Chapter 7: The world beyond the wall - 1
That morning had begun like any other.
In the town of Qinghe, eight li from the Zhang family farm, the market square stirred to life while the stars still clung to the western sky. The first to arrive were the vendors—old men and women who had been setting up their stalls since before the current mayor was born, their bodies tuned to rhythms older than clocks.
Old Zhao—everyone called him Lao Zhao, though his given name had long since faded from memory—arrived at four-thirty in the morning, same as he had for forty-three years. His cart creaked under the weight of fresh tofu, the wooden wheels finding every dip and crack in the cobblestones with practiced familiarity. He was sixty-seven years old, his back bent but his hands steady.
The same hands that had pressed ten thousand blocks of tofu. The same hands that had held his wife's face the morning she died, eight winters ago, her skin already cooling, her eyes already fixed on something he couldn't see.
The same hands that now worked alone, because there was no one left to inherit the stall and he had stopped expecting anyone to try.
He unloaded his wooden boards—dark with age, worn smooth by decades of use, the grain of the wood visible only in certain lights like the lines on a palm. He wiped them down with a damp cloth, then arranged the white blocks in neat rows. The tofu was still warm from the morning's pressing.
Steam rose from it in the cool air, carrying that faint, clean smell of soybeans that had been the background scent of his entire life. When his knife bit into the first block, the sound it made was a soft, wet sigh—a sound he had heard ten thousand times, a sound that meant the day had properly begun.
The market woke around him.
Lao Liu arrived next—Mrs. Liu to her customers, though everyone who'd known her more than twenty years called her Lao Liu. Her cart was heavy with vegetables: thick green cucumbers with skins that snapped when you bent them;
purple eggplants glossy as polished stone;
cabbages wrapped in their own leaves like gifts waiting to be opened.
She was a large woman with a loud voice and a generous hand, always slipping an extra scallion into a regular's bundle. Her husband had died in the war twenty years ago, leaving her with three children and a vegetable cart and no time to grieve.
She had raised those children alone, selling vegetables in this square, and now her children had children of their own, and still she came to the market every morning because she didn't know what else to do with herself.
"Lao Zhao!" she called, her voice carrying across the square with the force of a woman who had spent decades making herself heard over crowds. "You're earlier than the roosters."
"The roosters are lazy," he replied without looking up, his hands still moving over the tofu. "They sleep in. Eat too much. Get fat."
"You're describing my son-in-law."
"Your son-in-law is a good man."
"He's a good man who sleeps too much and eats too much."
She began arranging her vegetables, her hands moving with the speed of decades—cucumbers here, eggplants there, cabbages in the back where they wouldn't roll.
"But my daughter loves him, so what can I do?"
"Nothing. You can do nothing. That's what being a mother-in-law is."
Lao Liu laughed, a sound that echoed off the buildings and startled the pigeons from the fountain. "You've never even been married, Lao Zhao. What do you know about being a mother-in-law?"
"I've had forty-three years of watching other people's marriages." He looked up at last, his eyes crinkling. "I know enough."
By five o'clock, the square was half full. The butcher arrived with his cart of fresh pork, the carcasses hanging from hooks, blood still dripping into the buckets beneath with a sound like slow rain. The fishmonger came with his baskets of river fish, their scales catching the lantern light in flashes of silver and grey. The spice merchant set out his jars—cumin that smelled like warm earth, star anise shaped like wooden stars, Sichuan peppercorns that left a tingle on your tongue, cinnamon bark curled like ancient scrolls. The smell of sesame oil drifted from the cooking stalls, where women in aprons were already frying dough sticks and steaming buns, their faces flushed from the heat.
The sun rose, painting the rooftops in shades of gold and amber, and the customers came.
---
Chen Ayi—Mrs. Chen to most, but Ayi to those who'd known her long enough—arrived at five-fifteen, same as she had for twenty-three years. She was a small woman in her sixties, with grey hair pulled into a tight bun and a shopping basket over her arm. Her husband had died of a stroke six years ago—she had found him in the garden, his hand still gripping the trowel, his tomatoes only half-watered. She had finished watering them before she called the ambulance. Some things, she believed, you simply had to do.
Her daughter lived in the provincial capital, three hours away by bus, and called once a week on Sunday evenings. The rest of the time, Chen Ayi filled her days with routines—the market, the temple, the small garden behind her apartment where she grew tomatoes in clay pots, the same tomatoes her husband had been tending when he died. She didn't think of it as sad. She thought of it as continuing.
"Good morning, Lao Zhao," she said.
"Good morning, Chen Ayi." He looked up from his tofu, and a smile spread across his weathered face, rearranging the lines around his eyes and mouth into something younger. "You look like you've become younger."
Chen Ayi laughed, touching her hair self-consciously. "Aiya, you're just seeing things. These old eyes of yours need glasses."
