"I should have told you sooner, I was adopted." Bleeding hands reach through iron bars for a final farewell. "I'm sorry, don't cry." Zhilan's wounds bleed fatally.

  Huali gasps for breath, skin fading to gray. "It hurts. Poison hurts."

  "If there is a next life, I promise I will protect you."

  "If there is a next life, let's not..." Huali's voice disappears in pain, but she rouses herself. "Not be family. You were...terrible...brother. The worst. If there is a next life, I hope we never..."

  I hope we never meet. Moron.

  ---

  I wake in a bedroom that, despite its familiarity, feels unreal.

  It must be a dream. I passed out from the pain.

  A nightmare, to be back here. Here, I had to learn music, art dance, history, and nothing actually useful. Here, I was trained to make conversation, to smile prettily, to cry at nothing and shine through tears, but not how to scheme or survive. Here, I lived alone, abandoned.

  "Miss?"

  Here, too many mistakes were made. Here, I was made to be pretty and smart, but not truly clever. Too refined, admired by society and rejected by my own family, when they finally saw fit to reclaim me.

  Wait, didn't this house burn down?

  "Miss?"

  Miss? Since when? "Hello?"

  "There you are! I've been looking everywhere for you." Mimi steps into the room, breathless.

  "Everywhere, except my room?" I flinch at the sound of my voice, too high and too pitchy. What is wrong with me?

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  "I started here!" She pouts and starts to cry about how I always bully her.

  "Never mind that." I close my eyes and pull the covers over my face. "I think I am ill." I think I might be dead.

  "What?" She comes to feel if my forehead is hot or cold. Her hand is warm, not like a ghost.

  I sit up and stare into her face. She looks just as I remember. "What's my name? How old am I? How long have I been here? What day is it?"

  "Miss, don't say such scary things!" Hua Mimi's crocodile tears are more annoying than I remembered. "Miss, you're Song Huali, the precious but exiled fourth daughter of the great Song family!" Trust her to still answer. "You're seventeen years old, and you've been here sixteen years. Today is Tuesday."

  Was it when I was twelve or thirteen? I used to ask every day, to annoy her and to remind myself that I wasn't abandoned.

  I drag myself out of bed to look around the room. These wood walls, that fireplace, the awful painting hanging over the mantle.. It's all so correct, so eerily like my memory of this place. The servant girl, who watches me with worry in her posture, has the same dark curly hair and pouting expression I remember. "Who are you?" Who sent her? Who created this place? The dowager?

  "I'm Hua Mimi!" She stamps her foot, because this isn't part of the routine. "I've been here with you fifteen years already, Miss!"

  I make her show me her scars and tell me of our times together, her voice growing more sincerely frustrated, and hoarse. "What's wrong with you, Lili?" she sobs at last, unable to answer any more questions.

  That is my Mimi.

  But my Mimi died years ago. Turning away, I brush past her to look out the window. The trees are green and flowerless, the grass thick and tall. I rest my head against the cold glass. "I want to be alone."

  Even the yard feels accurate.

  The wardrobe has a few dresses of common quality, the vanity table a handful of baubles too strange to be called jewelry. Mimi and I made those ourselves using wood and dried leaves, and broken bits of pottery and glass from the temple.

  All burned.

  My bookshelf was also more impressive, filled from end to end with different subjects. A little decorative panel in the bottom slides away to reveal a thick stack of letters from when my family still pretended to care.

  Those burned, too. Who knew of them?

  The fake Mimi watches me search the room, refusing to leave. She doesn't look surprised to see the secret compartment--why would she? She's probably the dowager's--but why?

  I shiver away from the memory of drinking poison, and another recollection floats through my mind. Scraping my heels on the wood floor, I creep to the bed and lift up a pillow. Nothing. A second, also clean. The third reveals an expensive jade pendant.

  I lose my balance, falling into the bed. It is too soft, this bed. Mine wasn't this soft.

  Nothing in my life was soft.

  The ugly painting seems to mock me. I kept that painting. I made Zhilan bring it with us, when we burned this house down. Years later, I took it with me to the great house. And when I married, I brought it to the palace. The dowager said she saw why I liked it--she meant to be rude. She didn't see.

  It looks like destruction--a city engulfed in flamed and falling to pieces, the moon shutting its eye and refusing to watch. But against the clouds there is a shadow of a shape, like a memory you can't quite catch. "Did you send me here?"

  The time dragon does not blink, frozen in oil paint.