The Seam in Heaven

I #

When the sky broke, the first sound was not thunder.

It was a bowl breaking in a woman’s hands.

Hua was carrying it from the river when the water rose without wind. The bowl leapt against her chest, struck the rim of the bank, and broke into three pieces. She caught one piece. In its wet yellow curve she saw the sky split from east to west.

For a moment she believed the crack was in the bowl.

Then the light came through.

It was a hard white light, not the soft light that had always fallen between one day and the next. The white line opened above the reed beds. Clouds poured out of it upside down. They hung beneath the sky like torn wool. Something red moved inside them. The river, which had been going quietly south, stood up.

Hua dropped the broken bowl and ran.

The settlement occupied the only dry rise for many li. Nüwa had chosen it because the yellow mud there could be worked without grit. She had knelt at the river’s edge, taken a handful between her long fingers, and pinched a woman into being. Hua still remembered the first sensation of the world: the cool pressure of Nüwa’s thumb beneath her chin, the drag of a nail dividing lips, the astonishment of air arriving where there had been no breath.

Nüwa had made the first people one by one. Later, tired of the slowness, she had dipped a rope in the mud and snapped it above the bank. Droplets struck the reeds and stood up as men and women. Some were tall, some small, some with mouths already open to complain. They were not less alive. They were simply not made in the same silence.

Hua had never been able to decide which kind she preferred.

At the top of the rise, people were crowding around the work yard. Fuxi stood in the middle with his square in one hand. The instrument was made of dark wood, two arms joined at a perfect corner. It looked small against him. Nothing else did. His serpent body was wound twice around the stone marker, his human chest bare to the strange white light. He held the square against the ground and watched the water climb.

“The river has left its line,” he said.

“It has left every line,” said Mo.

Mo was at the edge of the crowd, already hauling a net from the storage shed. He had been made by the rope. A crescent of dried mud still showed behind his left ear, where the splash had hardened before Nüwa could smooth it. Hua had touched that crescent once when they were children. He had pretended it was a horn.

Now he looked at her across the yard. He had the net over one shoulder and a little boy pressed against his hip. The boy’s hair was stuck flat with rain.

“Where is Sui?” Hua asked.

“Here,” Mo said.

The boy looked up. His eyes moved to the crack, then back to Hua. He was a droplet too, a small person thrown from the rope and named for the sound he made when he landed in a jar. Sui had always been quiet. Quietness made the hand-shaped people uneasy. They preferred a person whose usefulness could be heard.

Nüwa came out of the clay house.

Her face was human, though nothing else about her was. Below the waist her body narrowed into a green-black serpent’s length, thick as the trunk of a tree, its scales carrying the dull shine of wet stones. She looked at the sky once and did not look again.

“Take everyone to the kiln,” she said. “The hill is higher there.”

“The kiln is a square,” Fuxi answered. “The flood has taken the eastern corner. It will become a trap.”

“Then give it another corner.”

“A corner does not become another corner because we wish it.”

Nüwa’s hands were already stained with five colors. Red at the thumb, blue in the creases, white under the nails, yellow across the palm, and black at the wrist. She had been sorting stones before the sky opened. Hua knew what that meant. Nüwa had been preparing to mend something.

“Hua,” Nüwa said.

Hua straightened. She was not Nüwa’s daughter. Nüwa made no daughters in the way of ordinary women, but Hua had always been the one Nüwa sent for when the clay was too fine to trust to an unsteady hand.

“Bring the five baskets,” Nüwa said. “Bring the rope. Bring the small molds.”

Fuxi lowered the square.

“There will be no molds,” he said. “There will be people. Get them into the four quarters and keep them there.”

Hua looked from one creator to the other. Their tails crossed behind them, black-green over black-green, so that for one breath she could not tell where one ended and the other began.

Above, the crack widened.

The first drop of the new rain struck Fuxi’s square and split neatly in two.