"My eyes are perfect. Better than perfect. I can see a ripe soybean from a hundred bu."
"You couldn't see a cow from a hundred bu."
"That cow was very far away."
"It was ten chi."
"It was a very small cow." Lao Zhao's hands didn't stop moving as he spoke—folding, pressing, arranging. "A miniature cow. Very rare."
Chen Ayi shook her head, still smiling. "The usual?"
Lao Zhao was already cutting the tofu—the firm block from the corner, the way she liked it, the way he had been cutting it for twenty-three years. "The usual."
He wrapped it in a lotus leaf, folding the edges with the precision of origami, each crease sharp and deliberate. Chen Ayi took it and examined it with a critical eye, turning it over in her hands with the solemnity of a jeweler appraising a gem.
"This one looks a bit small," she said.
Lao Zhao's smile widened. His teeth were yellow, but his smile was kind—the smile of a man who had been having this same conversation for twenty-three years and looked forward to it every morning, who had structured his days around the certainty of it. "Chen Ayi, it's the same size it's always been."
"Last week's was bigger."
"Last week's was the same."
"Last week's was definitely bigger. I measured it."
"You measured my tofu?"
"With my eyes." She tapped the corner of her eye with her free hand. "I have very accurate eyes."
"Your eyes are as bad as mine."
"My eyes are excellent. My grandmother had excellent eyes. She could thread a needle at midnight. In the dark. With no lamp."
"Your grandmother was a remarkable woman." Lao Zhao folded his arms. "But my tofu is the same size it's always been."
They haggled. Two fen off, no more, no less. It was a ritual, the price never actually changing—Chen Ayi always asked for two fen off, Lao Zhao always protested with increasing theatrical indignation, and then he always gave it to her. The bargaining was not about money. It was about recognition. About two people who had known each other for twenty-three years and would know each other for twenty-three more, Heaven willing, and who marked the passage of time through these small, repeated gestures. Every morning, the same words, the same smile, the same two fen. It was the most reliable thing in either of their lives.
Lao Zhao shook his head with a gentle smirk, sliding the two coins back across the board. "Well, I can never win in bargaining with you."
Chen Ayi smiled, tucking the wrapped tofu into her basket. "You've never tried."
"I try very hard. You're just too good."
"I know." She adjusted the basket on her arm. "See you tomorrow, Lao Zhao."
"See you tomorrow, Chen Ayi."
She moved on to the vegetable stall, where Lao Liu was waiting with her usual bundle of spinach, the leaves still damp from the morning's washing.
"Did he give you the two fen?" Lao Liu asked, her hands already wrapping the spinach in old newspaper.
"Of course. He always does."
"That man has been in love with you for twenty years."
Chen Ayi waved her hand dismissively, though her cheeks flushed slightly. "He's not in love with me. He's in love with my bargaining."
"That's the same thing, at our age."
"It's not the same thing at any age." But Chen Ayi was still smiling as she paid for her spinach. "How's your daughter?"
"Fat. Happy. The baby's due next month." Lao Liu's face softened—the way it always did when she talked about her grandchildren. "She waddles around the house like a duck. A very happy duck."
"A boy or a girl?"
"She won't tell me. Says she wants it to be a surprise." Lao Liu shook her head, the grey bun wobbling. "I told her, how am I supposed to knit the right color? She said knit yellow. Who ever heard of a yellow baby blanket? Babies don't like yellow. Babies like red. Red is for luck. Everyone knows this."
"All my baby clothes were yellow."
"And look how you turned out."
They laughed together, two old women in the morning sun, their voices rising above the market noise. Around them, the square hummed with life. Children ran between the stalls, chasing a stray dog with patchy brown fur that had been hanging around the market for years—it belonged to no one and everyone, fed on scraps and affection. A woman sold skewered meat from a cart, the coals glowing red beneath the grill, the smoke rising in thin ribbons that twisted and vanished. Two old men played chess at a plastic table outside the tea house, their faces creased with concentration, a small crowd gathered around them offering unsolicited advice that both players ignored with practiced dignity.
A young couple held hands near the fountain—the girl, maybe nineteen, with a red ribbon in her hair, laughing at something the boy whispered in her ear. He was tall and slightly awkward, the kind of young man who hadn't yet grown into his limbs, but when he looked at her, his whole face changed. Softened. Became something better.
"Look at them," Lao Liu said, following Chen Ayi's gaze. "So young. So stupid."
"They're in love."
"Same thing." But Lao Liu's voice was fond. "I was that stupid once. A hundred years ago."
"We all were."
The morning stretched on, warm and golden, the sun climbing higher until the shadows shortened and the heat began to rise from the cobblestones in visible waves. The light had that particular quality of mid-morning—thick and honeyed, pooling in the alleys, catching the dust that rose from the stones and turning it into something almost beautiful. By ten o'clock, the market had reached its peak—dense with bodies, loud with voices, rich with the smells of food and spices and life.
