The first thing Lin Mu became aware of was the smell.
Not the antiseptic clean of a hospital. Not the particular blankness of unconsciousness. This was something altogether more honest — the smell of old wood soaked in salt water, of fish scales dried on rough cloth, of poverty that had been lived in so long it had become indistinguishable from the walls themselves.
The second thing he became aware of was the sound of crying.
Not one child. Several. A layered, overlapping symphony of misery, each voice at a different pitch and urgency, the whole composition held together by a desperate, rattling cough that seemed to come from somewhere very close.
The cough, he realized, was coming from him.
Lin Mu opened his eyes.
The ceiling above him was made of rough-cut timber planks, black with age, through which thin needles of grey morning light poked like accusations. A spider had built its web in the corner with more architectural ambition than anything else in the room seemed to possess. The web trembled in a draft that came from somewhere — the walls, perhaps. The walls looked like they had opinions about keeping wind out, and those opinions were largely permissive.
He tried to sit up.
Everything hurt.
Not the sharp, specific hurt of injury but the deep, systemic ache of a body that had been living wrong for a very long time. His hands, when he raised them and looked at them, were not his hands. They were larger than he remembered, browned and roughened, the knuckles swollen, the palms mapped with calluses that told a story of hard labor and harder years. His fingers were stiff. The joints cracked when he flexed them, a sound like distant firecrackers.
What—
The memories came in a wave, not gradually but all at once, the way water hits when a dam breaks — not a trickle but a wall, and Lin Mu pressed the heels of those unfamiliar hands against his eyes and made a sound somewhere between a gasp and a groan.
Wei Longhai. He was Wei Longhai.
Thirty-eight years old. Fisherman. Resident of Qingsha Village, Fujian Prefecture, Yongtai Dynasty.
Husband — widower, now — of Chen Mei, who had died eleven days ago bringing their ninth child into the world. The child had lived. Chen Mei had not.
Father of nine children, the youngest of whom was eleven days old and screaming, presently, from a basket in the corner of this room.
The memories were not his — they belonged to the man whose body he now occupied — but they arrived with the emotional weight of lived experience, and for a moment Lin Mu simply sat on the edge of the rough wooden bed and let them crash through him.
Wei Longhai had been, by any measure, a man comprehensively broken by his circumstances. A fisherman who fished poorly. A husband who had loved his wife with a desperate, inarticulate love that expressed itself mainly in helplessness. A father who looked at his nine children and felt, in equal measure, the oceanic depth of his affection for them and the paralytic terror of knowing he could not adequately feed them. A gambler — not a passionate one, not a man who felt the thrill of the dice, but a man who had come to gamble because gambling offered the mathematical possibility, however remote, that tomorrow could be different from today.
The gambling had made tomorrow considerably worse than today.
There were debts. Lin Mu sorted through them with the reflexive efficiency of a man who had spent eleven years in finance. Two silver coins and forty copper owed to Wang the fishmonger, who had extended credit on meals. One silver and twenty copper owed to the medicine seller, for the medicines that had not, ultimately, saved Chen Mei. Three silver owed to Cousin Dequan, accumulated over two years of small loans. And the largest, the one that sat at the center of the financial catastrophe like a stone in a pond, sending ripples through everything else: eight silver coins owed to Ma Shouyi, the moneylender, who charged interest at a rate that Lin Mu's professional instincts identified immediately as approximately usurious, and whose men had come to the door four days ago to remind Wei Longhai that time, like tide, waits for no man.
In total: thirteen silver and sixty copper.
Lin Mu, who had managed portfolios worth millions of yuan, sat on a poor fisherman's bed in a dynasty that had been dust for centuries, and stared at a debt that amounted to thirteen silver coins, and felt the genuine, vertiginous weight of it.
Because thirteen silver coins, in this world, in this village, in this body — was everything.
The crying had not stopped.
He made himself stand.
The main room of the house — calling it a house was perhaps generous; "shelter" was more accurate — was a single large space divided by a hanging curtain of rough burlap into sleeping areas. The floor was packed earth. The walls were a combination of mud plaster and wishful thinking. A firepit occupied the center of one wall, its chimney a clay pipe that had cracked and been repaired so many times with varying materials that it looked like a geological stratum. On one side of the firepit hung a blackened pot. On the other side, a smaller pot, cracked across the bottom, that had evidently been retired from active service and was now being used to hold kindling.
Lin Mu stood in the doorway and looked at his children.
They were arranged in the room in various postures of misery and need. The two eldest, the twins he understood to be called Wei Daming and Wei Erhong, were seventeen years old — or close enough to it that the distinction mattered less than the fact that they were old enough to be marrying age and were instead sitting in a cold room looking at their younger siblings with the haunted expression of young people who had been made old too quickly. Daming was thinner than a young man his age should be, his cheekbones pushing too prominently at the skin of his face. Erhong sat with his knees drawn up, staring at nothing, and Lin Mu could see, even at this distance, the slight tremor in his hands that spoke of a body running on insufficient fuel for too long.
The third son, Wei Sanlin, was fifteen. He was tending, with an expression of desperate concentration, to his twin brothers Wei Sizi and Wei Wuchun, who were two years old and had achieved the specific, relentless misery of toddlers who are hungry and cold and cannot articulate why the world is arranged so poorly. They were small — too small for two-year-olds. Their wrists were thin. Their cheeks, when they cried, showed hollows that should not be there.
