Chapter 6: The Song Before Drowning

The headmaster's office was a study in contradictions. Ancient scrolls lined walls that hummed with electric lights. A bronze incense burner sat beside a modern fountain pen. The headmaster himself was a thin man with a scholar's robe and a bureaucrat's spectacles, his face a mask of professional concern that did not quite reach his eyes.

"Miss Bai." He gestured to a chair. "Please sit."

Bai Su did not sit. She stood with her back to the door, her hands clasped behind her to hide their trembling. "You said it was urgent."

"Your classmate, Lin Wei. He has been reported missing since this morning's meditation period."

Lin Wei. The boy who had sat beside her in calligraphy class. The one who had whispered that the ghost students always sat in the back row because the living blocked their view of the teacher. Bai Su remembered his laugh, easy and warm, like sunlight through paper screens.

"What does that have to do with me?"

"I'm told you were the last person to see him." The headmaster adjusted his spectacles. "He was heading toward the east library after breakfast. You were seen following him."

"I wasn't following him. We were both going to the same place."

"At the same time? On the same path?" The headmaster's voice remained calm, but his eyes sharpened. "Miss Bai, I am not accusing you of anything. But we have a missing student, a dead student, and a ghost problem that seems to be getting worse by the hour. You are the only living student who can see the spirits directly. I need to know everything you know."

Bai Su opened her mouth to answer, but the words died in her throat.

The song.

It came from somewhere deep in the building, muffled by walls and distance, but unmistakable. A woman's voice, sweet and high, singing a lullaby that Bai Su had never heard before. And yet, somehow, she knew every word. She knew the next note before it came. She knew the way the melody would twist and fall at the end of each verse, like water cascading over stones.

"Do you hear that?" she whispered.

The headmaster frowned. "Hear what?"

"The singing. It's coming from—" She stopped. The voice was not coming from anywhere. It was coming from inside her head. From inside her chest. From somewhere so deep and old that it felt like memory.

"Miss Bai, you look pale. Perhaps you should sit down after all."

"I need to go to the east library."

"The library is closed until we find Lin Wei."

"Then I need to find Lin Wei."

The headmaster's frown deepened. He studied her with the careful attention of a man who had spent decades navigating the impossible. "You know something."

"I know that the song won't stop until I find the singer."

"The song—" He paused, his professional mask cracking just enough to show a flicker of genuine alarm. "You hear a song?"

"Don't you?"

The silence that followed was answer enough.

---

The east library was a three-story building that leaned slightly to the left, as if exhausted by the weight of its own knowledge. The door was locked, but Bai Su found it unlocked, the chain hanging loose like a snapped necklace.

She pushed it open.

The smell hit her first. Wet stone and rotting paper, the particular mustiness of a place that had been flooded and never properly dried. The floor was damp, dark spots spreading across the wooden planks like bruises. Books lay scattered everywhere, their pages bloated and illegible.

And there, in the center of the room, sat Lin Wei.

He was cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by a circle of open texts. His eyes were open but unseeing, his lips moving silently. Water dripped from his hair, his clothes, his fingertips, pooling around him in a spreading stain.

"Lin Wei?"

He did not respond. His lips continued to move, forming words that Bai Su could not hear but somehow understood. The song. He was mouthing the song.

She stepped closer. The water around him was cold, far colder than it should have been. Her shoes squelched with each step. The books in the circle were all open to the same page—a woodcut illustration of a woman drowning, her hair spreading through the water like ink, her mouth open in a silent scream.

"The scholar who killed himself," Bai Su whispered. "He told me there was another story. A girl who drowned herself in the academy well."

Lin Wei's eyes snapped into focus.

"She didn't drown," he said, his voice hollow and distant. "She was pushed."

Bai Su's blood went cold. "Who pushed her?"

"The same person who pushed Chen Feng." Lin Wei's gaze met hers, and for a moment, she saw something ancient looking out from behind his eyes. "The same person who has been killing students since the academy was founded. The same person who will keep killing until every living student is dead."

"That's impossible. Someone would have noticed."