And then, gradually, the morning crowd began to thin.
Chen Ayi finished her shopping and headed home, her basket heavy with tofu and spinach and a small bag of star anise. She walked the familiar route back to her apartment—past the temple where the monks were sweeping the steps, past the fountain where the young couple had been, past the old banyan tree whose roots had cracked the sidewalk decades ago. She climbed the three flights of stairs to her apartment, each step familiar, each creak of the railing expected. She put the tofu in the coolest corner of her kitchen, watered her tomato plants on the balcony—they were thriving this year, the fruits small but sweet—and settled into her armchair. Her daughter would call on Sunday. That was three days away. She had three days to think of what to tell her.
Lao Liu packed up her remaining vegetables around eleven. The morning rush had cleaned her out—only a few cabbages and a bundle of scallions remained. She loaded them into her cart and headed to her daughter's house, where she would help prepare dinner and argue about baby names. "Yellow," she muttered as she walked, the cart bumping over the cobblestones. "Who ever heard of a yellow baby blanket? The child will think it's a banana."
The young couple by the fountain finally separated, though it took them three tries. The girl kissed the boy on his cheek, leaving a faint smudge of lipstick. "Don't be late tonight," she said, straightening his collar.
"I'm never late."
"You were late three times last week."
"Those were exceptions." He caught her hand before she could pull away. "Tonight won't be. I promise."
"Everything's an exception with you." But she was smiling as she walked away, the red ribbon in her hair catching the sun, and she looked back once before she turned the corner.
The chess players finished their game—black won, which sparked a heated argument about a move made in the midgame that would probably continue into tomorrow. They packed up their board and shuffled home for lunch. The children were called inside by their mothers, their protests fading into the side streets. The stray dog found a patch of shade beneath the cloth seller's stall and fell asleep, its tail twitching.
The morning crowd was gone. But the market didn't close. It never closed until dusk.
For two hours, the square dozed in the midday heat. Vendors napped beside their stalls, hats pulled low. The fishmonger covered his remaining fish with wet cloths to keep them cool. The spice merchant retreated to the shade of the tea house for a cup of something cold, trading gossip with the woman who owned the skewered meat cart. The cloth seller fanned herself with a folded bolt of cotton. Even the stray dog barely stirred, its tail giving only the occasional lazy thump against the cobblestones. The square breathed slowly, resting, waiting for the second act of the day.
---
By noon, new faces began to appear.
The afternoon market was different from the morning—slower, more companionable. The frantic efficiency of dawn had given way to something gentler, almost lazy. Vendors chatted between customers. The fishmonger touched up the ice on his display, arranging his remaining fish into elaborate patterns—a fan of carp here, a circle of tilapia there, a single large bass positioned like a centerpiece. The spice merchant rearranged his jars, their contents glinting in the sun. The cloth seller laid out new bolts of fabric, their colors bright against the dusty cobblestones—crimson, indigo, a yellow the exact shade of a baby blanket that Lao Liu would have hated.
Lao Zhao ate his lunch at his stall—cold noodles with sesame paste, brought from home in a battered tin container that had been with him almost as long as the tofu boards. He ate slowly, watching the afternoon arrive in pieces. The sun climbed higher. The shadows shortened until they were just dark pools at the base of the buildings. The heat rose from the stones in soft waves, carrying the smell of warm dust and cooking oil and the river somewhere to the east.
A young mother appeared, a toddler balanced on her hip. The boy was maybe three years old, his face sticky from a candied hawthorn skewer he'd been working on for the past ten minutes. He was reaching for everything—the fish, the vegetables, the dangling edge of the cloth seller's display—and his mother kept pulling his hand back with the exhausted patience of someone who had been doing this all day. "Bao," she said, not for the first time, "if you touch that, we're going home."
The boy, Bao, touched it anyway. She sighed and bought him another candied hawthorn to keep his hands occupied. The vendor who sold them—a woman with a cart and a bubbling pot of sugar—smiled knowingly. She had seen this exact exchange a thousand times.
A group of laborers arrived from the construction site on the edge of town, their shirts dusty with plaster and sweat, their laughter loud enough to startle the pigeons from the fountain. There were five of them, ranging from a young man who couldn't have been older than twenty to a grizzled veteran with grey in his hair and a scar across his knuckles. They bought skewered meat and cold noodles and bottles of cheap beer, sprawling across the low wall near the tea house like they owned it.
"Did you see the foundation they poured yesterday?" the young one said, his mouth full of pork. "Three cun off level. Three cun. I told the foreman, I said, 'That's going to crack by winter.' He said, 'It's fine.'" He gestured with his skewer. "It's not fine. Nothing about that foundation is fine."