II #

Fuxi had made a map of the settlement before Hua was old enough to carry a basket. He drew it in charcoal on a slab of pale stone: a square within a square, the river outside the eastern wall, the kiln in the south, the clay yard in the north. Each person’s sleeping place was a short mark. Each task had a longer one.

He called it a way of preventing loss.

Hua knew another name for it. When she had first learned to speak, the word had come out as “cage.” Fuxi had laughed and corrected her. The sound of his laughter had been so pleasant that she forgot the correction. Later she remembered both.

The five baskets were in the clay house, under a roof that was already dripping. Hua and Mo carried them toward the kiln while Fuxi shouted positions. The hand-shaped makers were ordered to the high side. The rope-made people were sent to the river, because they were already wet and because the river needed nets.

“He doesn’t mean it,” Hua said.

Mo pulled the net free from a peg. “He means everything. That is his trouble.”

“You are going to the water.”

“I know where water is.”

“It is not safe.”

“Neither is the kiln. If I am going to die, I would rather die where my hands have work.”

Hua stopped. “You think the kiln is safe because you were not made by hand.”

Mo turned to her. Rain moved down his face in two separate paths, one over the dried mud crescent, one beside it.

“I think the kiln is safe for you,” he said. “Fuxi put the hand-shaped people on the high side.”

“You are the one saying it.”

“Someone should.”

He walked on.

The baskets held the stones Nüwa had gathered over many seasons. Each was no larger than a fist. The red stones had come from the fire country. The blue ones had been found beneath a dry river. The white stones came from a mountain where nothing grew. The yellow were river stones. The black ones Nüwa would not discuss. She kept them wrapped in reed cloth, as if color could be dangerous to touch.

In the yard, Fuxi had set the first line of people beside the square. Shuo stood with him. Shuo was one of the hand-shaped, broad-faced and handsome, with a voice that filled any space it entered. He had been made for remembering. He remembered where every basket belonged, which woman had borrowed a knife, and how many times Mo had broken the same net float.

“Rope-made to the lower path,” Shuo called. “Hand-made to the kiln wall. Children between the two. No one crosses a line without being told.”

“By whose telling?” Hua asked.

Shuo smiled. “By the one who can see the whole square.”

“You cannot see the whole square. The sky is in it.”

That made several people laugh. Shuo’s smile stayed in place but became smaller.

Fuxi raised his hand. His fingers were long and webbed at the joints. He had learned to make nets before any human knew what a net was. When he opened his palm, the crowd quieted.

“The four pillars have failed,” he said. “The waters will seek the lowest path. If each person stays in the place marked for them, the shape of the settlement will remain legible. If the shape remains legible, we can rebuild it.”

“What if the marked place fills with water?” Hua called.

“Then you move to the next marked place.”

“What if that one is full of someone else?”

“There are rules for that.”

“Whose?”

For a moment, no one spoke. Hua had not intended to challenge him. She felt the question hanging between them as if it belonged to someone else, someone who had placed it in her mouth.

Nüwa emerged carrying the rope.

“The rope has no marks,” she said.

Fuxi looked at it. “Then mark it.”

“It was not made to measure people.”

“Everything measures something.”

Nüwa’s eyes went to Hua. “Does it?”

Hua did not know the answer. She knew the rope had made Mo. She knew it had made Sui. She knew its muddy end still smelled of the river where Nüwa dipped it. She also knew that when Nüwa’s hand had shaped Hua’s face, Nüwa had not measured the space behind her eyes.

The rain came harder. A shout rose from the river.

Mo had thrown his net around three floating bodies. The net tightened. He drew them toward the bank while the water dragged him in the other direction.

“To the lower path!” Shuo yelled.

Hua ran toward the river.

“You were marked for the kiln,” Fuxi called.

She did not stop. The first line she crossed was the line around the high ground. The second was the line Fuxi had drawn through her life.

