You had been half-asleep on the kitchen stool, the kettle's last hiss keeping time with the clock on the wall. A cigarette ember died between your fingers; you told yourself you'd only rest your eyes for a breath.

The breath snaps.

You are torn from the thin warmth by the smell of iron and old paper - blood and ink. The room tilts; the lantern's light bloats and gutters. Outside, a radio coughs a dull announcement about comings and purges. Someone is weeping quietly in the courtyard, then a slap - quick, clinical - and silence like a lid closing over a pot.

When you open your eyes you are not in your kitchen. You are sprawled on cold tile beneath a lacquered screen painted with peonies. Your temple throbs as if a fist remembers where it hit. A thread of blood has mapped a red vein across your cheek. Beside you, a child's embroidered shoe - single, alone - lies like a poor testimony.

Before you finish naming what is wrong, a lacquered shoe clicks over tile. A woman stands in the doorway: posture refined, hair coiffed into a tight crescent, smile like a seam. Her hands are cool as she folds a silk handkerchief. She speaks in a voice that has learned to weigh everything twice.

"You finally wake. How inconvenient," she says, politeness plated over knife-edge. "We had guests."

The lantern trims her face into a portrait of control. She is Mei-ling - stepmother, household steward, rumor's neatest seamstress. Her eyes flick to you like she is checking a ledger.

A second voice, low and distant, comes from the corridor beyond: a man's boot, measured, imperial. He smells of tobacco and official linen. When he steps into the light you see the shoulder of a uniform and the slow, solid jaw of Lord Huo - the local cadre with a history like a ledger of closed accounts.

He does not smile.

Mei-ling inclines her head like a bow and says, very softly: "You must tell us everything you remember, child. Or perhaps begin with why you were in the back room with smoke on your sleeves."

Her fingers close, just for a breath, on the handkerchief. Outside, a radio voice stumbles through a list of names.

You have five minutes before the patrol comes back.

The floor is cold. Your heart measures louder than the lantern.

The lantern waits.

The world will not forgive forgetting.