"Nothing's ever fine with you," the grey-haired laborer said, cracking open a beer.
"Because nothing's ever done right."
"That's why you're not the foreman."
"I should be the foreman."
"You should be the foreman's mother." The older man took a long drink. "Same amount of complaining."
The others laughed. The young laborer threw a piece of gristle at his friend, who dodged it easily. "You'll see. When that foundation cracks—when the whole building comes down—you'll remember this conversation. You'll say, 'He was right. He was right all along.'"
"We'll say nothing. We'll be dead, because the building will have fallen on us."
"Exactly. And it'll be the foreman's fault."
The grey-haired laborer raised his bottle in a mock toast. "To the foreman. May his foundations be as crooked as his morals."
They drank. They argued. They played cards on the low wall, the slapping of the deck punctuating their conversation. None of them looked at the sky.
A grandmother—a tiny woman with sharp eyes and a sharper tongue, everyone called her Nainai—was picking through the spice merchant's jars, searching for star anise. She had been examining the same jar for five minutes. She held it up to the light, shook it gently, sniffed the contents with the intensity of a wine taster.
"This isn't fresh," she declared.
"It arrived yesterday," the spice merchant said, his voice carrying the weariness of a man who had been having this conversation since dawn. "From the coast. Still has the salt on it."
"It doesn't smell like it arrived yesterday."
"How would it smell if it arrived yesterday?"
"It would smell fresher. More..." She waved her hand vaguely. "More like the sea."
"Madam, star anise does not smell like the sea. Star anise smells like star anise."
"Fresh star anise smells like the sea. My grandmother taught me this."
The spice merchant stared at her for a long moment. Then he sighed—the sound of a man who had learned, decades ago, that some battles were not worth winning. "Would you like to try a different jar?"
"Yes. That one." She pointed. "The one in the back."
He retrieved it. She examined it with the same intensity. "Better," she admitted. "Not perfect. But better."
"You're too kind."
She bought the star anise—along with some cinnamon and a small bag of Sichuan peppercorns—and moved on to the fishmonger, where she spent another ten minutes examining a carp with the same critical eye. "This fish isn't fresh," she announced.
"That fish," the fishmonger said with great dignity, "died this morning. I was there."
"You were not there."
"I was there. I knew his father. A very respectable fish family. Three generations of carp."
"Three generations."
"They're very proud. Very noble." He lifted the carp by the tail, presenting it like a medal. "This fish would be honored to be eaten by someone with such... discerning standards."
The grandmother snorted. But she bought the fish.
A traveling salesman had set up a temporary stall near the fountain, his cart loaded with bolts of cloth from the coast. He was a young man, barely twenty-five, with a quick smile and quicker hands. His voice carried across the square as he demonstrated his wares to a small crowd of women who had gathered around him.
"Feel this," he said, thrusting a bolt of cotton into the hands of the nearest woman. "Have you ever felt anything so soft? This is three-ply weaving. Three ply. Most cloth is two. This is three. You could sleep on this. You could dream on this."
"It's too expensive," one of the women said, though she was still touching the cloth.
"Expensive? Madame, this is not expensive. This is an investment. This cloth will last you twenty years. Your grandchildren will wear this cloth."
"I don't have grandchildren."
"You will." He flashed his quick smile. "And when you do, they'll thank you for buying this cloth today, at this price, which is very reasonable and will not last—" he paused dramatically—"because I only have three bolts left."
"There are at least ten bolts on your cart."
"Those are spoken for. Reserved. This is the last available stock."
The women laughed, but some of them were reaching for their purses.
The afternoon sun was warm but not yet harsh, the kind of sun that made you want to close your eyes and tilt your face toward the sky. A light breeze moved through the square, carrying the smell of sesame oil and woodsmoke and the river somewhere to the east. It stirred the leaves of the old banyan tree, rustled the cloth on the salesman's cart, lifted the hair from the back of Lao Zhao's neck.
It felt like any other afternoon. Any other market day.
At two o'clock, that ended.
---
Lao Zhao noticed the light first.
Not because he was looking for it. Because the shadow of his tofu board was wrong. All morning, that shadow had been sharp as a blade—a clean black line separating light from shade, so precise you could trace it with a finger. He'd watched it creep across the cobblestones hour by hour, tracking time the way he always did, the way his father had taught him before he died, the way he had been tracking time for forty-three years.
But now the edge was dissolving.
He blinked, thinking something was wrong with his eyes. He rubbed them with the back of his hand—those steady hands, those hands that never shook. When he looked again, the shadow was still wrong. Its edges bled into the stone like ink dropped into water, spreading, blurring, losing their shape.
He looked up.
The sky was still blue—but it was thinning. The color was being pulled out of it like a thread from fabric, fading at the edges, bleaching toward something pale and sick. Along the eastern horizon, where the mountains rose dark against the heavens, a band of green was spreading.
