Chapter 8

Chapter 8

My mom set the porridge on the table without a word.

Her eyes slowly reddened.

I knew what she was thinking.

She had seen me through the bus window.

The forty-nine-year-old me, standing among the faceless passengers, writing the words, “Don’t get on.”

I really wanted to ask Liang Yan why my future self had been so stupid.

But when the words reached my lips, I couldn’t ask.

Because I knew the answer too.

If the person trapped on that bus were my mom, a friend, someone I had seen with my own eyes, I might not have been able to make a smarter choice either.

I simply hadn’t reached that point yet.

Liang Yan said my future self wasn’t trapped there waiting to die.

She was searching for the true exit of the Jiugang Line.

As long as she found the source of the first “echo” from back then, and made the seventeen passengers admit they were already dead and stop seizing substitute passengers, the line would disperse.

But the hardest one was Liang Jianzhang.

He had always refused to admit he had taken the wrong route.

He pressed all his hatred onto my mom, and onto “those who didn’t board.”

After listening, I had only one question.

“How do I get in and save her?”

Liang Yan frowned at once.

“No.”

“You just said she’s looking for the exit.”

“That’s you twenty years in the future.”

“I can do it now too.”

“You can’t.”

He answered too quickly.

My temper flared. “Liang Yan, I’m not your student, and I’m not some projection of your Senior. Stop deciding for me.”

He froze.

Beside us, my mom said softly, “Zhixia.”

I looked at her.

She didn’t try to persuade me not to go. She only asked, “Have you thought it through?”

That was what was most amazing about my mom.

She was afraid, but she didn’t use her fear to tie me down.

I nodded.

“I have.”

Liang Yan braced himself against the edge of the bed, trying to sit up, and blood was already flowing back into the IV needle in the back of his hand.

I held him down.

“Lie down first.”

“Xu Zhixia.”

It was the first time he had called me by my full name.

I lowered my head and looked at him.

His voice was taut.

“I’ve already watched her stay inside once.”

My heart ached.

There was no forcefulness in that sentence, no command.

Only sadness.

I suddenly realized that to me, my future self was like someone both strange and familiar.

But to Liang Yan, she was someone who had endured twenty years with him.

Someone he had truly lost.

My tone softened a little.

“Then that’s all the more reason you should tell me how to save her.”

He looked at me for a long time.

In the end, he briefly closed his eyes.

“There’s another entrance to Echo Station.”

“Where?”

“The school where your dad used to work.”

Before he died, my dad taught physics at Jiugang No. 2 High School.

That school had merged and relocated ten years ago, and the old campus had long since been abandoned.

Liang Yan said that after my dad discovered the abnormality in the Jiugang Line back then, he hid all his records in the physics lab.

I asked, “How do you know?”

“Your future self told me.”

He paused, then added,

“She said that if the present you didn’t believe it, you should go look at the third lab table in the second row. Under the bottom of the drawer, there are words your dad carved there.”

I asked, “What words?”

Liang Yan looked at me.

“Zhixia, don’t be afraid of echoes.”

My fingers stiffened.

That was something my dad used to say all the time.

When I was little and afraid of thunder, he would take two stainless steel basins and do experiments for me, telling me that when sound hit something, it would come back.

He said, “An echo isn’t a ghost. It’s sound that went far away, then came back to find you.”

At that moment, I suddenly missed him terribly.

Ten years had passed, and I rarely dreamed of my dad.

It wasn’t that I didn’t miss him.

It was that I missed him too much. If I dreamed of him once, I would wake up and be sad for a very long time.

That night, my mom and I went to Jiugang No. 2 High School.

Liang Yan insisted on coming with us.

His fever still hadn’t gone down, and he was a little unsteady even when he walked.

I said, “Stay at the hospital.”

He said, “I know the way.”

I said, “GPS knows the way too.”

He looked at me and said very seriously, “It’s not as familiar with it as I am.”

Standing beside us, my mom suddenly laughed.

I looked at her. “What are you laughing at?”

She shook her head.

“Nothing.”

But the look in her eyes was a little strange.

As if she were watching two children argue.