest, or I'll have you thrown out!"
"You try! Our names are going on the title tomorrow!"
While the adults bickered, the kids ran shrieking underfoot, chasing crimson nematodes in a plastic basin with a disturbing, focused joy.
Jing Shu and Wu You'ai charged in. The room fell silent for a beat.
"Who are you?" a woman with a pinched face snapped, clutching a bundled quilt to her chest. "You can't barge in here! Don't tell me they assigned spots to you two as well. There's no room left. It's full."
"My uncle said it's just our three families," said a thin man with a bureaucrat's frown, eyeing the newcomers' determined stance. "What do you want?"
Jing Shu's fist clenched, the knuckles letting out a series of sharp, audible cracks. She felt the old, familiar heat rise in her chest, the urge to swing first and ask questions into their unconscious faces. She forced it down, a steel lid on a boiling pot. "The owner of this unit is not dead," she said, her voice dangerously low. "Who let you move in? Do you not know that breaking and entering into a registered residence allows the owner to execute on the spot under the Emergency Edicts?"
"Hey now, watch your mouth, girl!" the thin man blustered, though he took a step back. "Director Zhang assigned us here! He said the owner hasn't appeared for over thirty days. Who knows where he wandered off to? He must be dead."
"Exactly," the woman chimed in, her face a mask of counterfeit righteousness. "Must have drowned. Being out of contact equals being dead now. The unit naturally reverts to the state for reassignment."
They all nodded, speaking with straight faces, building their lie together.
Jing Shu drew a deep, steadying breath that did nothing to cool the fire inside. "Then call Director Zhang over to resolve this," she said flatly. You had to cut the rot at the root. Trying to reason with locusts who had greased palms to steal a home was an exercise in futility.
"Who do you think you are?" the thin man spat, emboldened by her apparent calm. "What business is it of yours? You say call, and we will, AH! YOU, YOU HIT ME! AHH!"
At first, he could still scream. After a few precise, piston-like punches and a sweep of the legs that dropped him to the concrete, he couldn't make a sound, only gurgle. Maybe she had done this often. Jing Shu had the rhythm down, economical, brutal, efficient.
"HELP! MURDER! ASSAULT! THEY'RE SEIZING A PRIVATE HOME! THEY SHOULD BE TAKEN OUT AND SHOT, ACK PFFT!" Another man lunged, only to be met with a backhand that sent a molar spinning through the dank air on a brand-new trajectory to live its best, independent life.
The room boiled into chaos. Building No. 1, already a tinderbox of overcrowded tension, provided spectators like gossip-starved moths to a flame. They crowded the broken doorway, a packed, silent audience to the violence.
Five minutes later, the floor held seven or eight groaning, curled-up bodies.
"What is going on here? WHAT IS GOING ON? Why is everyone gathered?" Director Zhang's voice cut through the din. He smoothed the few greasy strands of hair across his scalp and frowned at the scene, though the frown didn't reach his shrewd, calculating eyes. "Who started a fight? Call the police! Arrest them immediately! Zhang Yi! How are you? Who did this to you?"
His nephew could only sob through shattered lips, his face already swelling into a grotesque, puffy bun. He tried to point a trembling finger toward the two figures sitting calmly on the now-vacated sofa.
Director Zhang's gaze followed. He knew that face. Oh, he knew it all too well. Yesterday, at that fortified villa, she had exposed his shakedown attempt on the spot, and her grizzled old father had knocked two of his front teeth out with a single, shocking punch.
Seeing that today she had not brought her human wrecking ball of a father, and seemed to have only that quiet, sharp-eyed woman at her back, Director Zhang puffed himself up, his official vest straining. "So! You came to make trouble here, too? I'll call the station right now and have you detained for good!"
He made a show of it, pulling out a chunky satellite phone. "Hello, 110? Banana Community, Building No. 1. Someone has forced entry and assaulted residents! Seven or eight injured, very serious! Yes! Come arrest them! Don't worry, I'll keep them here."
After the call, he grew more smug, a toad inflating on a power trip. "How's that? We missed you in the act yesterday. Today you deliver yourselves. Too easy to just ship you off to a labor brigade. I should first trick your old man out, get him to pay for your 'release.' Those nine hundred community coins he's hoarding, that's the real prize."
Zhang Yi tried to warn him with a wet, desperate sound. This woman was a devil. Her punches didn't just hurt; they carried the cold finality of a judge's gavel.
After venting, Jing Shu felt wonderfully, terrifyingly clear-headed. "Director Zhang, right?" she said, her voice cutting through his gloating. "The owner of this unit is not dead and not missing. He's about to return. Please undo whatever 'arrangements' you made and put these people out the way you brought them in."
"Comrade, do not malign me!" he retorted, playing to the crowd now. "This Wang Dazhao has had no contact for over 180 days! He was long ago processed as deceased! Don't think I don't know. The previous Consolation and Counseling Specialist was from your little circle, right? You thought a filed note would 'deceive the sky' and let you sell the place under the table? Our country will never allow such scum to operate!"
Jing Shu's knuckles clicked again, a soft, deadly percussion. "Big Data has the owner's identity on record. He crossed the China border at Ruili three days ago. You knew he was alive and still placed people here. That's… bold."
"Hmph!" Director Zhang scoffed, a fleck of spittle landing on his chin. "Even if the owner stood here this minute, it wouldn't matter! As allocators, we must prioritize the living, the people right here! Missing persons count as dead for housing purposes! Who knows who's carrying his phone to ping locations on Big Data anyway, a trafficker? A scavenger?" He leaned forward, his voice dropping to a venomous, triumphant whisper meant only for her. "Besides, the transfer is already done. Today, I finalized this unit's title to these three families. It has nothing to do with your Wang Dazhao anymore. The ink is dry."
He expected panic, despair, futile rage.
Instead, a slow, cold smile spread across Jing Shu's face, one that didn't touch her winter-gray eyes. "You move fast," she conceded, her voice barely above a murmur. She had underestimated how ruthlessly this petty bureaucrat would play the game. "But you think a forged title will let you steal a unit from a man who's fought his way back from hell?" She shook her head, almost pitying. "How naive."