Not the green of leaves. Not the green of grass or jade or anything that grew. The green of a bruise that had been festering under the skin for weeks. The green of stagnant water, of something that had died in a well and been left to rot. The kind of green that made your stomach turn before your mind understood why—something ancient and primal, a warning baked into the deepest parts of the brain. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
"Hey." The fishmonger's voice was different now. Quieter. His hands, which had been adjusting the bass for the fifth time, had stopped moving entirely. "Anyone else see that?"
"See what?" The spice merchant looked up from his brass scoop. His eyes tracked across the sky, finding the green stain, and his face went slack. Not afraid. Not yet. Just trying to make sense of something his mind wasn't built to process. "What... what is that?"
The cloth seller had stopped mid-sentence, a bolt of crimson cotton still in her hands. The traveling salesman turned from his customers, his quick smile gone. The grandmother—the one with the star anise and the noble carp—let the jar slip from her fingers. It struck the cobblestones and shattered, the star anise scattering like wooden stars, and the sound was very loud in the sudden quiet.
Bao, the child with the candied hawthorn, tugged at his mother's sleeve. "Mama? Mama, what's happening to the sun?"
His mother didn't answer. She was staring at the sky, her mouth slightly open, her hand tightening on her son's shoulder until her knuckles went white. The rice cracker she'd given him fell from her other hand and shattered on the cobblestones. Bao began to cry—not from fear, but from the loss of his cracker, the small injustice of it. He didn't understand yet. His mother didn't either. But some part of her—some animal part, some ancient thing that lived in her spine and her gut—was already screaming.
The birds stopped singing.
Not gradually. All at once, as if a door had slammed shut somewhere in the world. The sparrows that nested in the tea house eaves. The pigeons that gathered around the fountain. The crow that had been perched on the butcher's sign, its black feathers gleaming. Every bird within hearing fell silent in the same instant—and then, one by one, they dropped. Not flying. Falling. Their wings locked, their bodies rigid, striking the cobblestones with soft, terrible thuds.
One landed at the laborers' feet. It lay twitching, its beak opening and closing, its eyes filmed over with something grey.
"What the fuck," one of the laborers whispered. He was the young one, the one who had complained about the foundation. His voice was very small.
Then the sound came.
It started low—so low Lao Zhao felt it in his chest before he heard it, a vibration that made his ribs ache, that rattled his teeth in their sockets. It built slowly, climbing in pitch with the deliberation of something that knew exactly what it was doing. A hum. A whine. And then past that, past anything he had words for. It became a scream—a high, piercing sound that seemed to come from everywhere at once, from the sky and the ground and the air itself, from inside his own skull.
The young mother clapped her hands over Bao's ears. It didn't help. The sound was inside them now—in their teeth, in the soft places behind their eyes, in the marrow of their bones. Bao was screaming, but no one could hear him over the sound. His mother was screaming too. They were all screaming.
Lao Zhao dropped his knife. It clattered on the cobblestones, the blade still wet with tofu water. He tried to bend down to pick it up—forty-three years of instinct, of never letting his tools lie on the ground—but his body wouldn't move. His legs had locked. His arms were frozen at his sides.
The green light swept across the town like a breaking wave.
---
It came from the east, faster than anything should be able to move. A wall of green, thick and oily, rolling over the rooftops and swallowing the horizon. Lao Zhao could see it coming—could see the wave of light cresting above the buildings like water above a dam—and then it was here. It washed over the square, over the stalls, over the people. It poured down the streets and alleys. It pressed against windows and doors. It filled the world.
For one suspended moment—two heartbeats, three—nothing moved. The green light held everything in place, frozen. The fishmonger with his mouth open. The spice merchant reaching for his jars. The mother clutching Bao. Even the dust motes hung motionless in the air. The world was holding its breath. Waiting to see what would come next.
Then the light pressed deeper, and the moment shattered.
Lao Zhao felt it hit his chest like a fist. His ribs compressed. All the air was driven from his lungs, and when he tried to inhale, the air was thick and wrong, heavy as water, tasting of copper and rot. He fell to his knees. The lotus leaves scattered around him like white petals torn from a flower.
The pain started in his skin. Not burning. Worse. A prickling, crawling sensation, like thousands of insects hatching beneath the surface, pushing their way out. He watched his own hands—those steady hands that had never trembled, that had held his wife's face, that had pressed ten thousand blocks of tofu—begin to shake. The skin was changing. Darkening. The warm brown of his flesh was draining away like water from a cracked cup, replaced by grey. Not the grey of age, not the grey of death. The grey of stone. Of ash. Of things that had been hollowed out and filled with something else.
He tried to scream. His throat moved. His jaw opened. No sound came. Just a soft hiss of air, like steam escaping a kettle.