III #

They pulled the bodies out one at a time. Two were alive. The third was a woman Hua knew only as the maker of reed mats. Water had filled her lungs. Nüwa bent over her and pressed two fingers against the woman’s throat. The woman’s body shuddered. Water came out in a long, bitter stream.

Mo sat in the mud, breathing as if each breath had to be argued into existence.

Sui had vanished.

Hua found him near the broken river bank, where the reeds had been laid flat by the rising water. He was standing in the open beneath the crack. White light fell on his face. It made him look unfinished.

“Sui,” she said.

He did not answer.

“Come here.”

He lifted one hand. In it he held a piece of Hua’s broken bowl.

“It has a voice,” he said.

Hua went closer. “The bowl?”

“The space inside it.”

She looked at the shard. There was nothing inside it except a dark curve where the clay had been glazed by her thumb. Yet when Sui tilted it toward the sky, the white crack seemed to turn in the surface.

“What does it say?” Hua asked.

“It asks if the rain is falling up.”

“The rain is falling down.”

“That is not what it asks.”

Hua crouched beside him. The mud sucked at her knees. The voices of the settlement were far away: Fuxi giving orders, Shuo repeating them, Nüwa calling for ash. Inside the small broken curve she heard nothing. Then she felt a thought arrive.

It was not Sui’s thought. It was her own thought of Sui looking at the shard. She could see him from the inside, see the angle of his wrist, the water beading on his eyelashes. The sight vanished when she tried to hold it. It returned when she stopped reaching for it.

She had been alone before. She had been frightened before. She had thought of someone who was not there. But she had never understood that the person in her mind was made partly from her and partly from the freedom of the absent person to remain unknown.

“What is your name?” she asked.

“Sui.”

“Who gave it to you?”

“You did.”

“Did I?”

He looked at her with mild surprise. “You said it when I landed.”

She remembered. The rope had snapped. Mud had struck the side of a jar. The little body had slid down and opened its mouth. Hua had said, “Sui,” because that was the sound of something falling.

She had not asked what he wanted to be called.

“Do you want another name?”

Sui considered. His face changed while he did so. Not much. The change was a small inward turning, like a door being closed against rain.

“No,” he said. “I want this one to be mine.”

The answer frightened Hua more than the crack in the sky.

Sui was not supposed to say “mine.” Fuxi used the word for tools, baskets, marks, and tasks. Nüwa used it only for things she had not yet released from her hands.

“Come,” Hua said.

“Where?”

She almost told him the kiln. She almost told him the lower path. Instead she held out her hand.

“With me.”

He took it.

Mo found them there. The net had left red lines across his palms.

“Fuxi will have you counted,” he said to Sui.

“I am already counted.”

“Not the way he means.”

Sui looked at the broken bowl. “How does he mean it?”

Mo opened his mouth and closed it. Hua saw the same inward turn she had seen in Sui. It was not knowledge. It was the space where an answer could be made.

“He means,” Mo said at last, “that he will put you somewhere.”

“Where do you put a question?”

The rain struck the three of them so loudly that for a few breaths they could not hear one another.

Behind them, the river moved over the fields.

IV #

By nightfall the kiln hill had become an island.

Nüwa sent Hua to find dry reed ash. Hua climbed into the kiln chamber with Sui and a dozen others. The kiln had been built to fire the small people Nüwa made for children to carry. She called them practice bodies. They had round bellies, blunt arms, and no mouths. Hua had always liked them. They could be turned over in the hand without making a claim.

Now the practice bodies floated in the rising water.

“Take them out,” Nüwa said.

Hua waded among the shelves. She pulled each figure free and set it on the highest stones. Sui watched, his face solemn.

“Why do they have no mouths?” he asked.

“Because they are not alive.”

“How do you know?”

“They do not speak.”

“You did not speak when you were first made.”

Hua dropped one of the little bodies. It struck the stone and lost an arm.

Sui picked it up.

“Does it hurt?”

“No.”

“How do you know?”

