Iris 8

"I found something." After searching through a cabinet beneath a curtain on the other side for quite some time, the taciturn Cheng Guoxu finally found a document envelope and brought it over. He handed it to Mu Qin, seemingly acknowledging, without saying so, Mu Qin's position as leader of their little group of three.

Mu Qin took the envelope from Cheng Guoxu and pulled out the documents. What he found were several thin sheets of paper stapled together, along with a stack of clipped newspaper articles. He casually set the candlestick he was holding on a broken table on the church stage, then began to look through the papers.

Soon, Mu Qin realized that the yellowed pages were personnel files for the orphanage staff.

They were really just thin resumes, listing each employee's name, sex, age, date of birth, and ID number, with a one-inch ID photo pasted in the upper right corner. Below, messy handwriting recorded every employee's work history and family members.

All the resumes had been stapled together, but Mu Qin noticed that one appeared to have been torn out. Torn scraps of paper still clung to the staple.

The tear marks were fresh, as though the page had only just been ripped away.

Having noticed this detail, Mu Qin silently raised his head and glanced at Cheng Guoxu. After giving Mu Qin the documents, Cheng Guoxu had not left. He stood beside Mu Qin, pretending to read them with him. Mu Qin said nothing more and lowered his head to continue going through the files.

Judging from these staff resumes, the orphanage employed more women than men; there seemed to be only one or two male employees. Most were between twenty and thirty years old, and none appeared to have much education.

At first, Mu Qin did not think these resumes meant anything, until he found Han Li's among them.

Han Li's resume was the last one. The name field plainly read "Han Li." At first Mu Qin thought it might be someone with the same name, but then he saw the one-inch photograph attached in the upper right. The picture was small and yellowed, and the Han Li in it was clearly much younger than the woman Mu Qin had seen now, probably in her twenties. Still, her features made her easy for Mu Qin to recognize.

Han Li's resume was ordinary and straightforward, with nothing out of the ordinary on it. Yet since it appeared in the orphanage's staff files, it proved that she had once worked at this orphanage. And then there was what Han Li had said earlier about having been a preschool teacher...

Mu Qin thought it over and felt there was something suspicious about it.

Since Han Li had once worked at the orphanage, and apparently for a considerable time, she undoubtedly knew the place very well. Yet she had not told Mu Qin and the others the truth about herself. She had chosen to conceal it and keep silent. But why?

The answer was not difficult to guess. Mu Qin first thought of the cause of Han Li's death. Xu Fu had previously speculated that Han Li had been drugged and killed by one of her students.

Han Li had been a middle-school teacher, teaching seventh- through ninth-graders, roughly twelve to sixteen years old. If a child in their teens knew enough to drug and murder someone, what motive could they have had for poisoning their own teacher?

That was not difficult to guess, either. Most likely, the student had developed an irreconcilable conflict with the teacher. Children generally had decent emotional resilience. It was common in school to be scolded by teachers for not doing homework, disliking school, and all sorts of other reasons; no one would kill a teacher simply for being yelled at a few times. Perhaps Han Li had physically punished students, or used even worse methods, causing one of them to hate her enough to want her dead.

That suggested Han Li was not a particularly good person.

The rest of the deduction was even more obvious. Han Li had said she had been a preschool teacher, and this staff file from the orphanage showed that her supposed preschool teaching job had likely been as a caretaker looking after orphans here.

Thinking of all the negative reports that had surfaced about Iris Orphanage, accusing its staff of suspected child abuse, and of how evasive Han Li had been about having worked there, Mu Qin suspected she had done something as vile as abuse children. That was why she had not dared admit to Mu Qin and the others that she had once worked at this orphanage.

But so what?

Holding Han Li's resume, Mu Qin thought it over... They were all trapped inside this sealed-off orphanage now, surrounded by high walls and iron gates, unable to go anywhere, with a terrifying killer relentlessly hunting them down.

In a crisis like this, Han Li's past was completely unimportant to Mu Qin. He could not be bothered with what she had done before. All he wanted to know was how to get out of this place.

Xu Fu said that they were already dead, and that after death some mysterious force had sent them into this game, into this map.

Mu Qin had always half-believed and half-doubted Xu Fu's words. He did have memories of his own "death": he remembered a large truck barreling straight toward him. He could even recall the sound of his organs rupturing.

But those memories felt like a dream. He was standing here now, perfectly intact, with all his limbs, able to hear his own heartbeat and breathing. He was clearly alive, truly alive, and it left Mu Qin unable to tell dreams from reality.

Mu Qin continued flipping through the documents Cheng Guoxu had given him, then noticed a stack of newspapers tucked beneath the staff resumes.