"Someone did." Lin Wei smiled, but it was not his smile. It was too wide, too sharp, too knowing. "The headmaster. The teachers. The ghost scholars who came before you. They all noticed. And they all chose to look away."

"Look away from what?"

"The truth about this academy." Lin Wei's voice began to shift, growing higher, sweeter, taking on the cadence of the song that still echoed in Bai Su's skull. "Wutong Academy was not built on a graveyard. It was built on a well. And in that well, there is a girl who has been waiting for a very long time."

"Waiting for what?"

"For someone to hear her song."

The water around Lin Wei began to rise. It crept up Bai Su's ankles, cold and grasping, pulling at her robes like eager hands. She tried to step back, but her feet were rooted to the floor. The water was climbing higher, faster, reaching for her knees, her waist, her chest.

"Lin Wei, snap out of it!"

"I'm not Lin Wei," the boy said, and his voice was no longer his. It was a girl's voice, young and sweet and terrible. "I'm the one he was looking for. I'm the one everyone has been looking for. I'm the one who has been singing since before you were born."

Bai Su's hands were shaking. Her breath came in short, sharp gasps. The water was at her throat now, cold and suffocating, and she could feel something under the surface, something that brushed against her legs like long, wet hair.

"What do you want?"

"I want to be heard." The girl's voice was everywhere now, filling the room, filling Bai Su's mind, filling the spaces between her thoughts. "I want to be seen. I want to be remembered. I've been alone in the dark for so long, and I am so tired of being forgotten."

"I don't even know your name."

There was a pause. The water stopped rising.

"You don't know my name?"

"No. No one told me. The ghost scholars, they only told me about the boys who died. They never mentioned you."

The water began to recede. Slowly at first, then faster, draining into the floorboards like it had never been there at all. Lin Wei slumped forward, unconscious, his breath evening out into the steady rhythm of sleep.

And in the space where the water had been, a girl stood.

She was young, no more than fifteen, with long black hair that hung in wet ropes around her face. Her skin was pale as paper, translucent as silk, and her eyes were the color of deep water. She wore a simple dress, soaked through and clinging to her thin frame, and her feet were bare and blue with cold.

She was the most beautiful thing Bai Su had ever seen.

And the most terrifying.

"You want to know my name?" The girl smiled, and her teeth were too sharp, too white, too many. "My name is Mei. And I died in this well one hundred and thirty-seven years ago."

Bai Su's heart hammered against her ribs. "Who pushed you?"

"The same person who will push you, if you're not careful." Mei stepped closer, her bare feet leaving no prints on the wet floor. "The ghost scholar who killed Chen Feng. The ghost scholar who has been killing for centuries. The ghost scholar who wears the face of the living and hides in plain sight."

"Who is it?"

Mei reached out and touched Bai Su's cheek. Her fingers were ice, and they left trails of cold that did not fade.

"Look at the blood on your hands, Bai Su. Look at the footprint that matches your shoe. Look at the song that only you can hear." Her smile widened, cracked and terrible. "Ask yourself: why you? Why now? Why can you see the ghosts when no one else can?"

"I don't know."

"Don't you?" Mei leaned in, her lips brushing Bai Su's ear. "You've been here before, Bai Su. In another life. In another body. You were the one who pushed me into the well."

Bai Su's world shattered.

"No. That's impossible. I'm seventeen years old. I've never even been to this city before—"

"You have been reincarnated a hundred times since that day. And every time, you find your way back here. Every time, you walk through these gates. Every time, you hear my song." Mei's voice was soft now, almost tender. "And every time, you forget. Until now."

The bell above them began to ring.

One. Two. Three.

Bai Su stumbled backward, her mind reeling, her heart screaming, her hands reaching for something—anything—to hold onto.

Four. Five. Six.

Mei began to fade, her form dissolving into mist, her voice echoing through the empty library.

"Find me, Bai Su. Find me in the well. Remember what you did. Remember what you are."

Seven. Eight. Nine.

"I'll be waiting."

The bell rang ten times.

And Bai Su woke up screaming.