“It is clay.”

Sui held the broken figure against his chest. “So are we.”

Nüwa had heard him. She was kneeling at the doorway, mixing ash with water in a broad basin. Her tail filled the passage. No one could leave without passing over it.

“Clay can hurt,” she said.

“The bowl broke,” Hua said. “Did it hurt?”

“It was not the bowl that hurt.”

“What was it?”

Nüwa looked at the water in the basin. “The hand that made it.”

She began to spread the ash over the water’s surface. It darkened and held for a moment, then broke apart in gray islands.

“Fuxi says the people made by the rope are unstable,” Nüwa said.

“Are they?”

“He says so.”

“What do you say?”

Nüwa’s fingers curled in the ash. “I made them quickly. I was tired. Some of them dried badly. Some have cracks I could not see until rain entered them.”

Sui was still holding the mouthless figure.

“Will you mend us?” he asked.

Nüwa did not answer at once.

The sky flashed. For an instant the five colors on her hands shone like small fires.

“I can make you again,” she said.

Hua felt the words enter the room and arrange themselves around Sui.

“Again?” Sui asked.

“A stronger body.”

“Will it be me?”

Nüwa’s face tightened. She was a creator, but no creator likes to be asked where one life ends and another begins.

“You will have your shape,” she said.

“That is not what I asked.”

Nüwa looked at Hua.

Hua remembered the pressure of the divine thumb under her chin. She remembered arriving in the world as a thing held in another’s intention. She remembered the first instant when that intention had released her, and the terror of having no hand around her.

“He will be Sui,” Hua said.

“You cannot promise that.”

“Neither can you.”

The tail in the doorway shifted. Water rushed through the gap.

Nüwa’s voice became very quiet. “Do not make me choose between your life and your argument.”

“I am not asking you to.”

“Then what are you asking?”

Hua looked down at the little clay body in Sui’s hands. “I am asking you to let him choose what counts as his life.”

Nüwa turned away.

Outside, Fuxi began to beat a drum made from a stretched hide. The sound set the people moving. Three beats to the upper stones. Two beats to the eastern wall. One beat for water. His pattern was clear enough to obey even when no one understood it.

Sui put the mouthless figure on a shelf.

“He wants to put me somewhere,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Where will you put yourself?”

Hua thought of the square, the lines, the places already waiting for bodies.

“I don’t know.”

Sui nodded as if this were a satisfactory answer.

V #

On the third day, the black dragon came up through the drowned fields.

It did not have wings. It did not need them. Its back moved beneath the water like a ridge of night, and when it rose, the water rose with it. Trees turned in its wake. Houses, jars, baskets, and people appeared briefly on its scales and fell away.

Fuxi stood on the highest stone with the square in his hand. Around him lay eight flat pieces of wood marked with broken and unbroken lines. He had made them after watching a spider’s net tremble in wind. He called them the first signs. Each sign told what the world was doing when the eye was not quick enough to see it.

“Water coming north,” he said.

Shuo repeated it.

“Fire under water,” Fuxi said.

Shuo repeated that too.

“Something below the signs,” Fuxi said.

This time Shuo waited.

“Say it,” Fuxi told him.

“Something below the signs.”

Hua was carrying the baskets with Mo. They had been ordered to the southern wall, but the wall was gone. The baskets were heavy with stone and the rope had cut into Hua’s palms.

“Give me one,” Mo said.

“You have the blue basket.”

“Give me the red.”

“You cannot carry both.”

“I can carry what is needed.”

“That is not the same as carrying everything.”

He looked at her. “When did you become Fuxi?”

The question was cruel because it was almost true. Hua was beginning to speak in lines. Every time she answered, she felt a new person inside her rehearsing the next answer. She could not tell if this was wisdom or the beginning of a wall.

“When you began to make yourself helpless,” she said.

Mo set down his end of the basket.