Like the newspapers Mu Qin had searched through earlier, these reported all manner of negative news about Iris Orphanage. Several, however, covered particularly heinous crimes, such as:

"Eight-year-old girl's body found dumped in the wilderness; suspected of having been assaulted before death."

The headline made Mu Qin read the article carefully. It said the body of an eight-year-old girl had been found. She had been dead for several days and had already begun to decompose. Her body had been discovered in woods on the outskirts, only a few hundred meters from Iris Orphanage. Forensic examination found that she had been raped and beaten before her death. The girl was a registered orphan at the orphanage, and police speculated that she had been harmed by certain orphanage employees. After a dozen or so rambling sentences, the article ended with: "Police are intensifying their investigation."

Mu Qin flipped farther through the papers. Not only did he find no follow-up reports, he found information on even more orphans of roughly the same age who had been assaulted, murdered, and dumped in the wilderness. Counting them, about five children from Iris Orphanage had been killed in succession. It appeared to be a brutal serial child-torture-and-murder case, yet Mu Qin read to the end of the stack without finding any news that the police had solved it.

After thinking it over, Mu Qin concluded that the victims had all been orphans, with neither parents nor families and little public attention. The case had probably been allowed to fade away in the end.

At that point, Mu Qin closed the documents in his hands. He looked up at Cheng Guoxu again, only to suddenly find Cheng Guoxu looking at him too.

Cheng Guoxu's features were not especially appealing. The corners of his eyes and mouth always drooped, giving him a perpetually unhappy look. Especially when he stared at someone with his eyes wide, they seemed to reveal dark, filthy emotions.

Cheng Guoxu did not seem to dare meet Mu Qin's gaze for long. He quickly lowered his head again and resumed his usual reticent manner. Mu Qin narrowed his eyes and watched him for a long time, but in the end said nothing further. He tossed the documents aside and went to find Qiu Zijia.

By then, Qiu Zijia had searched the entire Little Church. Holding up a candle, he shook his head at Mu Qin. "There's nothing in this damn place."

Mu Qin turned to look at the church's second floor. The second floor of this Little Church was not enclosed but open, with a railed corridor forming a U-shape that faced the stage below. In other words, from the stage on the first floor, one could look straight up and see the church roof.

Mu Qin glanced at the section of stairs leading to the second floor that had already collapsed. "There must be something important upstairs waiting for us to explore, but we can't get up there right now. We'd better find a ladder or some other tool. Climbing up by hand would take too much time."

"I know where there might be a ladder," Cheng Guoxu said abruptly.

Qiu Zijia immediately asked in surprise, "How do you know where to find a ladder?"

The question seemed to catch Cheng Guoxu slightly off guard. After a subtle pause, he said, "The church roof is high, and the wall lamps are high up too. If they needed to clean dust off the roof or change the bulbs in the wall lamps, they would definitely need a ladder... There might be one nearby, in a storage room or someplace like that."

Understanding dawned on Qiu Zijia after he heard this, and he nodded. "That makes sense. This church may not be big, but it's still a holy place. The staff would have cleaned it regularly. The ladder might be where they keep the cleaning tools... Let's look outside."

Mu Qin had no objection. They nodded and walked to the main doors of the Little Church. Just as they were about to push the doors open and go out, they heard faint... wet, slapping footsteps outside. The sound of feet treading over stone-brick steps was not obvious on this stormy night, but Mu Qin and the others, their nerves taut, still noticed it.

Mu Qin immediately held out an arm to stop Qiu Zijia and Cheng Guoxu beside him, whispering, "Put out the lights. Hide."

As he spoke, Mu Qin blew out the candle burning with its faint flame in his hand, and the other two quickly did the same. The church had already been dim; once the candles were out, it became darker still, so dark one could not see one's hand in front of one's face. Following the darkness, Mu Qin and the others crouched low and quickly slipped into the gaps between the rows of pews, crouching down and crawling beneath them.

The situation was extremely perilous. Just after Mu Qin and the others had hidden themselves, someone pushed open the church doors from outside. As the doors swung open, the wind and rain outside stirred and rushed into the modest church with the movement of the doors. Cold, damp air struck them head-on. Mu Qin huddled beneath a pew in a pitch-black corner, gripping the candlestick that had just been extinguished and was still slightly hot.

Without making a sound, Mu Qin felt around the floor with his fingers and gently, slowly set the hot candlestick down, trying not to make the slightest noise. As he focused intently on doing so, a woman's voice came from by the opened door, small and intermittent as she defended herself: "I really don't know... I left this orphanage many years ago... I never did that kind of thing!"