"Where am I?" Lu Yanyan asked, scraping cold cave dust from her palms.
"Answer me," she told the echo, because an echo was the only witness.
She pushed up on elbows. Stones bit into her knuckles. A dry wind pulled at the edge of cloth. Her mouth moved; words came out as new and heavy. She tried one name and it snagged.
"Lu Yanyan," she said, tasting the syllables she had not spoken in years.
She sat too fast and the world slid wrong. A kitchen flash stabbed through: hot oil, the slap of a spatula, a shout she could not place. The memory vanished as quickly as it came.
She reached for pockets. Fingers closed on cold silk, then on a hard thing that hummed under touch.
"Not a knife," she muttered, pulling out a small overcoat—man's cut, coarse, smelling faintly of smoke and horsehair.
A second memory hit: a carriage rocking, a hand taking hers at a doorway, a muffled shout down a dark corridor. It lasted two breaths and then she had only the ache in her jaw.
"Who took my life?" she said aloud.
Her voice was a toy in this body's throat. It answered anyway. The pendant rolled free from a fold and struck stone with a soft ring. She stared at the jade.
She knew that sound. She had polished jade in a previous life until it shone. She rubbed it between thumb and forefinger. The jade felt wrong in a