The daughters. Lin Mu's eyes moved to them and his chest did something complicated.
Wei Liuzhu, sixteen years old, was standing at the firepit attempting to coax heat from damp wood. Her sister Wei Qiyue, fourteen, was beside her, and between them they were engaged in what appeared to be a negotiation with a very small amount of millet over whether it could be persuaded to become a meaningful meal for eleven people. The youngest daughter, Wei Baxiu, was ten years old and was sitting in the corner near the infant's basket, rocking it with one hand and reading — or pretending to read — a tattered piece of paper with the other. She had, Lin Mu noticed, the face of a child who had decided, at some point recently, to stop crying because crying had proved ineffective.
And in the basket, the eleventh-day-old infant who had not yet been named, because Wei Longhai had been in the particular hell of grief and debt and helplessness and had not found the resources to name her.
Her.
A ninth child. A third daughter.
She was very small. Even for a newborn she was very small, and she was crying with the reedy, exhausted cry of an infant who had been crying for a long time and was beginning to wonder if anyone was listening.
Lin Mu crossed the room.
He picked her up.
She was lighter than he expected. Lighter than she should be. Her face, when she stopped crying for a moment in surprise at being lifted, was red and crumpled and furious and — underneath the fury — frightened in the particular way that very new people are frightened, because the world is enormous and bewildering and the one voice they had learned to know through months of muffled warmth was suddenly, inexplicably, gone.
"Hey," Lin Mu said, quietly, in a voice that was not quite Wei Longhai's voice — rougher, yes, and lower, wearing Wei Longhai's throat like a borrowed coat, but carrying something Wei Longhai's voice had lacked. Steadiness, perhaps. "Hey. I've got you."
The baby blinked. She had very dark eyes, unfocused in the way of newborns, but they moved toward his face with something that might, in a more stable world, have been curiosity.
The room had gone quiet.
Lin Mu looked up. Eight pairs of eyes — nine, if you counted the infant — were looking at him. The twins at the firepit had stopped their negotiation with the millet. Sanlin had paused in his management of the toddlers. Even the two-year-olds had temporarily suspended their crying in favor of staring. Baxiu had let the piece of paper fall and was watching him with those dry, serious eyes.
Daming and Erhong, the eldest, watched their father from across the room with an expression Lin Mu recognized. He had worn it himself, at twenty-two, when his own father had come home from the factory with the news that there was no more factory. It was the expression of people who have become accustomed to disappointment and cannot yet determine whether what they are seeing is the end of it or simply a new variation.
Lin Mu looked at his children — Wei Longhai's children — and felt the peculiar doubling of a man standing in two lives at once. In one life, he was a financial analyst who had no one who needed him, who had eleven years of expertise in systems and markets and the movement of resources from one place to another. In the other life, he was a fisherman's ghost wearing a fisherman's body, looking at nine children and one infant and a debt of thirteen silver coins and a world that offered, as far as he could determine, exactly one way to get money in this village.
He looked at the firepit. At the near-empty millet pot.
"Daming," he said. The seventeen-year-old straightened slightly. "How much millet is left?"
A pause. Daming and Erhong exchanged a glance. They had not, apparently, expected a question that practical.
"Perhaps enough for two more meals," Daming said carefully. "If we are... careful."
"Liuzhu." The girl at the firepit turned. "Is there anything in the store room?"
"Some dried fish," she said. "Three pieces. I was saving them."
"Good thinking." He looked around the room. Counted his resources the way he used to count assets. "Erhong. When did you last go to the beach?"
Another exchange of glances. "Father has not..." Erhong stopped. Started again. "We have not fished in two weeks."
Two weeks. A dead wife, a moneylender's threats, nine hungry children, and no one had gone fishing in two weeks.
Lin Mu looked down at the infant in his arms. She had stopped crying. She was making the small, effortful sounds of an infant who wishes to eat, and could not, because she had no mother, and the goat whose milk had been substituted — he found this memory in Wei Longhai's residue — had dried up three days ago.
First things first.
"We need goat's milk," he said. "Is there anyone in the village—"
"Widow Feng has a goat," Baxiu said, from the corner. Her voice was matter-of-fact. She had, apparently, already thought about this. "She's asked for help mending her roof."
Lin Mu looked at his youngest daughter — the ten-year-old with the serious eyes and the piece of tattered paper — and felt something shift in his chest.
"Smart," he said. She blinked. He suspected Wei Longhai had not said that to her often. "Very smart, Baxiu."
He looked around the room one more time. At the cracked walls and the earthen floor and the blackened pot and the damp wood struggling to become fire. At the nine faces watching him — some with wariness, some with hunger, the youngest two with the uncomplicated need of very small people, the eldest two with the beginning of something cautious and not-quite-hope.
He had managed a forty-million yuan portfolio once. He had modeled risk across twelve variables simultaneously. He had sat in rooms with men worth more than this entire village and made them feel, through the careful marshaling of information and presentation, that the future was manageable.
Thirteen silver coins of debt. One leaky boat. A beach. An ocean.
Start with what you have, he thought. In finance and in life, you start with what you have.
"Sanlin," he said. The fifteen-year-old looked up. "I'll need you to come with me. We're going fishing."