City Vigil: The Last Words of the Dead

Shen Du is a mortician at Jiangyu City Funeral Home, five years on the job, a man of few words. He harbors a secret he can never reveal: touching a deceased person's skin for more than three seconds allows him to see the last seventy-two hours of their life. Not a soul, not a medium. Just residual neural signals from the moment of brain death, which he happens to receive. Over five years, he has touched countless bodies, keeping their secrets. Until the body of seventeen-year-old high school girl Yang Xiaotang arrives in the morgue—the police rule it suicide, but in the memories he sees, she was pushed off a rooftop. He chooses to call the police. An unprovable piece of evidence, a covered-up series of deaths, an unknown entity deep underground calling for help. The fluorescent lights in the funeral home flicker every eleven seconds; Shen Du has counted them for five years. This time, he will no longer just receive—he decides to speak for the dead. The dead cannot speak, but he can.