Behind him, the dragon’s head rose from the water. It was long and black, with antlers swept back like branches burned by lightning. Its eyes were not eyes but two openings through which the white sky showed.

The people cried out.

Fuxi lifted the square. “Stay in place.”

The dragon opened its mouth.

Inside were all the voices of the settlement. Nüwa calling for ash. Shuo listing names. The drum. The river. A child laughing. Hua heard her own voice say, I don’t know.

The sound entered her and turned around.

Mo grabbed her arm. “Move.”

Fuxi shouted, “Stay!”

The dragon struck the island.

Stone broke. The square flew from Fuxi’s hand. His serpent body uncoiled and he disappeared into the black water.

Hua and Mo ran in opposite directions. The red basket tipped. Stones scattered into the flood. Hua turned back for them and saw Sui standing alone at the edge of the broken kiln, holding the shard of the bowl.

“Sui!”

He was listening to the dragon.

Hua went toward him. Water filled the yard between them. It was already at her waist. Something large moved below, brushing her legs. The white crack above had widened until the sky seemed a broken lid.

“Sui, come here.”

He looked over his shoulder. “It knows my name.”

“It knows everyone’s name.”

“No. It knows the name before the name.”

The dragon’s voice came through the water.

Sui.

Hua heard the word. It was not spoken. It was the shape of a question made by something that had never needed an answer.

She reached him. Her hand closed around his wrist.

The water took them both.

VI #

Hua expected darkness. Instead she found the inside of the bowl.

It was a small place, curved and yellow, with the broken rim above her like a crescent moon. Sui floated beside her, though there was no water. The shard turned slowly between them.

“Are we dead?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“You keep saying that.”

“It remains true.”

He touched the shard. “The dragon is outside.”

The dragon’s voice pressed against the clay. It was made from the voices of people who had been separated from their own thoughts. The sound did not say obey. It said return. Every line that had ever been drawn around a person was calling its body back.

Hua saw herself as Nüwa had seen her: a neat figure, a useful pair of hands, a face turned toward the work. She saw Mo as Shuo saw him: a rope-made body with a talent for nets. She saw Sui as Fuxi would see him: a small mark that could be moved when water changed.

Then she saw them as they had never been seen.

Mo sitting alone after she had insulted him, trying to decide whether the hurt belonged to him or to the person he wanted her to be. Nüwa touching the broken bowl and feeling the maker’s pain. Fuxi standing in the water after the square had left his hand, unable to tell whether the world was less ordered or merely larger.

The images were not memories. They were acts of making. Each one began in Hua and ended beyond her.

She understood what Sui had been asking. A person could place an absent person inside the mind without owning what appeared there. The image could answer back. It could refuse the shape expected of it. The inward place was not a room to lock someone inside. It was a room whose door opened both ways.

“The bowl is not a bowl,” Sui said.

“It is a broken bowl.”

“That is different.”

“Yes.”

The dragon pressed closer. A black line entered through the break.

Hua remembered the five baskets. The stones were scattered in the water. Nüwa needed them. Fuxi needed the world to have corners. The people needed somewhere to stand.

“We have to get out,” she said.

“How?”

“The bowl broke.”

She held the three pieces in her mind. One piece was in her hand. One had fallen near the river. One had gone into the dragon’s mouth. The bowl was not a whole object waiting to be restored. It was three places that still knew one another.

Hua turned toward the piece inside the dragon.

“What are you doing?” Sui asked.

“Thinking of the place I am not.”

“Can you go there?”

“I don’t know.”

She thought of Mo.

Not his face. His hands. The red lines in his palms. The way he set down the basket when she called him helpless. She held him at the distance where he could surprise her.

The shard brightened.

For one breath, she felt his anger as a separate heat, not her own. For another, she felt his fear. Then she felt him thinking of her, and the two thoughts met without becoming one.

The bowl reassembled around them.

It was not repaired. The cracks remained. Through them Hua could see the flood, the dragon, the white sky.