The grey spread up his wrists, his forearms, his elbows. Under his sleeves, it crawled across his shoulders, down his chest, into his belly. He could feel his own body turning to something that was no longer his, cell by cell, bone by bone.
Then his bones began to ache. Not pain—pain was too simple a word. A grinding, shifting sensation, like his skeleton was being dismantled by hands that didn't care about the original design. His spine popped. Vertebra by vertebra, something was changing inside him, rearranging itself into a shape that had never been human. His knees, still pressed against the cobblestones, bent further—further than knees should bend—and then snapped backward with a wet, grinding crack.
He fell forward, catching himself on his hands. But his hands were no longer hands. The fingers were lengthening, the knuckles swelling, the nails pushing out black and sharp and curved. They scratched grooves into the stone.
Around him, the market was dying.
---
The fishmonger had collapsed across his baskets. The fish were still alive, flopping around him, their silver bodies thrashing against his changing flesh. He lay on his back, staring at the sky, and the green light was pouring into him through his open eyes—through the pupils, through the whites, filling him like a vessel. His skin began to bubble. Not metaphorically. Actually bubble, like water coming to a boil. Blisters rose and burst. The flesh beneath was grey and new and wrong. His jaw unhinged—not falling open, but detaching, the joints popping free with a sound like wet branches snapping underfoot. His teeth, the ordinary human teeth he had used to smile at customers for thirty years, began to fall out. They scattered across his chest like seeds, clicking against the cobblestones. And in their place, new teeth pushed through the bleeding gums—long and jagged and curving inward, the teeth of something that had never been human.
The spice merchant had fallen backward, knocking over his jars. Cumin and star anise and Sichuan peppercorn and cinnamon bark scattered across the cobblestones in a riot of colors and smells—the sharp bite of the peppercorn, the warm sweetness of the cinnamon, the earthy richness of the cumin. The fragrances layered over the smell of rot that was beginning to rise. He was clutching his arm, where the skin had begun to split. Not cracking like Lao Zhao's skin. Splitting, like fruit left too long in the sun. Green pustules formed in the wounds—dozens of them, hundreds, swelling and pulsating with a rhythm that matched his heartbeat. Each one swelled to the size of a grape, then burst, releasing a thin curl of yellow smoke that stank of sulfur and spoiled meat. He was screaming—not words, just sound, a raw and endless wail that went on and on because he couldn't stop, his lungs wouldn't let him stop, even as his throat tore and blood filled his mouth.
The cloth seller's transformation was quieter, and somehow that was worse. She had fallen sideways, her bolts of fabric tumbling around her—crimson, indigo, that unlucky yellow. Her head was twisted at an angle that necks were not designed to achieve, her chin resting against her shoulder blade. Her eyes were white—not rolled back, but white, the pupils and irises swallowed. Her mouth was smiling. A soft, peaceful smile, the kind of smile a woman might wear while sleeping, dreaming of something pleasant. Her chest still rose and fell. She was still alive. But whatever was inside her now—whatever was looking out through those white eyes—was not the woman who had been selling cloth ten minutes ago.
The grandmother who had bought the star anise was on her knees. Her sharp tongue, which had critiqued spice merchants and fishmongers and probably everyone she had ever met, was grey and swelling, filling her mouth like a stone. Her eyes turned white. Her fingers curled into claws.
Bao, the child with the candied hawthorn, was the worst.
He was so small. The green light had nowhere to hide in a body that size. His mother was holding him, pressing him against her chest, her body curled around his like a shell. Her back was to the light, her arms wrapped tight, her face buried in his hair. It didn't matter. The light passed through her as if she were made of glass, as if her love and her body and her desperate, ferocious motherhood meant nothing at all to whatever force had decided to end the world.
Bao's crying stopped mid-sob. His small body went rigid in her arms, his back arching, his tiny fingers curling inward. His skin turned grey from the inside out—Lao Zhao could see it, could see the color spreading through the child's veins like a map of rivers flooding, each capillary a tributary of poison. The grey rose up his arms, his legs, his chest, his throat. It reached his face.
"Mama," Bao said. His voice was very small, very clear, the last human sound he would ever make. "Mama, I can't see."
His eyes turned white.
His mother held him as he crumbled. She held the dust that had been her son—the boy who had wanted the fish, who had eaten the candied hawthorn, who had been alive and warm and reaching for everything in the world—and she screamed. Not a word. Not a name. Just sound. Raw and endless and filled with something that went beyond grief, beyond horror, beyond anything language could hold. She screamed until her throat gave out, until blood ran from her lips, and then she kept screaming in silence, her mouth open, her body rocking, her arms full of grey dust and the memory of a child.
