Autumn in Graycliff was always accompanied by an unsettling, cold rain.
Sixty-eight-year-old public defender Tom Harrington struggled to hang his old, tobacco-smelling, coffee-stained overcoat on the county police station's coat rack. He suffered from severe chronic bronchitis, each breath sounding like pulling a broken bellows.
In three days, Tom would officially retire. He had spent his life defending car thieves, drunkards, and low-class scum who couldn't afford legal fees. He had witnessed the ugliest, most mercenary lies of humanity.
But today, he received an extremely forceful assignment from the judge: to take on the most sensational and bizarre case in Graycliff's history—the "North Slope Ghost Murder Case."
No private law firm was willing to take Rowan on. Although the Carter family was on the verge of bankruptcy, old Carter still used all his political connections, determined to send this "forest witch who murdered his son" to the electric chair or a life sentence in a top-level mental hospital. As for public opinion, the townspeople were terrified of the North Slope, filled with poisonous spores and deadly traps; they needed a grand "witch hunt" to soothe their fragile nerves.
Tom, carrying his worn-out briefcase, followed Sheriff Brody towards the heavy-duty isolation cells on the second basement level.
"Listen, Tom." Brody stopped in front of the heavy iron door, his face extremely haggard. "She went into shock yesterday due to severe dehydration. The medical team forcibly injected her with sedatives and put her on an IV. When she woke up, she pulled out the needle and nearly bit off a caregiver's finger. She's strapped to a chair in a straitjacket now. You need to be prepared."
"I've seen the most insane serial killer, Brody." Tom coughed twice, pulled a mint from his pocket, and popped it into his mouth. "As long as she's a carbon-based being, as long as she's afraid of death, she'll talk. And as long as she talks, I can concoct a perfect self-defense story for her: 'retaliation against long-term sexual harassment by a rich kid.'" Brody looked at the extremely confident old lawyer and shook his head wearily.
"Tom, you still don't understand. You're not dealing with a 'weakling' who needs your help." The iron door slid open heavily.
The air in the interrogation room remained that stiff, filtered, dry, cold air.
Tom went in and sat down at one end of the iron table. At the other end of the table sat Rowan, tightly bound to a fixed chair by an extremely heavy white canvas straitjacket.
This was the first time Tom had seen this woman, known as the "monster," in person.
She looked extremely weak. Her skin, forcibly washed clean of insect repellent, appeared a sickly grayish-white under the harsh fluorescent light; dark red scabs covered her cracked lips. A glaring bruise marred her right arm—a violent mark left from forced intravenous fluids.
But what made Tom's heart pound violently were her eyes.
They were amber pupils, devoid of any yielding or fear. Those eyes did not reflect the oppressive interrogation room, nor did they reflect Tom, a human being. The way she looked at Tom was as if she were looking at a piece of slowly rotting wood, or a moss-covered stone.
Utterly cold, utterly objective, utterly inhuman.
"Hello, Rowan. My name is Tom Harrington, your court-appointed defense attorney." Tom professionally opened his briefcase, neatly laying out a thick stack of files and photographs on the iron table. "Whatever misunderstandings you may have had about human society, now, I am your only friend in this building." Rowan didn't look at the files; her gaze slowly moved to Tom's face.
Her nostrils twitched almost imperceptibly.
In Rowan's acutely sensitive olfactory world, she detected the heavy tar deposits in Tom's lungs, the faint, decaying smell emanating from his liver from years of alcohol consumption. In nature, this smell signified that this "old beast" was nearing death, about to be decomposed into nutrients for the soil.
Rowan had no interest in communicating with a dying organism.
"I know you don't want to talk." Tom skillfully employed the tactic of empathy, pointing to the photograph of Julian Carter's body on the table. "The prosecution is now charging you with 'first-degree murder.' They say you maliciously planted mutated puffball spores in the abandoned mine and cruelly lured Julian into the trap on the night of the incident. They found extremely conclusive microscopic evidence on that coat." Rowan remained absolutely still.
"But I know what kind of scum Julian is," Tom said in a low voice, leaning forward as if trying to establish an air of complicity. "He's a spoiled bastard. He came to your territory with a Remington shotgun; he wanted to kill you. It was your territory, and you were just protecting yourself, right? That's our starting point—self-defense."
"Just tell me what happened that night. Even if you only tell me he fired first, that he attacked you first, I guarantee I can make those incredibly hypocritical housewives on the jury weep for you. I can turn it into a deeply moving story of a poor girl fighting against an extremely evil capitalist." Tom spoke with great fervor. He needed a story; human courts desperately craved stories. Law wasn't about finding absolute truth, but about finding a perfectly logical narrative.