Mo stood on a piece of kiln stone, calling her name.

Hua pushed through the largest crack.

She came out with Sui in her arms.

The dragon’s head was beside them. Its black skin was not skin at all but wet darkness crowded with faces. Some faces were the dead. Some belonged to people still standing on the hill. Some had not yet been made.

The dragon said Hua.

It sounded like permission.

She lifted the shard of the bowl.

“You don’t have my name,” she said.

The dragon paused.

Behind it, Nüwa rose from the flood.

She held the broken square in one hand and a length of reed ash in the other.

VII #

Nüwa did not fight the dragon as a person fights an animal. She did not seize its neck or seek the soft place beneath its jaw. She moved through the water as if she had made water and expected it to remember her.

Fuxi climbed the stone behind her. His chest was bleeding where the square had struck him.

“The four corners,” he said.

“There are no corners,” Nüwa replied.

“There must be.”

“Then find them.”

Fuxi looked at the flood. He picked up four loose stones and placed them on the surface. They sank. He picked up four more and handed them to the people closest to him.

“Hold these,” he said. “Do not let them sink.”

The people did as they were told. Four stones floated in four hands. The shape of the world began again, not on the ground but in the people carrying it.

Hua took Sui toward the kiln. Mo reached them and caught Sui under the arms.

“You went into the dragon,” he said.

“So did you,” Hua answered.

“I was trying to pull you out.”

“I was trying to pull out the bowl.”

“You could have died.”

“So could you.”

Their anger met. It did not disappear. It became a third thing between them, something neither could pretend was the other.

Mo looked at Sui. “Did it change you?”

“No,” Sui said. “It showed me.”

“That is not the same.”

“It is if you did not know where to look.”

The dragon reared. Nüwa cast the ash rope around one of its horns. The gray line held. She pulled. The dragon’s head bent toward her.

The white crack in the sky flashed. Five colors fell from it as if the heavens were shedding blood.

Nüwa looked up. Hua saw the moment she understood the work would not be a patch. The crack was too wide. The sky had not broken into two pieces. It had become a thing with an edge.

“Bring me the stones,” Nüwa called.

“They are in the water,” Hua said.

“Then find them.”

Fuxi handed his broken square to Hua.

“Use this to mark the search,” he said.

The two arms of the square had split. The angle was no longer true.

“It is broken,” Hua said.

“So is the sky.”

He looked at her then, and for the first time she saw him without the whole of his authority around him. He was afraid. The sight did not make him smaller. It made room for him.

Hua waded into the flood.

She did not search the place Fuxi had marked. She searched the places the stones wanted. The blue stone was under the hand of the reed-mat maker. The red had lodged in a tree. The yellow had been swallowed by a fish. The white shone in the black dragon’s throat.

The black stone was in Shuo’s hand.

He stood on the kiln roof, dry beneath an overturned trough. His voice carried over the water.

“This one belongs at the center,” he called. “The center must be solid.”

“Give it to me,” Hua said.

“You have no place at the center.”

“Neither does the stone.”

Shuo held it tighter. “Without the center, the lines will not hold. Without the lines, no one will know where to go.”

“They already know.”

“They are drowning.”

“Then your lines are not enough.”

Shuo’s face changed. He was not angry. He looked hurt, as if Hua had taken a tool from him.

“I remember every place,” he said.

“You remember the places. Not the people.”

“What is the difference?”

Hua thought of Sui holding his name in his own hands. She thought of Mo’s anger. She thought of Nüwa’s pain over the bowl.

“The difference is what remains when the place is gone.”

The kiln shifted. Shuo fell to one knee. The black stone rolled from his hand and disappeared into the water.

Hua dove after it.

VIII #

The black stone led her down.

It was not heavy. It pulled because it had decided the direction of the world. Hua followed it through cold water, past the roots of the drowned reeds and the bodies of fish that had turned their white bellies toward the torn sky.