---
The laborers had tried to run. They made it ten steps—five men who had been laughing and playing cards, who had been arguing about foundations and foremen. Their legs locked mid-stride. One fell forward, his face striking the cobblestones, his nose breaking with a wet crunch. Two of them reached for each other—the young one who complained, the grey-haired one who mocked him—and their hands found each other. Their fingers intertwined. The grip tightened. The older man's fingers began to break under the pressure, bone cracking, skin splitting. Neither of them could let go. Their flesh was fusing, knitting together, two bodies becoming one mass of grey skin and white eyes and screaming mouths.
The traveling salesman had crawled under his cart, pulling the bright cloth down around him like a blanket. His quick hands, which had been demonstrating three-ply weaving, were pressed against his face. He was weeping. The green light seeped through the fabric, through his fingers, through his closed eyelids. His weeping turned to screams. His screams turned to silence.
The young mother—the one whose son had crumbled in her arms—was still alive. The green light had touched her, passed through her body to reach her child, but it hadn't changed her. She knelt on the cobblestones, her son's dust clinging to her dress, her face blank, her mouth open in a soundless howl. She was the only one still human in the square. The only one who could still weep.
---
The shimmer lasted three minutes.
When it passed, the green light receded like a tide pulling back from the shore—not fading, but withdrawing, pulling toward the horizon, leaving behind a world that had been permanently altered. The hum faded. The pressure in Lao Zhao's chest eased, though his body was no longer his own. The sky was still wrong—still cracked at the edges, still bleeding that sickly green along the horizon—but the wave itself was gone.
The market was silent.
Not the silence of peace. Not the silence of sleep. The silence of a held breath. The silence of a graveyard at midnight, when even the wind is afraid to move. The kind of silence that presses against your ears and makes you hear your own heartbeat—or what used to be your heartbeat, before it changed into something else.
Lao Zhao opened his eyes. He didn't remember closing them. He pushed himself up, his arms moving in ways they shouldn't, his joints bending at angles that made his mind stutter and skip. He looked down at his hands—grey, clawed, the nails black and sharp. He flexed his fingers. They moved. They were his, and they were not his.
He stood. His legs were wrong. The knees bent backward now, and his feet had changed—longer, narrower, the toes curled into claws that clicked against the cobblestones. He took a step. His balance was different, but his body knew what to do even if his mind didn't.
He tried to speak to the young mother. No sound came. Just a hiss of air.
She looked up at him. Her eyes were red, her face wet with tears, but her gaze was steady. She looked at what he had become—the grey skin, the black claws, the backward knees—and she didn't flinch.
"I know," she said. Her voice was raw, scraped out. "I know."
She stood up. Her dress was grey with dust. "Goodbye," she said. "Whoever you were."
She walked away, into the side streets, and Lao Zhao watched her go.
He bent down—his new knees folding in their strange way—and picked up his knife from the cobblestones. The blade was still wet with tofu water. He held it in his grey, clawed hand, and he did not know why.
Nearby, the fishmonger stirred. He was trying to stand, his new legs scrambling against the cobblestones, his clawed hands reaching for his baskets. The fish had all died—they lay scattered around him, silver bodies still and dull. But his hands moved among them anyway, picking them up, setting them down, trying to arrange them into the patterns he had made all morning. A fan of carp. A circle of tilapia. His claws were too sharp, too clumsy. The fish slipped. Their scales tore. He kept trying anyway, making soft, frustrated sounds in his throat that were almost words.
Lao Zhao watched him for a moment. Then he tucked his knife into the remnants of his clothing and walked away. He didn't know where he was going. But his body kept moving, step after step, through the ruins of the town he had lived in his entire life.
---
In the homes, it was different.
The shimmer had swept through the streets like a flood, pressing against every surface, seeking every opening. But it couldn't pass through walls. It couldn't go through closed windows or sealed doors. It was an outside thing, a thing of open air and exposed skin. Those who were inside, behind barriers, were safe from the initial wave.
But they didn't know that. Not at first.
Chen Ayi was in her apartment when the shimmer came. She had been watering her tomato plants on the balcony when she noticed the light changing—the sky going wrong, the green spreading like a bruise. She stepped back inside, closed the glass door, locked it. She didn't know why. Some instinct, some voice in the back of her mind that said close the door, close the door, close the door. A voice that sounded, she realized later, exactly like her mother.
She stood at the window and watched the green light sweep across the town. It washed over the buildings, the streets, the distant square where she had been standing just hours before. It pressed against her window—a green film clinging to the glass like oil—but it couldn't get through. The window was closed. The door was sealed. She was safe.
Her tomatoes wilted on the balcony, their leaves turning grey. The watering can lay on its side. She pressed her hands against the glass until the screaming stopped. Then she stayed longer. She didn't know what else to do. Her husband's tomatoes were dead. The town was silent. And somewhere, three hours away by bus, her daughter would call on Sunday evening, and Chen Ayi did not know if she would be able to answer.
