Picture a jewelry box, lacquered, latticed red with rosewood, pearled with a dozen stone leopards. Picture it inlaid in the wall of a great steep gorge, studded into the steaming green like a glass bead, threaded together with other beads by limestone steps and anchored climbing chains; this was Lo Yai and its sister-houses.

Some would call me overgrown, my body old enough by its birth that it retained some memories of my unlife. Yes, it was too cold and confusing to forget: the way the crechewards took us into the raw stinging north on bony-backed horses, made us hunt with our hands and climb dragonspine mountains and sleep out in the raw air where the ice reached up through frozen earth and sat in our flesh like tetanus.

We agreed that this was what made machinery, and what made it worth knowing: the perpetual and exponential motion of it, a combination of bodies arranged so that a single action compelled a hundred others. The world was made of contraptions such as this, chains of actions upon actions, configured such that the smallest motion might effect the greatest.

Then the autumn. The white and cold dews, the heat-limit, and the first frost, which covered our house and trees and eyelashes in downy silver ice. Still, still she was gone.

My aunts and uncles were all swept away in the certainty of her tone, the way she spoke of unbearable things as if they were pittances. In her voice the flood was a leak. The wildfire was a coal.