Interrogation (2)

Jiang Feng. Male. 18 years old. Suspect in the Greenlight Full-care Kindergarten arson case.

At 1:00 AM, the interrogation room light remained stark and unforgiving. In the center of the room, Jiang Feng sat with his hands cuffed on the table. His long hair almost completely veiled his eyes. Under the deep blue factory uniform, his spine arched high like a cornered cat, his black trousers concealing legs tucked tightly beneath the bench.

To his front-left, the camera had been recording for over two hours, yet it hadn’t captured a single sentence related to the case. He was a statue encased in concrete, silently sinking into a sunless abyss.

Click.

The door opened and closed. Jiang Feng looked up briefly. It was a young woman. Years of isolation had made him fear looking at others’ faces; he didn’t dare meet her eyes. But from the sound of the door alone, she was different from the two loud, aggressive men who had been there before.

“Jiang Feng.”

Liu Huisheng sat in the interrogation chair, about three meters away—close enough for a normal conversational tone to carry. She flipped open the file prepared by Chen Doudou and began to read:

“Eighteen years old. Worker at the Fanhua Jinxing Engine Oil Factory. Both parents deceased. Raised by your grandmother until she passed away last year, at which point you left home for Wengcheng to find work.”

Jiang Feng listened to the summary of his own life. Though Huisheng’s voice was clear, the words seemed to bounce off an invisible barrier around him. He kept his eyes on the floor, his cuffed hands clasped so tightly his thumbs were buried in his palms—a gesture of extreme psychological closure.

Liu Huisheng noted the movement and continued, “You should recognize me. I’ve been to the tube building.”

Jiang Feng remained as still as a boulder welded to a mountain peak.

“Yesterday morning, during the rush, you were standing in line,” Huisheng said calmly. “You followed the rules, but someone else cut in front and shoved you to the back.”

Finally, the boulder showed a crack.

His clasped hands loosened slightly, the base of one thumb peeking out. It was a minuscule shift, but for Huisheng, it meant she had found the key to his door. She didn’t rush.

“I actually understand you,” she said softly. “Bullied since you were a child. No family, no friends. No one wants to talk to you, and no one wants to listen.”

Jiang Feng’s hands relaxed further. His head, which had been bowed for hours, finally lifted. Through his thick fringe, he peered at Liu Huisheng.

“Fire is a remarkable thing,” Huisheng said, her voice steady. “It symbolizes passion, intensity, life. Even the most silent person is forced to feel something in front of it. For someone isolated by the world, you must have wanted a way to finally talk to that world, right?”

The sealed stone gates groaned open. Heavy dust fell in clumps, shattering on the ground.

Jiang Feng leaned forward, his hunched shoulders twitching. A rattling sound came from deep in his throat, like a heavy machine whose joints had been seized by grime for decades. Clunk. Clunk. It struggled to turn once, twice, before the engine finally caught.

“No one ever listens to me,” Jiang Feng’s voice was agonizingly raspy, like sandpaper on a whetstone. “Since I was small, no one cared. You’re the first one… the first one who wanted to listen.”

Outside the observation glass, Zhao Yu checked the time: 1 minute and 33 seconds.

“Is it because of the burns?” Huisheng followed up.

Jiang Feng blinked. “How do you know?”

“It’s nearly 40 degrees out. You always wear long pants and socks. You never let your ankles show.”

Jiang Feng lowered his head, his fingers digging into the back of his hand until the skin turned white. He chose to confess. The memory was painful, but the thrill of someone actually listening to him for the first time in eighteen years was intoxicating.

“When I was a kid, I liked fire. Once, I accidentally lit the firewood in the kitchen. My dad was so angry… he took a piece of burning wood and burned my feet… It hurt. It hurt so much. The skin turned black and the meat rotted. My grandma took me to a doctor, but it wouldn’t grow back right. It looks like centipedes crawling on my ankles… When I went to school, they laughed at me. I did nothing wrong, but they laughed and bullied me. They even used lighters to burn my hair.”

