Yumi woke to the cold bite of mountain air and ropes cutting into her wrists. The world smelled of smoke and pine. Through the blur of dawn she saw Mina—her adopted sister—standing a few feet away, dressed in silk that glittered like a different life.
Mina raised a hand and slapped Yumi so hard that stars burst behind her eyelids. Yumi touched her cheek, trying to make sense of the words that followed.
"Why are you doing this?" Yumi managed. "Didn't you set me up?" Her voice came out thin.
Mina laughed, the sound like icicles breaking. "Set you up? Your whole family is bankrupt. Your father is in a coma—he'll die before a doctor arrives. My brother will be arrested for embezzlement. Your mother—your favourite mother—has breast cancer because I changed her medication. Two other brothers are praying for you to be dead. You were meant to die today."
Mina let the ropes fall through her fingers, stepping forward as if to leave. Yumi lunged, shoving her aside and stumbling toward the path that led down the mountain. Her pulse hammered in her ears. Fear and fury carried her.
First she ran for her older brother, the one Mina had accused of hiding in the company's accounts. She burst into the house where he waited, grabbed his arm, and they fled together. Sirens wailed in the distance. As they ran through the narrow alley toward a waiting car, a squad of police burst from behind a wall. Shouts, the thunder of boots, and then the crack of gunfire—two shots, two bodies collapsing into the dust.
Yumi's world went black.
She woke later to the same hard sky, but everything had shifted. Her clothes were old and patched. A pair of couples—her parents—stood at the edge of a dirt road, faces streaked with tears and relief. "Yumi!" they cried, rushing forward.
She stared at them, the memory of the mountain slicing through the fog in her mind like a cold blade. Mina's laugh. The gunshots. The rope.
"I'm born again," she whispered, tasting the handful of days she had been allowed. It was four years before her death.
"I won't make the same mistakes again," Yumi said to the empty air—and to the woman in the mountains who had tried to kill her life.