"Spring-miao! You're alive!" Liu Cuihua's voice split the cold air. I blinked at her face, huge with crying and relief, and my hand slid without thinking to the round thing under my shirt. "It moves," I said, because that was the easiest truth. Liu grabbed my fingers and pressed them to my belly. Her nails dug in, rough and real. "Baby? You have a baby," she breathed. "I—" I tried to laugh. The sound came out small and foreign in this body. My throat was thick. My fingers were small. The world smelled of smoke and damp straw. "Keep your voice down," she hissed, then immediately kissed my forehead. "Don't tell anyone. Not yet. We travel light. We can't have trouble." "Who will know?" I asked. My mouth tasted like the ash we burned for warmth. I felt the weight of this body, the slow clench and release of something alive inside me. "Me. Dalong. The children," she said, naming the people who had already stumbled in and sworn under their breaths around the dying fire. "We die for you. I swear it." I closed my eyes and let that promise sit. Only three sentences of explanation: I am me, a consciousness from far ahead of these fields, inside a fifteen-year-old peasant's body. I have something else in my head—a whole bright place that gives food, medicine, tools—and it answers when I think to it. The rest will show itself