"Spring? You alive?" Liu Cuihua's voice snapped me into the world like a slap. I opened my eyes to stars and a burlap blanket. Hands—rough, urgent—were pulling at my wrist. The cold night smelled of smoke and sweat and hay. "Where am I?" I said, and my voice was small and wrong. "You in Tang City?" Cuihua demanded, half-laugh, half-cry. "Girl, spring back to us. Don't you die on me." I looked down and hit panic so fast my knees buckled. My shirt rode up. The belly under it was round and hard. "You're—" Cuihua didn't finish. She didn't have to. "Pregnant?" I said. The word scraped my tongue. "She is," came a voice I recognized only as my own in this body. "Fifteen, and curled up like a moon." "Who did this to you?" another woman asked. Her lantern swung. Faces cut out of the dark, worn and hungry. "No one," I blurted. I wanted to shout everything I knew—names, years, research papers, the elevator, the cold—but the air was thin and my head buzzed. I touched my belly with a child's hand as if the baby might be a lie. "You sure it's real?" Liu Cuihua's fingers were steady on my shoulder. "Hold still. Say if you feel it. Don't faint." "I can't tell you what I feel." I forced a laugh that sounded like a cough. "I don't know." "Don