American comic book: I, with my abundant martial virtue, love to do good to others.

Chapter 740 Two things are related

The car stopped again at the intersection. Lynn glanced down at his watch: 10:40. It wasn't too late, but his body was already reminding him that he had only slept for less than four hours last night. In addition, the burning sensation under the thin dressing on his hand hadn't completely subsided. He felt like a machine that had been running for too long, with every part making a metallic, fatigued sound.

My phone vibrated again.

He picked it up.

Gwen: Where are you now? Lynn: In the car. Just finished.

Gwen: That's not what I'm asking. I'm asking where you are, your location.

Lynn paused for a moment, rolled down the car window a little, and glanced at the street sign outside.

Lynn: Midtown. Almost 40th Street.

Gwen: That's not far from my house.

Lynn looked at the line of text but didn't move.

Gwen: If you're passing by, come over. Gwen: It's not because of you. Gwen: I have something here that might be related to something you guys were investigating before. Lynn stared at the screen for a few seconds.

Lynn: What is it? Gwen: We'll talk when you get here. It's hard to explain in words.

Lynn: Okay.

After replying with that one word, he looked up and gave the driver Gwen's address. The driver nodded, turned the steering wheel, and turned onto a quieter road.

When the car entered her neighborhood, the streets were almost deserted. Several roadside trees had lost many leaves due to the rain of the previous days, and the remaining leaves gleamed wetly under the streetlights. The convenience store near the building entrance was still lit up, and the owner was looking at his phone through the glass, his face appearing bluish from the screen's light.

Lynn paid the fare, got out of the car, and tugged at the collar of her coat.

The night breeze at the end of October was cooler than he had expected, seeping in through the gaps in his shirt collar and cuffs, poking at his skin like tiny fingers. He stood downstairs and rang the doorbell, waiting for about ten seconds before Gwen's voice came through the intercom, a little muffled, as if she had just spoken but swallowed half of what she was about to say.

"Come on up."

The door lock clicked open.

The hallway smelled of old carpet and cleaning agents mixed together. Someone had drawn something on the wall with a marker and then erased it, leaving a grayish-white mark. Lynn climbed three flights of stairs and stood in her doorway; the door was already ajar.

He pushed the door open and went in.

Gwen's apartment wasn't big; the living room and kitchen were connected. On the coffee table sat a half-eaten bowl of yogurt, next to an open laptop with its screen dark. A blanket and a wrinkled sweatshirt were tossed on the sofa, the curtains were half-drawn, and two or three half-dead potted plants sat on the windowsill.

Gwen stood by the kitchen counter, a glass of water in her hand, barefoot, wearing only a pair of gray cotton socks. Her hair was more disheveled than the night before, as if she had slept all day and then casually tied it up, with a few stray strands falling from her temples and onto either side of her neck. She wore a dark long-sleeved T-shirt, the neckline loosely askew to one side, revealing a section of her collarbone.

Lynn glanced at her as he entered, and she glanced at him in return.

Their eyes met, then looked away at the same time.

"You said there was something." Lynn closed the door first, then leaned against the wall in the entryway. "What is it?"

Gwen didn't answer, turned and went into the bedroom, and came out with a tablet computer in her hand.

She placed the tablet on the coffee table and pushed it in front of him.

"You take a look first."

Lynn sat down on the sofa and picked up the tablet. On the screen was a photo, a scanned copy of a document. The paper was yellowed and the corners were worn. The text was printed in English and the layout was not very neat, like an internal document from a government agency or research institution.

He quickly scanned the first paragraph.

His brows furrowed.

"Where did this come from?"

"Never mind where it came from." Gwen sat down opposite him, holding a glass of water, her legs crossed, her knees sticking out from the loose legs of her pajama pants. "You read it first."

Lynn glanced at her again, but didn't ask any further questions, and continued scrolling down.

Page 2. Page 3. Page 4.

Each page contained similar documents, ranging in date from six years ago to three months ago, all addressing the same theme: a categorized monitoring report on so-called "unregistered special individuals" in New York and the surrounding area. The wording was extremely restrained, almost devoid of any value judgments, consisting entirely of technical descriptions of their activity range, abilities, degree of social integration, and frequency of interaction with the general population.