“Did your family know? That you were being bullied?”

“They knew. But my dad said it was because I played with fire, so people were just ‘teaching me a lesson.’ Just like he did… I actually stopped playing with fire for a long time. Even though I liked it, seeing it made me remember the screaming. But… fire is fun, isn’t it? All kids like playing with fire, right?”

“So, you set the fire at the kindergarten?”

“Yeah. Kids like to play. Why shouldn’t they?” His voice grew frantic. “Why does everyone else get to play with fire and be fine, while I’m the one turned into a monster?”

“But the fire you set at Greenlight killed thirty-two children.”

Jiang Feng suddenly stood up, slamming his cuffed hands onto the table.

“They deserved it! They like fire, so why are they okay? Why didn’t their fathers burn them! Since we’re all the same, they should be monsters too! Since nobody else would do it, I did! I’ll burn them all! BURN THEM ALL—!”

The beast in the cage shrieked, the metal chains of his handcuffs clanging violently against the table. It was a roar that drove everything away, leaving only the hollow silence of hell.

Under Liu Huisheng’s systematic questioning, Jiang Feng detailed everything. He admitted to the Greenlight fire and the two previous kindergarten arsons in Wengcheng.

On the night of the crime, he saw the guard Li Changcheng visit Ba-mei and realized the school was unguarded. He waited for his roommates to sleep, pried up the floorboard for his stolen gasoline, and walked to the school. He avoided the main gate’s cameras by climbing through a gap in the fence. He climbed the pipes to the second floor, hiding in a storage closet for thirty minutes when a teacher, Xu Qin, got up. Once she was back in her room, he poured gas at the dormitory door. He decided the previous failures weren’t enough, so he poured the rest at the ground-floor exit to ensure no one could escape.

Then, he flicked his lighter.

***********************************

The interrogation ended at 3:00 AM. The office lights were still humming. Chen Doudou leaned her head on her hands, sighing deeply.

“I feel like Jiang Feng is almost… pitiful. Abused as a child, bullied by peers—it’s no wonder his mind twisted.”

Liu Huisheng leaned against the window, looking out at the silent, sprawling street. The long line of streetlights looked like needles driven into the heart of the city.

“Eighty-five percent of extreme criminals were abused in their youth,” she said quietly. “But that is not an excuse to slaughter the innocent.”

The damp night breeze blew in, fluttering her collar. In the moonlight, her collarbones were stark and thin.

Doudou tried to explain, “I’m not making excuses for him, it’s just… it feels like fate. Someone who was hurt grows up to pick up a knife and hurt people as helpless as he once was. If someone had just reached out to pull him back… maybe this wouldn’t have happened.”

Huisheng stared at a flickering light at the crossroads, a cold, self-deprecating look in her eyes.

“There are no saviors in this world. And even if there were, they couldn’t possibly comfort every marginalized soul or pull everyone out of the vortex. If you cannot save yourself, eventually, you will be swallowed by a deeper darkness.”

Doudou wanted to argue—it felt unfair to blame the victim for not being “strong enough” to save themselves. But the words died in her throat.

As the wind caught Huisheng’s collar, Doudou saw it clearly on the porcelain-white skin just below the collarbone: a scar the size of a thumb.

Specifically, the size of a cigarette burn.

In that moment, Liu Huisheng looked as fragile as a sheet of thin paper, ready to shatter at the slightest gust. Doudou’s heart sank. What had Huisheng endured that made her give up on “saviors”? What kind of agony had she crawled through to escape her own abyss?

“Doudou,” Zhao Yu appeared at the door, having finished the paperwork. “It’s over. Go home and get some sleep. There’s more work tomorrow.”

“Oh… right,” Doudou stammered. “Goodnight.”

Zhao Yu turned her gaze to the woman by the window, her eyes softening with a flicker of hidden pain. “Liu Huisheng. I’m driving you back.“