第 001 Ch.| 03:17 A.M.

03:11 a.m.

Li Kaichen parked the car on Songshou Road. He cut the engine. The street was empty. He wasn't waiting on an assignment. He was waiting for a man who was supposed to have called him, and hadn't picked up in three days.

The man's surname was Cai. Fifty-two years old. Three weeks ago he'd said over the phone that he had something to show Li. Then he was gone.

Li had worked the crime beat for seven years and chased missing-persons cases for two. He knew the scale of the word "gone." Usually it meant not answering calls, not returning messages — present, just silent. Mr. Cai had still been buying tea at a convenience store last week. From the thirteenth day on, even his wife said he'd left the house and never come back. The police logged him as a missing person, reported on the seventh day.

Li set the voice recorder on the dashboard and didn't switch it on. The Sony α7 sat on the passenger seat under an old towel. A 24–70mm lens. Manual focus. He preferred manual.

He called Mr. Cai a fifth time. No answer.

03:14.

He got out.

---

Xinyi District at three in the morning wasn't quiet, but the kinds of sound were few. A convenience store's air-conditioner compressor droned at a low frequency thirty meters off. A sanitation truck's engine carried from a few streets away. A taxi idled at the corner opposite Taipei 101. The driver hadn't gotten out, the cabin light was off, only the orange glimmer of the dashboard showing through the window, like a flame turned low.

He started toward the middle of the street, meaning to look at the convenience store where Mr. Cai had last appeared. Seventy meters from where he'd parked. He'd interviewed the store manager six months ago; he remembered the location.

Halfway there, he looked up.

The sky had split.

The line ran lower than the cloud layer, straighter than lightning, and shaped like neither. It was on the sky itself — beginning at some altitude north of Taipei 101 and running south, a straight line. He couldn't judge its length. Its width was about the visual span of two knuckles held together. The color was the same on both sides of it, the orange-tinged gray-black of Taipei at three a.m. But the line itself — Li stared at it for three seconds and found he couldn't name the color.

His first instinct was to reach for the camera.

Three steps back to the car. Open the passenger door. Pick up the α7. Pull off the cap.

He didn't reset anything — RAW, 24mm, f/4, 1/30, all set before he'd left home. He moved to where the car's headlights couldn't reach, tilted his head back, focused.

He fired off three frames. Then three more.

Then he switched to video.

The clip ran one minute forty-two seconds.

The rift vanished at one minute seven. The second before, it was there; the second after, it wasn't. Nothing happened in between.

03:17.

Li kept the lens pointed up and recorded another thirty-five seconds. No change.

---

He lowered the camera. Turned around.

Seventy meters off, behind the glass door of that convenience store, a clerk was restocking shelves. From that angle, looking out, the view landed exactly on the spot where the rift had been.

He walked over. Pushed the door.

The clerk was a young man in a face mask. Halfway through restocking, he set the box down. "Hi."

"Sorry to bother you." Li lifted the camera but didn't switch it on. "Did you happen to see anything strange in the sky just now?"

"The sky?"

"Yeah. Just now. Two, three minutes ago."

The clerk looked at him. Then his eyes drifted up and back, once. He was looking out the window. He looked for about two seconds. Then he looked back. Then he said, "Nope."

"Did you happen to look up just now?"

"Sure. I look up at the clock when I'm shelving. The clock's above the door."

The clerk pointed. The clock sat on the steel crossbar above the glass door. From there, looking up, the view ran upward, and out past the glass door was exactly the bearing where the rift had been.

"So when you looked up, the sky looked normal?"

"Normal, yeah. What's up?"

Li didn't answer. He watched the clerk's eyes. The clerk genuinely didn't know. The gaze was clean, no muscle tension, the rhythm of his reply the same as when he'd been talking about the restocking. It was blank. That stretch of memory wasn't in his head.

"Nothing," he said. "Thanks."

He left the store.

---

On the way back to the car he circled past where he'd parked and looked once more in the direction he'd tilted his head a while ago.

The sky was just sky.

03:23.

He got back into the driver's seat and set the camera on the passenger side. His phone screen was lit — Mr. Cai's call log. The fifth call. No answer. He shut the screen off.

He sat for twelve seconds before he started the engine.

In those twelve seconds he thought about three things. First, the chance it had been an illusion. Second, why the clerk's eyes had drifted toward that direction before he said he hadn't seen anything. Third, whether the clip on his memory card would be blank by the time he got home and opened it.

He started the car and drove home.

On the way home he didn't turn on the radio. He always turned on the radio. Today he didn't. It was only after about two kilometers that he realized he hadn't. And in the moment he realized it, he still didn't reach for it.

---

Li rented a place on the ninth floor of an old condo block in Da'an District, northeast corner, with a view of Dunhua South Road from the window. He'd moved in six years ago; the landlord had said the windows had good soundproofing, and six years later Li confirmed the landlord had lied. But he hadn't moved.

He didn't shower. He plugged the camera into the computer.

He was using a six-year-old MacBook Pro, the left Shift key a little sticky. He opened Capture One and imported the RAW files. The three-frame burst, the video, the three he'd shot afterward — seven files in all.

