There was a touching pureness to it that Ouyang envied. He had never been able to inhabit a moment of pleasure as simply and purely as Esen did. Just knowing that it was transient—that any moment would be drained of its sweetness and vividness once it became memory—made it bittersweet to him even as it was happening.

How could her body be a woman’s body, if it didn’t house a woman? Zhu wasn’t the grown-up version of that girl with the nothing fate.

I suppose he was a cherished son, the kind brought up believing he should bring honor to his ancestral line. But then he was cut, and made to serve the very ones who did it, and he knows his ancestors would spit at him rather than receive his offerings.” Then, slowly, because talking about her girlhood still felt wrong, she added, “But that’s the d

The sight seemed oddly familiar. It made her think of undressing in her storeroom in the monastery, and how the changed and threatening body she had uncovered had always seemed to belong to someone else. But this invisible agony-hand was undeniably hers, and so was the stump.

He had the image of his relationship to Esen being a thin strip of metal that Ouyang was deliberately bending back and forth. Each time it bent, it hurt. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt after it finally snapped, but Ouyang couldn’t make himself believe it.

For a moment she wondered if she had a seed of potential within herself too, and it was only that she had never known what to look for; she had never had a name for it.

Becoming nothing was the most terrifying thing she could think of—worse even than the fear of hunger, or pain, or any other suffering that could possibly arise from life.

But now as she stared down at those majestic figures, the word “greatness” on her tongue, Zhu was surprised by a jolt of something that vanished the moment she recognized it: the queasy curiosity that people get when they stand in a high place and wonder what it would be like to jump.

The girl knew she was no more useful than those dead girls had been. Uglier, too. She pressed her lips together and crouched next to the first elm stump. The only difference between them and her was that she had learned how to catch food for herself. It seemed such a small difference, for two opposite fates.