The double doors of the communal washroom yielded with a wet, swollen groan as Julian drove his shoulder into the damp oak.
A wall of scalding white fog rolled out across his face, thick and suffocating as a wet wool blanket.
Julian pulled the thick collar of his woolen cardigan up over his mouth and nose. The air inside the washroom was thick with sulfur, oxidized copper, and boiling mineral scale. The concrete floor was covered in two inches of steaming, murky water that rippled against his boot soles with tiny, agitated waves.
“Visibility is under five feet,” Lin Mei called from right behind him, her voice muffled through the sleeve of her field jacket.
She swung her heavy brass flashlight through the vapor.
The beam hit the white tile walls, illuminating long cracks where the grout had dissolved from decades of boiling steam. Eight private porcelain sink basins lined the left wall, each mirror clouded with thick grey sweat. Over the third sink, an old institutional brass soap dispenser hung lopsided from its bracket, dripping pink carbolic slime into the drain.
On the right wall stood a row of seven wooden toilet stalls, their louvered pine doors swollen tight inside their frames.