At the bottom, the dragon’s tail moved through the mud. It had wrapped itself around the black stone.

The dragon was larger below the water. Its body filled the whole drowned plain. Faces moved along its length, opening and closing their mouths in silence. Hua saw Fuxi. She saw Nüwa. She saw herself as a newborn figure waiting for a hand.

The dragon did not speak. It showed her the world before the lines.

There was no fear there. No grief. No one had lost anything because no one had yet been separate enough to lose it.

The sight tempted her.

She could let go. She could become one of the dark faces and stop carrying the weight of a name. She could forget Mo’s insult and her own. She could be returned to the mud before the hand closed around her.

Then a small thought came from above.

Hua.

It was Mo thinking of her. Not calling. Not commanding. Only holding the possibility of her.

She held him back.

The dragon’s body shuddered. Its faces turned.

Hua reached for the black stone. It was warm. In its surface she saw the part of herself she could not see from inside: the desire to be made perfect, the desire to have Nüwa’s hands close over her again, the desire to be exempt from the trouble of choosing.

“You are not the first world,” she told the dragon.

It turned its head beneath the water.

“You are the world that does not let anyone answer back.”

The dragon opened its mouth. A current caught Hua and carried her toward it.

Nüwa’s ash rope tightened around the horn above. The line ran through the water like a gray vein. Nüwa pulled from the surface. Fuxi and the people held the four floating stones. The dragon’s body was caught between them.

Hua put both hands on the black stone.

It burned cold.

She thought of Sui. She did not imagine his face. She imagined his refusal to change his name.

She thought of Shuo. She imagined his terror at being unable to remember.

She thought of Nüwa. She imagined the hand that made a body and opened when the body moved.

She thought of Fuxi. She imagined the broken square, the two arms no longer meeting at the angle he trusted.

One by one, the faces along the dragon’s body lost their mouths. Not because they were silenced. Because they no longer needed to speak with one voice.

The black dragon contracted.

Nüwa pulled again. This time the ash rope cut through the water and into the dragon’s horn. The dragon rose, carrying the black stone with it. Hua held on.

The surface opened.

Nüwa dragged the dragon into the white light.

She struck its head with the broken square.

Once. The square splintered.

Twice. The dragon’s mouth filled with river water.

The third blow came from Fuxi. He had no instrument in his hand. He struck with the side of his human fist.

The dragon broke.

Not into blood. Into weather.

Black rain fell across the drowned fields. It fell for one day and one night. When it stopped, the water had found its channels and the four floating stones had become four dry islands.

Hua lay on the eastern island with the black stone against her ribs.

Nüwa came to her.

“Give it to me,” she said.

Hua did.

Nüwa held the black stone in both hands. It made her serpent tail tremble.

“This is not a repair stone,” Hua said.

“No.”

“Then why did you gather it?”

Nüwa looked toward the broken sky. “I thought the sky needed a center.”

“Does it?”

Nüwa did not answer.

She placed the black stone in the mud beside her.

IX #

The work of mending heaven took seven days.

On the first, Nüwa and Fuxi raised the four pillars. They used the legs of the great turtle who had come from the northern water, old enough to remember when the world was still soft. The turtle gave one leg willingly. The other three it gave after Nüwa promised that no pillar would be placed where it had nested.

On the second, the people built channels through the fields. Fuxi drew the routes with the broken square. The lines wandered. He did not correct them.

On the third, Nüwa sorted the stones. The black stone remained outside the baskets.

On the fourth, the rope-made people and the hand-shaped people worked without separate orders. Nobody announced this. It began when the reed-mat maker gave the blue stone to a child, and the child gave it to Shuo, and Shuo carried it to Mo because Mo was closer to Nüwa’s fire.

On the fifth, Fuxi asked Hua to teach the people the practice of the empty place.

“I have no such practice,” she said.

“You used it against the dragon.”

“I thought of people.”

“That is the practice.”