He watched the video first. In the clip, the rift vanished at one minute seven. He stepped back through it frame by frame. One second was about sixty frames. Frame sixty-six, still there. Frame sixty-seven, still there. Frame sixty-eight —

Frame sixty-eight, already gone. No transition in between.

He screencapped frame sixty-seven and frame sixty-eight separately and put them in the same folder. Then he enlarged sixty-eight. Zoomed all the way to the pixel boundary. The compression layer was clean, the image unbroken. The rift was simply there in the previous frame and not there in the next.

---

Then he switched to the photos.

The first burst frame. The rift was there — length, width, position, all the same as what he'd seen on the spot.

He zoomed to one hundred percent to look at the cloud layer.

He opened his on-site time-check records. Every time he worked a story, he shot a few unimportant things before and after setting out — a street-corner sign, a traffic light, his own shoes — to confirm the timestamps hadn't drifted. He pulled up a shot of a Songshou Road street-corner sign, taken at 03:09, before he'd gone into Xinyi District.

He switched to the patch of cloud in that photo's upper left. Then switched back to the cloud at the same bearing in the three rift shots.

The clouds were wrong.

In the 03:09 corner shot, the background clouds broke into roughly three layers. The bottom layer was thicker, with irregular edges, the kind of frayed fringe you get when wind pushes a cloud apart. The middle layer was thinner, broken into a few pieces. The top layer was almost without outline, like a pale gray smear in the dark.

The three rift shots had three cloud layers too. The positions matched. The thickness distribution of bottom, middle, and top was close. But the edges —

The edge of that bottom cloud was too even.

Not sharp in the high-resolution sense. Even. As if someone had run a tool along the cloud's edge and smoothed it. The broken middle layer too. What should have been seven or eight irregular fragments — now every fragment's edge had become a smooth curve.

Li was no cloud expert. But over three years he'd shot maybe twenty thousand on-scene news photos. He knew what a cloud's edge was supposed to look like. It was supposed to look like the 03:09 shot.

Not like these three 03:17 shots.

---

He pulled the three rift shots and the 03:09 corner shot into one frame, aligning them by the cloud-layer bearing.

The lower left of both photos held the metal glint off that segment of Taipei 101's spire — just enough to serve as a fixed reference. He aligned by the spire and overlaid the 03:09 shot onto the first 03:17 shot.

Eight minutes separated 03:09 from 03:17.

That slab of thick bottom cloud, overlaid at one hundred percent, matched almost perfectly at the edges. The distribution of the broken middle layer was consistent with 03:09 too.

Eight minutes, and against the spire-aligned baseline, that mass of cloud hadn't shifted at all.

He knew the read wasn't solid enough. He still hadn't checked the wind direction, wind speed, or cloud height at the time. If weather data later confirmed there'd been wind before dawn and the clouds should have shifted, then the clouds in these three rift shots were an anomaly. If the data said there'd been no wind, then he'd just seen a mass of cloud that happened not to be moving.

But his own gut had already leaned one way.

---

He leaned back a little. Not all the way against the chair. The chair was that Herman Miller knockoff from six years ago, the left armrest already loose.

Then he did something he didn't normally do.

He took the portable encrypted drive out of the drawer. The 3 TB one. Plugged it into the computer.

He compressed the eight files — the three rift shots, the video, the three he'd shot afterward, plus the 03:09 time-check photo — into one folder and saved a copy. He unplugged the drive and put it back in the drawer.

He took out another one. The old 1 TB, the one he normally used to back up interview recordings. Saved a second copy.

He opened the bottom drawer and took a USB stick out of a white envelope. A small label was stuck to the USB, four characters in his handwriting: safe-deposit copy. He saved the folder one more time.

He unplugged all three backups. He put the three devices back in three places: the top drawer, the bottom drawer, the white envelope.

He didn't touch the originals on the machine. The memory card he left as it was. Three backups, three physical locations, off the network — this was not how he normally handled a single news photo.

But this time he needed to.

He shut down the computer. Outside, it still wasn't light.

04:33.

---

He sat in the chair another three minutes.

Mr. Cai's phone didn't ring.

He thought of the two seconds the clerk's eyes had drifted up and back, and the blank stretch between that and the clerk saying "Nope." In the blank, the direction the clerk had looked was the direction of the rift.

The clerk hadn't seen the rift.

But the clerk's eyes knew where to look.

Li wrote it down on the first page of his waterproof notebook. Rite in the Rain paper, the brand he was used to. The pen a Pilot 0.5. He wrote:

03:17 a.m. A line.
Clerk looked out around 03:19, doesn't remember looking afterward.
Video: frame 67 present, frame 68 absent, no transition between.
03:09 to 03:17, 8 min apart, cloud didn't shift under spire alignment, weather TBC. Edge smoother than the 20,000-frame average sample.

He stopped under those four lines and didn't write a fifth.

He set the pen down.

---

He looked at the notebook. Looked at it for over a minute.

Then he turned to the next page.

On the next page he wrote a number:

001.

He didn't know why he'd written it that way.

But he knew — if he was going to write more, the next one was 002.

【Ch. 001 End · Songshou Road, Xinyi District, Taipei → an old condo block in Da'an District】