---
Lao Liu was at her daughter's house when the shimmer came. She had been in the kitchen, chopping vegetables for dinner—the cabbage from her morning stall, the scallions that hadn't sold. Her daughter was resting in the bedroom, her swollen feet propped on pillows, the baby due in three weeks. The windows were closed. The house was still. Lao Liu had closed them herself, an hour ago, because the afternoon sun was too bright and her daughter needed rest.
She didn't see the green light. She didn't hear the hum. She heard the screaming start outside, and her hand stopped on the knife.
"Mama?" Her daughter's voice from the bedroom, thin with fear. "Mama, what's that sound?"
"Stay there," Lao Liu said. Her voice was steady, though her hands were not. "Stay in the bedroom. Don't open the windows."
She walked to the front door. Her hand was on the latch. She could feel the warmth of the afternoon sun on the other side, could hear the screaming growing louder, could smell something wrong in the air—copper and rot and something sweet, like burnt sugar.
She didn't open the door. Some instinct, some voice, told her to wait. She stood there, her hand on the latch, her heart pounding, and she listened to the world end outside.
When the screaming stopped, she went back to the kitchen. She picked up the knife. She finished chopping the cabbage. She didn't know what else to do. Her daughter was calling for her. The baby was kicking. The world was still there, somehow. So was she.
---
In the eastern quarter, a grandmother was rocking her infant grandson to sleep when the shimmer came. Her windows were open—it was a warm afternoon, and the breeze was pleasant, and the baby had been fussy all morning. She had opened the windows to let in the fresh air, hoping it would calm him. It had. He was drowsing now, his small fingers curled around her thumb, his breathing slow and even. She was humming an old lullaby—one her mother had sung to her, one she had sung to her own children, one she had hoped to sing to many more grandchildren.
The green light poured through the open window like water through a broken dam.
She felt it hit her back—cold, wrong, a pressure that made her ribs ache. She knew, in that instant, that she had made a terrible mistake. She curled her body around the baby, her arms tightening, her back to the window, trying to shield him. But the light was already in the room. It was already touching them both. It was already too late.
The baby changed first. He was so small. There was so little of him to resist. The grey spread through his skin in seconds—she felt it, felt his small body go rigid in her arms, felt the warmth drain out of him. He crumbled before she could say his name. Crumbled into dust that slipped through her fingers and scattered across the yellow blanket she had knitted herself. The yellow blanket her daughter had wanted. The yellow blanket she had argued about. Yellow is for luck, her daughter had said. She had been wrong about so many things. She had been wrong about everything.
The grandmother felt her own body begin to change. The prickling in her skin. The grinding in her bones. She didn't fight it. She just closed her eyes and held the dust of her grandson and waited. The lullaby was still on her lips when the grey took her.
---
The schoolhouse stood at the edge of town, a single-story building with large windows and a bell that rang every morning at eight. When the shimmer came, thirty children were reciting their lessons. Their teacher, a young man fresh from the provincial academy, was writing characters on the blackboard. The chalk dust hung in the air like fine snow.
He had closed the windows earlier because a wasp had flown in through the gap and the children had screamed and scattered, climbing onto desks and hiding under chairs. It had taken him ten minutes to calm them down and another five to catch the wasp in a jar and release it outside. He had closed the windows as an afterthought. A small, forgettable decision. The kind of thing he did every day and never thought about again.
That decision saved thirty children.
The green light pressed against the glass, but it couldn't enter. The children saw the sky change—saw the bruise-green spreading, saw the wave rolling toward them—and they started to cry. The teacher moved among them, his heart pounding, his hands shaking, but his voice was steady.
"It's all right," he said, though it wasn't. "Stay inside. Stay away from the windows. It's going to be all right."
The shimmer passed over the schoolhouse. The glass held. The classroom was untouched. Thirty children, crying and clinging to each other, but alive. For a moment—just a moment—the teacher allowed himself to think they had survived. He allowed himself to breathe.
Then the door burst open. A parent. A father, wild-eyed, his clothes torn, his face streaked with dust and tears. He had run from his home, through the green light, through the screaming streets. He had come to find his daughter. He threw the door open, stumbling inside, his arms reaching, his mouth open to call her name.
The green light came with him. It clung to his clothes. To his skin. To the air around him, a sickly halo that poured through the open door like floodwater. The teacher saw it—saw the light, saw the children, saw the end of everything—and he moved without thinking. He threw himself forward, not to save himself, but to put his body between the light and the children.
It didn't help. The light washed through the classroom. Thirty children. One teacher. In seconds, it was over. The teacher was the last to go. He spent his final moments trying to shield two children—a boy and a girl, brother and sister, who had been sitting in the front row—with his body. He was still holding them when he crumbled.
The father stood in the doorway, his mouth open, his hand still reaching for a daughter who was already gone. He had come to save her. He had killed them all.
He fell to his knees. He didn't get up.
End of chapter 7