On the second terrace of the Great Silt Plaza. There, the irrigation channels emptied into a shallow settled mud settling basin, a six-year-old refugee girl named Xiao Yue was playing alone in the damp grey silt.
Her family had lost everything during the flight from the drowned southern province of Taishan. Her father had disappeared when the escape barges collided in the tidal bore. Her mother spent every waking watch sewing hemp sails in the upper work-gangs to earn extra dried fish rations. Xiao Yue, left to herself on the warm flat stone slabs, had found a broken piece of slate roofing tile. With the sharp corner of the tile, she was scratching crude, wobbly drawings into the three-inch layer of fine silt that had settled upon the terrace steps.
She was drawing an animal.
It had four clumsy stick-legs, a long, looping tail that curled like a cinnamon roll, and two pointed ears that stood straight up. It was a dog—an animal that Xiao Yue had loved on her grandfather’s farm before the ocean arrived, but whose name she could no longer remember how to write. Her mother had tried to teach her before the war, but the letters had been washed away by fear, leaving only the memory of soft, wet fur and a friendly bark in the evening twilight.
