The first thing Forest Xu knew was cold peach-sap on his cheek and sunlight like a promise on his eyelids. He blinked in sentences. Adeline's face filled his world. Her hair was a careless knot the color of late wheat, her jaw still gentled with youth but her eyes had miles in them — the kind of miles that had already learned how to fold grief into meal plans. Amos hovered behind her, sleeves rolled to forearms that bore faint grease streaks from wood-wing maintenance. He looked eighteen, if eighteen could look apologetic and apologetically proud at once. “Is he—alive?” Adeline asked, and the breath in her voice made steam in the yard. She smelled of boiled greens and linen, and when she cupped his cheek with fingers that trembled, Forest's infant face felt like a useless mask over a room full of old papers. He felt everything that wasn't his jaw. He felt the ache in his right shoulder that didn’t exist. He remembered a city emptied by ash and a light that swallowed the sky. He remembered warning signs ignored, a child crying under a collapsed stairwell, a map burned into his head of exits that no one took. Most of that was memory, not sensation, and the shock of having knowledge without the body to act with it was a buzzing, electric kind of vertigo. Amos laughed, a short, disbelieving sound. “He’s with us,” Amos said, more to steady the