"Help—stop! She's fainting!" a vendor shrieked as hands shoved Marta toward sunlight. "Watch the stall!" another barked. "Who is she?" a woman in a red armband demanded, grabbing Marta's wrist with fingers that smelled of chili and sweat. "I'm not a beggar," Marta said, sitting up too fast and hitting her head on a wooden crate. "I'm not—" "She looks lost," a young man said, offering a cup of water with a nervous smile. "Lost people have papers," the red-armband woman said. "This is a busy day. We don't have time for tricks. Show me your ID." Marta blinked at the crowd, at faces turned toward her like lenses. Her mouth tasted like metal. Her memory hit in pieces: pain, a hospital room, the sound of a nurse calling her name wrong. Then one sharp fact threaded everything together. "I died," Marta said. Her voice trembled but she kept it short. "I died giving birth." The vendors froze. A child selling rice cakes stopped chewing. "Stop it," the red-armband woman said. "No one makes jokes here." "I'm not joking," Marta said. She reached into her head and found the name of a doctor, a date, the exact pattern of the wallpaper in a room she'd never expected to see again. She spat out three words. "It's 2001." "What?" the young man asked, but his question was swallowed by someone else. "Two thousand and one," an older vendor repeated, pointing to