But it wasn't these things that truly sent chills down Lynn's spine.

It is the signature section at the end of each report.

It should either be blank or contain only a four-digit code.

There is no organizational header. There is no publication date. There is no information that can be traced back to a specific department.

"This isn't right." Lynn looked up. "This format—"

—

“I know,” Gwen said. “It’s not official.”

"How did you get it?"

Gwen paused for two seconds, placed the water glass next to her knees, and looked down at her fingers.

"Last night," she said.

Lynn waited.

"After you took me home, I went upstairs and stood at the door for a while." She spoke slower than usual, as if untangling a loose thread from a tangled mess. "Then someone came out of the stairwell. I didn't see his face, but he was wearing a hat and thick clothes. He shoved this tablet into my hand and said something."

"What are you saying?"

'

Your friend is investigating something much deeper than he thinks.

Lynn's eyes narrowed slightly.

Gwen looked at his expression, as if she had expected him to react this way.

"My first instinct was to give chase," she said, "but the person had already gone downstairs and was running very fast. I chased them for two floors and then stopped."

"You didn't call the police."

"What did the police say? Someone gave me a tablet in the hallway?" Gwen's tone was sharp with a hint of weariness. "And then? They have to register it, write a report, hand in evidence, and in the end, this thing gets locked in some filing cabinet, and nobody knows who it will end up with."

She paused for a moment.

"And he said it was your friend." She looked at Lynn, "Not your colleague, not someone you know. Your friend. He already knew who you were back then."

Lynn didn't respond.

The living room was quiet for a few seconds, with only the low hum of the refrigerator compressor and the sound of a motorcycle passing by on the street in the distance.

"Have you seen it?" Lynn asked.

"I watched it," Gwen said. "From beginning to end."

"What conclusion?"

"The conclusion is—" Gwen picked up her water glass again, took a sip as if trying to warm her mouth, "that someone is doing something unofficial through unofficial channels. And they've been doing it for at least six years."

Lynn looked down at the date on the first page again.

six years ago.

Six years ago, he was working in a grassroots department of the federal government, dealing with smuggling and financial crimes every day, and had almost no knowledge of so-called "special individuals." At that time, however, there were already people systematically conducting this kind of classification and monitoring.

"This is not something one person can do," he said.

“Of course not,” Gwen said. “Look at the table on page three. The data collection points cover all five boroughs of the city, some even broken down to specific neighborhoods. This level of granularity isn’t something one or two people could achieve. And—” she pointed to a line on the screen, “the technical terminology used here highly overlaps with your Federation’s old, discontinued classification system. That system was scrapped three years ago, but the people who wrote this report are still using it. What does that tell you?”

"That means he either came from that system," Lynn said, "or he still has access to a data source that has been shut down."

Gwen nodded.

Lynn put down the tablet, stood up, and walked to the window.

Through the gap in the curtains, one could see several lit windows in the building across the street, and shadowy figures moving about in the kitchen. They were completely unaware that someone in this room, just across the street, was looking at something that probably shouldn't exist.

He suddenly thought of something.

"You just said he shoved a tablet into your hand and left," Lynn turned to him. "How did he know you would give it to me?"

Gwen looked up at him.

"Guess," she said.

Lynn stared at her for two seconds.

"You recognize that voice."

"I'm not sure," Gwen said slowly, "but that way of speaking—I feel like I've heard it somewhere before."

Not recently. It was a long time ago.

"how long?"

"About ten years ago," Gwen paused, "...about."

Lynn's brow furrowed even more. Ten years ago, Gwen was in another city, doing a completely different job. If there really was an intersection between that timeline and the present, then it wasn't just a simple information leak issue.

"Gwen," he said, "what exactly are you getting into?"

Gwen did not answer.

She lowered her head, stuck her toes under the coffee table, hooked out a slipper, and kicked it back into place. She repeated this action twice before finally speaking.

Do you remember the first time we met?

