Ten Thousand Futures

Tova knew the words Buried King from a kitchen wall.

The admission came after sunset, while Fu Lan divided travel food and the rest of Hejingshui pretended not to listen. She had taken over the pottery shed because the shrine was too crowded and the kiln still smelled of hound water. Six packs lay open on the floor. Every person who entered tried to add something. Fu Lan removed most offerings without discussion.

Tova sat near the doorway so the route wound pointed away from the food. Xiulan knelt opposite him with the blank road book closed on her lap.

"What wall?" she asked.

"My grandmother's."

"What did it say?"

Tova rubbed the copper strip under his collar. He took it out for the first time. The metal had been hammered thin and punched with words in a square script Xiulan did not know.

"If the buried king wakes," he translated, "do not give him every door."

Tianhui, seated against a pillar while Lan Jue inspected his bandaged arm, looked offended. "That is imprecise."

"It was beside instructions for cleaning fish."

"That does not improve it."

"My grandmother believed kitchen warnings lasted longer than temple law."

Fu Lan weighed the copper strip in her palm. "She was sensible."

Tianhui glanced at her. "You have known me less than a month."

"Long enough to keep you away from extra doors."

The exchange might have become another village joke. Tova did not smile. His grandmother's warning had grease in the punched letters and one corner worn smooth from being touched before journeys. Whatever humour it once carried had survived into fear.

"When did she make it?" Xiulan asked.

"After Orasha."

Dren appeared at the shed entrance without announcing herself.

Tova lowered the strip. "You were meant to be on the north watch."

"Ren Yu took the first hour." Dren entered and sat on the floor without removing her coat. She kept her braced knee straight. "If they are walking toward an Orashan toll station, they should hear what Orasha became."

Fu Lan continued packing. The ordinary sounds—beans poured into cloth, a jar lid tested, a knife scraping wax from a stopper—gave Dren something to speak against.

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"There were eighty-three thousand registered inside the walls," she said.

Shen Yao looked up from the plain wooden stakes he was sanding. "Registered?"

"People who appeared on the city grain count. We never knew how many lived in alleys, shrines, roof rooms or under false names."

Dren removed a small brass token from inside her coat. Heat had warped it into a shallow curve. One side carried the mark for two loaves. On the other, a child had scratched NERI with a nail.

Dren placed it between them.

"She was nine. She caught a ration clerk marking two loaves while handing her one. I sent her home before the first feeder reached the square."

Xiulan waited. The shed roof ticked as evening cooled the tiles. Outside, someone called for a missing cooking pot. A baby cried in the lower lane and was soothed without success.

"Neri went back out," Dren said. "Her brother had not come home."

"What was his name?" Qiao Rui asked from the doorway.

Qiao Rui had crawled behind the stacked firewood while the adults listened. Qiao Ming reached for her, but she stayed where she was, eyes fixed on the token.

Dren opened her mouth.

Nothing came.

Dren's mouth stayed open. The scar through her eyebrow pulled tight. "I do not remember."

Qiao Rui looked down at Mei's repaired rabbit. She did not offer comfort. She backed out of the shed and left the adults with the missing name.

Dren continued after a long time. Feeders had entered through wells, registry marks and household doors. Every attempt to open an evacuation route gave them another relation to use. The western tower held for six hours. The southern gate held for three. When the creatures reached the grain square, Dren sealed the city's roads from the outside.

"Were people alive?" Xiulan asked.

"They were."

"How many?"

"Enough that I stopped counting aloud."

Dren turned Neri's token until the scratched name caught the kiln light. "The feeders did not leave. The people did not leave. For seven years the walls rang at noon. Then the ringing stopped."

Shen Yao's sanding knife had gone still. "Would you seal it again?"

Dren looked at the token rather than him. "Yes."

Dren kept her eyes on the token. She had asked herself the same question every morning since Orasha.

Tianhui spoke from the pillar. "And Tova's grandmother wrote about me afterward."

"She wrote about every old power that might turn a road into one man's decision," Tova said. "Your title survived because people whispered it while Orasha died."

"What did they believe I could do?"

"Open the roads Dren closed."

"Could you?" Xiulan asked.

Branch-Sight stirred behind Tianhui's eyes. Xiulan saw the tiny change in his focus and regretted the question at once.

"Perhaps," he said. "That is not the same as saving the city."

Dren looked at him directly. "If you had been there, would you have opened them?"

Tianhui considered several answers and discarded all of them. "I do not know."

Dren picked up the bread token. "Then your kitchen wall should have used larger letters."

She left for the north watch.

Fu Lan waited until her footsteps faded. Then she placed an extra packet of salt in Tova's bag and covered it with folded cloth, as though no one had watched her do it.

No one followed Dren to ask whether she had been right. The village had work before dawn, a sealed road, a woman labouring beyond the ridge and an expedition that might enter the place from which her certainty had never returned.

Xiulan opened the blank road book after everyone else left. She wrote NERI beneath the date, then stopped before adding the brother as an unnamed relation. The empty line looked accusatory. She left it empty.

Tova watched from the doorway. "She will hate that."

"Dren?" Xiulan asked.

"Neri. She hated inaccurate ration marks."

Xiulan handed him the charcoal. "Then you write what belongs there."

He added: WENT BACK FOR HER BROTHER. Under it he drew a small square around the missing name, not to contain the absence but to make sure the page could not pretend it had forgotten.