Chapter 155: She Asked to Go Back

"I want to go back," she said.

She had walked four days to say it. Her name was Min, she had come up in the second month of the reading, and she was standing in front of my cook-fire at eight in the morning with her hands folded like a woman at a counter.

"Back where?" I said, though I already knew, and I think I asked so I’d have another second.

"Down. Where I was." She did not blink. "You put me here. I’d like to be put back."

Tao Tao came round the pot fast. "It doesn’t work like that."

"Doesn’t it?"

"No. It—" Tao Tao stopped, because she is honest even when it costs her, and looked at me. "...Does it?"

"I don’t know," I said. "Nobody’s asked before."

— • —

Min sat down and told it flatly, the way people tell the worst thing when they’ve had four days on a road to practise.

She had been erased in her thirties, by an Empire clerk, over a tax dispute her village lost. That was nine hundred and some years ago. She came up in a field in the eastern terraces, alive, whole, healthy, and spent her first week being congratulated by strangers.

"My husband was Hai," she said. "He was not erased. Do you understand what I am saying to you?"

"I think so."

"Say it, then. I want to hear somebody official say it."

"He wasn’t taken," I said. "He just died. A long time ago. Of being a person."

"Yes." Min nodded once. "So he is not in your ocean. He is not on anybody’s list. There is no ache anywhere in the world shaped like him because everyone who ached for him is also dead." She smoothed her skirt. "Your Yun Shu explained it to me very kindly. She was good about it. She did not pretend."

"No, she wouldn’t."

"The girls too. Both of them. They were nine and six." Her voice did not change at all. "They grew up. That’s what I’m told. They grew up and got old and died, and I am glad, and I would have liked to be there, and I can’t be, and there is no door for it, and there never will be."

Nobody said anything. Tao Tao had her hand over her mouth.

"So," said Min. "You’ve given me nine hundred years further from them than I was. That’s what the gift was. I don’t want to be ungrateful and I have tried very hard for two months, but I am further away now than I was when I was dead, and I would like to go back."

— • —

I tried, that afternoon. I want it on the record that I tried, and that I was bad at it.

"There are people who could sit with you," I said. "Mu Chen’s trained about nine thousand of them."

"I’ve had four," said Min. "They were all very good."

"Then—"

"They were all very good and none of them knew." She was folding a blanket she had already folded. "One of them told me grief is a thing you carry. I know grief is a thing you carry. I carried Hai for eleven years before your Empire came and took my name, and I was carrying him fine. I had a house and two girls and a bad knee and I was carrying him fine." The blanket got folded again. "Now I’m nine hundred years down a road with nothing on it. That’s not grief. There’s no word for it because nobody’s ever been in it."

"I’ve got a friend who might be."

"Don’t." She put the blanket down. "Don’t send me somebody famous to be gentle at me. I’ve had a great deal of that."

So I stopped, and sat there being no use, and after a while she said, "You’re not what I expected."

"Smaller?"

"Tireder," said Min.

— • —

It was not only the returned who were struggling, and I found that out badly, in a market, from a man who did not know I was standing behind him.

"—third one this month," he was saying. "Three families on that lane, and every one of them’s got somebody from the old days sleeping in the front room and eating out the same pot."

"They’ve nowhere else," said the woman on the stall.

"I know they’ve nowhere else. I’m not saying send them back." He said it fast, and then his voice dropped. "I’m saying my boy’s twenty-two and he’s been waiting four years for that cottage and now there’s a weaver in it who’s been dead since before the Empire. And I can’t say a word about it, can I, because what kind of man complains about a miracle."

I bought some turnips I did not need and went away and thought about it for two days.

Then I sent Xue Ningzhi.

"He’s right," she said, when she came back. "That’s what I’d like recorded first. He’s right, he isn’t cruel, and there are about four hundred thousand of him." She sat down with her board. "We spent two years asking the world whether it could carry the weight. We never asked whether it had a spare room."

"Can we fix it?"

"Some. Build, mostly. Buy land where there’s land." She made a note. "The part I can’t fix with a board is that his boy is going to be twenty-six before that cottage is free, and he is going to be polite about it, and being polite about a thing for four years is how people come to hate it."

"So what do we do about that?"

"We say it out loud," said Xue Ningzhi. "Before he does. That’s the only trick we’ve ever had and it has annoyed me for years that it keeps working."

— • —

We had an argument about it that night that I’m not proud of.

"We’re not doing it," Tao Tao said.

"It’s her life," Mu Chen answered.

"It’s not the same. Everyone we’ve let go — Hua, the Hundred, Ping — they were choosing to drop something they were tired of carrying. Min is choosing to stop existing." Tao Tao’s voice cracked. "That’s not the third door. That’s a cliff."

"It’s the same door and you know it," Mu Chen said. "You don’t get to call it consent when they choose exactly what you would have chosen."

"Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare throw my own words back at me."

"I’m not quoting you, I’m agreeing with you, and I’m going to hate every second of it." He rubbed his eyes. "I’ve sat with two hundred of them this season, Tao Tao. Not all of them are okay. Some are, frankly, not okay at all, and it’s a reason we can’t fix — because everyone they loved is dead and stays dead."

Xue Ningzhi stayed quiet, just staring at her board, before she turned it around.

"It isn’t one," she said.

We all looked at her.

"Min is just the first one to walk four days and say it to his face. She isn’t the first to say it." Xue Ningzhi tapped a column of text. "Mu Chen’s healers have logged four hundred and ten people in the last two months who have asked, in plain words, to go back. Twenty-six hundred more that the reachers have flagged as — her word is unmoored." She put the board down. "Eight million people, and so many of them climbed up into a world where the only thing waiting was the grave of someone they last saw alive. We counted whether the world could carry them, but we didn’t count whether they could carry it."

"That’s not a failure," Bai Qing said.

"I didn’t say it was a failure; I said we didn’t count it." Xue Ningzhi picked her pen back up. "Now we count it."

— • —

I walked off and lifted a barn.

It didn’t need lifting, really, but Yun Shu found me at it and just stood there with her arms folded until I set it down.

"Feel better?"

"No."

"No." She walked over and leaned against the wall next to me. "You can’t hit it."

"I know."

"You’ve got more power than anything that’s ever lived, yet there’s a woman in the guest tent who wants to stop being alive — and not one bit of it is any use." She let that hang there. "How long have you been standing out here?"

"About two hours."

"Right." Yun Shu straightened up. "Come inside, eat something, and then go ask the only person in the world who has actually been where she is."

"Mu Chen’s seen two hundred—"

"Mu Chen has sat with two hundred. That’s not the same and you know it." She tugged at my sleeve. "Go and ask Su Yue."