However, Rowan's reaction shattered Tom's professional pride.
Not only did she not succumb to the "lifeline" Tom offered, she even closed her eyes very slowly.
In Rowan's mind, Tom's incessantly noisy speech was like a flock of incredibly foolish crows idly scrambling for a non-existent piece of carrion.
"First-degree murder," "self-defense," "jury."
These incredibly complex legal terms were utterly absurd to a top-tier ecologist who observed spore firing under a microscope and calculated mortality rates using highly acidic red mud.
In the laws of nature, does a fox killing a rabbit and the rabbit blinding the fox require proof of "self-defense"? Does a plant ruthlessly releasing neurotoxins to kill herbivores require a defense of "excessive self-defense" to the forest god?
No.
Julian Carter arrogantly crossed the boundary marked with an "X" on the rotten wood, crushed the incredibly deadly fungus, and died. This is a perfectly flawless physical and chemical process that needs no embellishment from human language.
They actually wanted to cram this sacred process of natural selection into a "court" made up of dozens of tattered pieces of paper and a few utterly hypocritical arguments?
"Rowan, you must cooperate with me!" Tom's voice was shrill with impatience. He slammed his hand on the iron table. "Do you know what you're facing? Death! They'll strap you to the cold electric chair and electrify you with thousands of volts until your insides are completely burned!"
"Electricity." Rowan uttered the word with extreme difficulty. This was the first word she had spoken since her arrest.
Because three days earlier, at Old Moore's junkyard, she had just experienced the excruciating pain of a 50,000-volt electric shock.
Tom thought his intimidation had finally worked. He excitedly picked up a pen: "Yes! The electric chair! So you must tell me—"
"You... are utterly pathetic." Rowan opened her eyes extremely slowly, interrupting Tom.
Her hoarse, harsh voice, like sandpaper scraping, echoed clearly in the interrogation room.
Tom froze. "What did you say?" Rowan didn't look Tom in the eye; she stared indifferently at her body, tightly bound by canvas.
"You built extremely dry boxes of stone…and locked yourselves inside." Rowan's voice was incredibly slow, as if describing the behavior of a primitive insect. "You used chains and electricity…to pretend you were predators."
She glanced with utter contempt at the photograph of Julian's corpse on the table, then at the incredibly thick legal files Tom had brought.
"Rotten wood…doesn't need your paper." Rowan concluded with extreme coldness. "He rotted in the red mud. And you…will eventually rot in the red mud too. The law…can't stop the fungus."
Utter silence.
The air in the interrogation room seemed to freeze instantly.
Tom stared blankly at Rowan. In his forty years in the profession, he had heard suspects' tearful confessions and their most arrogant provocations, but he had never heard such a trans-species, godlike, utter contempt.
She wasn't afraid of the electric chair at all. She even felt immense pity for the humans who tried to judge her. In her eyes, judges, lawyers, and police were nothing more than short-lived carbon-based compounds destined to become spores.
Tom suddenly felt a profound, bone-chilling cold.
He slumped back in his chair, utterly dejected. He finally understood Sheriff Brody's weary warning outside the door: "You're not dealing with a 'weakling' who needs your help."
This was an utterly absurd, irreconcilable conflict.
Rowan had decisively severed all logical connections with the human world. She refused to plead guilty, and she refused to defend herself. With her utter silence and inhumanity, she had driven the entire Graycliff justice system into an incredibly awkward deadlock.
"Fine," Tom said weakly, gathering the files on the table. His hands trembled slightly from a violent cough.
He shoved the case file roughly into his briefcase. "Since you refuse to communicate, then I'll have to put on an utterly absurd 'blind defense' for you. I'll shamelessly tell the court that the prosecution has no direct eyewitness testimony to prove you killed him. I'll stubbornly insist it was just an extremely unfortunate natural accident." Tom stood up, giving Rowan one last, incredibly complex look.
"You're an extremely terrifying creature, Rowan. I don't even know if the court desperately wants to send you to hell or send you back to the forest." Rowan closed her eyes extremely slowly. She entered a deep state of "hibernation" once more, completely shutting out Tom's extremely rapid coughs and the heavy slamming of the iron door.
Three days later, this utterly lacking in witness testimony, a blind defense pieced together entirely from the prosecution's evidence and the defense's speculation, would officially begin in this utterly hypocritical courtroom.
Unbeknownst to Tom Harrington, the most damning evidence to completely overturn the trial lay quietly in Sheriff Brody's trench coat pocket—the diary stained with red mud.
Nature's judgment is utterly silent, while human trials are utterly noisy and utterly absurd.