"I remember," Lynn said. "You sat in the Federation's waiting room for two hours, and when I finally came in, the first thing you said was that the coffee machine in your building was much worse than the one in Uptown."

Gwen's lips twitched, as if she wanted to laugh but didn't.

"At that time, I was waiting for a result," she said. "I waited for two months. Your result was that there wasn't enough evidence to open a case."

Lynn didn't say anything.

"I thought you were just giving me the runaround," Gwen continued. "But I later found out it wasn't."

The line was cut cleanly from above. So cleanly that everyone involved in the investigation thought they were looking in the wrong direction.

She looked up at Lynn.

"But the person who gave me the tablet, he knows you. He also knows I haven't completely let go of that. He even knows you won't stop outside that line because of work pressure."

Lynn looked at her.

The living room light shone down from above, casting shadows on her nose and eyelashes. She wasn't wearing makeup today; her complexion was a little darker than usual, and there was a light bluish-gray tint under her eyes, making her look like she hadn't slept well or had been crying, but her eyes were dry.

"You think these two things are related," Lynn said.

"I don't know," Gwen said, "but I won't take it as a coincidence."

She picked up the glass again, only to find it was empty, so she put it down again.

"What would you like to drink?" she suddenly asked, her tone shifting as if the previous conversation was just a passing interlude. "I have water, beer, and a bottle of apple juice that I don't know when I bought it."

"Water will do."

Gwen stood up, walked barefoot to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and took out a bottle of water. She tried to unscrew the cap twice but couldn't, only managing to open it on the third try. She poured the water into a glass, brought it over to him, and their fingers touched the glass. Lynn felt her fingertips were very cool.

"Thank you," he said.

Gwen didn't respond, but sat back down on the sofa and pulled the blanket over her lap.

Lynn took a sip of water, placed the cup on the coffee table, and picked up the tablet again to flip through it. This time he read even more slowly, pausing for more than ten seconds on each page, as if trying to etch every word into his brain.

He stopped when he turned to the last page.

The last page wasn't monitoring data or an analysis report. It was a scanned copy of a handwritten note, the handwriting messy, likely written with a ballpoint pen, the ink varying in shades. It contained only two lines: "They're already inside. And not just one."

Lynn read the sentence twice.

"How do you interpret this?" He turned the tablet toward Gwen.

Gwen glanced at the line of text, as if she had known he would ask this question.

"There are two possibilities," she said. "First, someone is warning that certain departments of the federal government or the New York City government have been infiltrated. Second, the person who wrote this is being tracked, and this is the last message he could send."

Which one do you think is more credible?

"Neither of them is credible," Gwen said. "And both could be true at the same time."

Lynn put the tablet back on the coffee table and leaned back into the sofa.

Gwen had worn a shallow dent into the sofa cushions, and the back of his head was stuck in it, which was uncomfortable, but he didn't want to move. There was a chandelier on the ceiling, and the dead body of a small flying insect had fallen into the lampshade. It was a dark dot that cast a small circular shadow under the light.

"What are you going to do?" Gwen asked.

"Let's find out more about Victoria first."

"Victoria?"

Lynn turned her head to look at her.

"The one I had dinner with tonight," he said, "she's got a problem."

Gwen raised an eyebrow. It was a subtle movement, but Lynn noticed it.

"You're not surprised."

"I've told you before, once you say something's 'okay,' it always leads to trouble." Gwen pulled the blanket up a bit. "What kind of trouble?"

Lynn recounted the two probing questions about mutants that evening at the restaurant. He didn't embellish or omit any details, including Victoria's explanation of the "student being doxxed," the appropriateness of her embrace and her scent, and her mention of the Columbia University lecture next Wednesday before she left.

Gwen didn't interrupt him at all.

After he finished speaking, she remained silent for a long while.

"How did you feel at that time?" she asked finally.

Which second are you referring to?

"The moment she asked, 'Won't your job involve those kinds of cases?'"

Lynn thought for a moment.

"It's like being patted on the back," he said. "It's not painful, it's that feeling—you're clearly walking on a path you chose, and suddenly someone reminds you that the path you're on isn't a secret."