She reached for the ice water on the table beside her; the ring of condensation wet her right hand, damp between her fingers.
The breathtakingly beautiful Omega closed her eyes quietly. Her fingertips flushed red; blood warmed with rising heat spread from the back of her neck, dyeing red all the way to her ears.
The pink skin was half-hidden by her loose hair, flickering in and out of sight.
Lin Jinxu’s lashes trembled faintly, the corners of her eyes flushed and damp. She bit her lower lip, unhurried, unafraid—she was no longer a stranger to this feeling.
Just as the Orchid Mantis had said: her Heat Period was near, and the reactions hormones brought could not be suppressed by reason alone.
From Sang Ling’s second day of training at the hospital, Lin Jinxu had booked this hotel, this room.
Standing at the window with the Telescope, she could see exactly the hospital’s ninth floor—could watch the black-haired Alpha walk out of the elevator every morning in her white coat.
She watched the Alpha go from the jarring wrongness of that first day in the white coat to looking more and more like a real young doctor—gentle, kind, drawing countless covert and overt gazes of longing.
She watched the lonely Alpha walk among all those Beta medical staff, blind to the hidden, greedy, love-drunk eyes that followed her everywhere.
She watched that too-old Beta surnamed Su approach her Alpha with such naked, pointed purpose—and in that instant, rage nearly drowned her mind.
Mine. That’s mine. Mine, mine…
Mine!
The longer she gazed at Sang Ling, the more familiar the Alpha’s every look and expression became—and the stronger her possessiveness grew.
Whenever she felt someone trying to take what was hers, dark thoughts spread like a spiderweb, growing vaster with every day she spent watching Sang Ling.
How absurd. She had always prided herself on being a rational researcher, on having a mission, a life’s work she would gladly die for.
She should have forgotten all small loves. She should have set aside these petty grudges, this jealousy. She should have hated all Alphas, as she always had.
Yet now she was churning with dark feeling over an Alpha—and it wasn’t hatred. It was jealousy.
As if another self were whispering in her ear:
Only look at me. Only look at me. Only look at me…
The beautiful Omega was nearly cocooned in those threads, in this lightless room with its drawn curtains, unable to move, rotting away in silence.
Like a ghost, she hid behind the Telescope day after day, night after night, spying on every movement of the Alpha who walked in sunlight.
Like a jealous wife—all that might be mistaken for love was, in truth, a chilling, all-consuming hunger for control.
In gazing at Sang Ling, she grew familiar with her own desire day by day, as familiar as with the tide that came in daily.
She scarcely rested. Every morning at nine she was at the window, waiting in torment for Sang Ling to appear.
Every night, after Sang Ling left the station, Lin Jinxu lay on the hotel bed with her eyes open, imagining hour upon hour what Sang Ling might be doing now.
She could no longer tell what drove her. Was it something genuinely good and true? Or the wicked, obscene hormones of an oncoming Heat?
Now the heat came again, wave upon wave.
Lin Jinxu’s lashes trembled harder and harder, like a butterfly’s last flutter at the end of its life, her nerves stretched to the snapping point, her brain on the verge of melting in the fire.
Then, all at once, she went utterly still. The lashes stopped. Her clenched eyes relaxed. Her whole body fell silent, like a statue in its final moment before the wind wears it away.
The tide was going out…
Seconds later, her eyes opened, brimming with moisture, like dew gathered on petals after a whole night.
She reached out her faintly trembling hand for the bottle of pills on the table—meaning to shake out only two, but her hand shook and seven or eight green capsules tumbled into her palm.
She didn’t bother counting. She tipped them all into her mouth, washed them down with ice water, closed her eyes, and waited for the drug to take hold.
A minute later she opened her eyes again. The moisture had receded; her mind was clear, her gaze bright.
The tide had gone out completely.
The desire that heralded the Heat Period was suppressed; rational thought reclaimed her brain.
With reason restored, all of it—the tangled, spiderweb chaos, the jealousy, the madness—seemed only the product of Heat Period hormones. Lin Jinxu was once more the cold, meticulous Lin Jinxu.
She shook her head sharply, as if that alone could sweep out the damp, dark feelings.
The pills she’d swallowed were a Heat Delay Drug. They couldn’t truly relieve a Heat Period—but they could push its true onset back.
The side effects were severe. Lin Jinxu had no choice but to take them. Only this way could she keep a cold, rational brain for thinking.
The light brain rang. The Orchid Mantis.
She answered, and heard:
“The Golden Scorpion’s finished! Even if she doesn’t die today she’ll be crippled by your Alpha—think of something, fast!”
“Is the mission going to fail again?”
Lin Jinxu’s fingers tapped the desk, tap, tap. Her mind restored to clarity, her eyes were cool and indifferent, as if she had calculated everything.
“It will not fail.”
The Omega’s voice was exquisitely fine—but now it was all resolve.
“I will not permit failure.”
“Initiate Plan B.”
The Orchid Mantis’s running steps stopped short. This Zerg, normally without a care in the world, asked carefully, “Are you sure?”
