Voices from the Void

The air in her father’s study tasted of stale jasmine and the ozone of an overworked document scanner. Lin Mei stood in the center of the room, the darkness of the Chinatown apartment pressing against her like a physical weight. She didn't turn on the lights; the streetlamps outside bled a fractured, sickly amber through the blinds, casting long, distorted shadows across the desk where her father had spent his final, hollowed-out months.

She wasn't here for nostalgia. She was here because the ledger in her bag felt like a live wire, and the silence of the room was no longer an absence of sound, but a held breath. She slid the heavy oak drawer open. It groaned—a sharp, splintering protest that made her freeze. Outside, the neighborhood was quiet, the kind of heavy, enforced stillness

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