Sect Year 1 · tenth month · day 28 · a barn in the Qingliu dry hills
Someone had hung a sack over the doorway of the barn on a hook of bent iron. The wind found every gap at its edges and came through anyway, lifting the cloth and letting it fall, lifting and falling, the way a sleeper breathes once he has given up trying to sleep.
They had walked twelve days from the fork. The road had grown smaller with every one of them. The cart tracks had become two ruts through the grass, and the ruts had become a line of trodden earth that a man could follow only if he already knew where it went. Twice they had passed a well with a stone cover set over its mouth, and each time Lin had stopped and looked at the cover, and each time Pei had waited for him without asking why. The barn stood at the end of the line, in the dry hills, a long low building with half its roof gone and a hayloft that smelled of old rain. Whoever built it had meant to stay.
On the last morning before the barn they had crossed a boundary stone half sunk in the grass. The name of the district was cut into its face, worn so faintly that Su had to kneel and trace the letters with two fingers before she could read them aloud. She wrote it down. Lin stood a while…