The answer came without a heartbeat’s hesitation.
“For success, I’ll pay any price.”
Lin Jinxu pinned up her hair, fastened two discreet black hairpins, put on a crisp jacket, fitted in a Bluetooth earpiece, and hurried from the hotel into the hospital itself.
On the other end of the earpiece, the Orchid Mantis took her orders.
“Go to the hospital’s power distribution room. Find the red distribution box in the second row, fourth column on the wall.”
Through the earpiece came the sound of the Orchid Mantis sprinting, while Lin Jinxu herself moved unhurried, melting into the crowd like any ordinary person come to see a doctor.
She wore a white gauze dress and a blue denim jacket, delicate and lovely. She was simply too thin—no one on earth would suspect her purpose.
The guards’ eyes swept over her without pausing a single extra beat. Who would suspect a frail little Omega?
And so Lin Jinxu passed unimpeded all the way to her destination: the hospital’s Consumables Warehouse.
Capital Star First Hospital was a great comprehensive hospital, its patients drawn from at least five nearby planets. High-volume supplies like cotton gauze and surgical gowns were bought in bulk and stored in its own Consumables Warehouse.
The warehouse door bore a twelve-digit keypad lock of forbidding complexity; only the hospital’s procurement director and the Dean knew the code.
Yet Lin Jinxu entered it as if coming home, keying it in without a hitch, and pushed the door open.
The heavy door swung wide onto a vast, towering warehouse.
Row upon row of shelves held cotton and surgical gowns—all of it flammable.
“Tell the Golden Scorpion to fall back with the flow of things. It’s almost time.”
Lin Jinxu spoke through the earpiece, then drew from her pocket a small, portable pistol.
She looked up at the warehouse ceiling: countless thin water pipes ran dense as a net, and every fifty meters hung a smoke alarm—all parts of the automatic fire-suppression system.
Lin Jinxu raised the pistol.
“Bang, bang, bang.”
“Bang, bang, bang.”
Every smoke alarm dropped in answer. She collected them one by one, taking the batteries.
Then she drew a flip lighter from her pocket.
“You can cut the power now.”
“Got it.”
Through the earpiece, the Orchid Mantis snipped the cables cleanly.
Lin Jinxu flipped open the lighter’s lid. A small flame bloomed in her palm, and unhurried she walked the length of every shelf, letting the fire light evenly upon each bundle of cotton cloth.
In the deep, silent warehouse, everywhere she passed, flame burned quietly.
The delicately lovely, fragile-seeming Omega walked amid the flames, her face all ease and light smiles.
Only when every shelf was lit and the fire had grown past any easy extinguishing did Lin Jinxu stroll out of the warehouse and close the great door behind her.
She threaded back through the crowd, slipped into a restroom along the way, and emerged wearing a hat and a mask. At the corner farthest from the hospital warehouse, she pulled the fire alarm.
The shrill alarm wailed like a siren’s lament, and in an instant it filled the entire hospital.
People looked around, not yet understanding—until five minutes later, someone finally caught a whiff of smoke.
“I think it’s really on fire.”
“Where? How can anything still catch fire in this day and age? We have automatic suppression systems!”
“I smell it too—smoke, from over this way…”
The chatter swirled and swelled, and only when several guards in black pushed through the crowd and hurried toward the warehouse did most people finally believe it.
“It sounds like someone sabotaged the automatic suppression system. Now what do we do?”
“Who could be so vile? Is arson a game to them?”
The hospital’s public address system finally crackled to life, the venerable old Dean’s voice earnest and grave.
“We have just learned that our Consumables Warehouse is on fire, and that the automatic fire-suppression system was deliberately destroyed.”
“To minimize losses and avoid casualties, all members of the public are to leave the hospital immediately. All members of the public, leave the hospital immediately.”
“All medical staff of every department are to proceed at once to the first-floor Consumables Warehouse to assist with firefighting.”
“All medical staff, proceed at once to the first-floor Consumables Warehouse to assist with firefighting.”
“Fire crews are at least half an hour away. We must save ourselves, and we must not let the fire spread to the rest of the hospital.”
“Repeating: all members of the public, leave the hospital immediately. All medical staff, proceed immediately to assist with firefighting.”
Lin Jinxu tilted her head, her expression utterly cold.
She watched countless white-coated staff pour down from every floor, racing toward the fire.
She heard members of the public refusing to evacuate.
A middle-aged woman with a child said, “Why should we evacuate?”
“We can help fight the fire too. My child still needs to see a doctor here. I’m not leaving—I’m staying to help.”
“Me too.”
“Me too!”
More and more people gathered on the first floor, and Lin Jinxu moved among the sea of them like a tiny snowflake falling to earth.
It didn’t matter.
She didn’t care whether these people left or stayed. All she needed was for them to leave the ninth floor.
She had already done her utmost—drawn every last medical worker down from the ninth floor.
As for those who refused to leave—unfortunately, they would be the sacrifices of her Plan B.
She had said it: today she would finish the mission, whatever the cost.
Any. Single. Price.