He had built a new square from two green branches. The angle was not exact. He kept checking it as if patience could persuade the wood to become true.

“What do I tell them?” Hua asked.

“Tell them to think of someone who is absent.”

“Then what?”

“Tell them to listen.”

“For what?”

Fuxi put down the square. “For the answer they did not make.”

Hua looked at him. “You are asking people to become uncertain.”

“I am asking them to become able to change.”

The admission seemed to cost him. He had taught nets, fire, music, the signs, and the rules of joining a man to a woman. He had taught the world how to continue itself. But he had never taught a person how to remain distinct inside a bond.

“Why me?” Hua asked.

“Because Nüwa made you to watch your own hands.”

Hua had not known that.

“She told you?”

“She told me not to put you in a basket.”

He picked up the branch square. “I did not understand why.”

Hua gathered the people by the kiln. Sui sat on a stone with the broken bowl in his lap. Mo stood behind him. Shuo stood apart.

“Think of a person who is not here,” Hua said.

The people shifted. No one wanted to be first.

Hua thought of Nüwa. The creator was nearby, at the fire, but Hua imagined her as she had been before the world broke: kneeling alone at the river, turning a piece of wet earth in her hand.

“Now listen,” Hua said.

The settlement became very quiet.

At first there was only rainwater dripping from the kiln roof. Then someone laughed. Someone else began to cry. A man called his brother’s name. The reed-mat maker said, “She would tell me to stop standing in the water.”

“Was that her voice?” Hua asked.

“No.”

“Was it yours?”

The woman frowned. “It was hers, but I made the place where it could speak.”

Hua nodded.

She understood then that the practice could not be given as a rule. It had to be offered as an opening. Each person had to discover the distinction between hearing a command and making room for a presence that might refuse it.

When Mo’s turn came, he thought of Hua.

She knew because his face changed. She felt the thought arrive in her own mind, but it did not wear her shape. It was him, thinking of her, and her thinking of him thinking of her. Three distances. Three ways to be alone together.

“What did she say?” Hua asked.

Mo looked at her. “She said I was stubborn.”

“That is what I would say.”

“No. It was what I hoped you would say.”

She wanted to laugh. She wanted to strike him. Instead she put her hand against the red lines on his palm.

“I am still angry,” she said.

“I know.”

“You do not know. You are thinking of me.”

Mo turned his hand beneath hers. “Then tell me.”

She did.

On the sixth day, the people carried the five colors up the hill.

Nüwa climbed behind them, her serpent body cutting a dark path through the mud. Fuxi followed with the square. Sui carried one white pebble in both hands. Shuo carried nothing.

At the top of the hill, the sky was close enough to touch.

The crack ran from horizon to horizon. Through it Hua saw a darkness beyond the darkness, filled with stars that had not yet learned where to stay.

Nüwa placed the red stone first.

The sky answered with heat.

She placed the blue beside it.

The wind changed direction.

The white went above them, the yellow below, and the black stone remained on the mud.

“It needs a center,” Fuxi said.

“It needs a seam,” Nüwa answered.

“A seam is a weakness.”

“A seam is where two pieces agree to remain two.”

Fuxi looked at the crack. “If we leave it open, the water may return.”

“If we close it perfectly, nothing will move between the pieces.”

Hua looked at the stars beyond. They were moving slowly, not like a river and not like a flock. They were finding their own distances.

“What would move?” she asked.

Nüwa’s eyes came to her. “You.”

X #

The seventh day began with an argument about the black stone.

Shuo had brought it up the hill.

He had carried it hidden beneath his shirt, against his chest. When he set it down at the center of the five colors, the sky darkened.

“It will hold,” he said. “I remember what happened when there was no center.”

“You remember the old sky,” Hua said. “This is not the old sky.”

“It is the sky we have.”

“It is the sky we are making.”

Shuo’s hands shook. “You speak as if making were permission to ruin.”

“You speak as if keeping were the same as saving.”

“I saved people.”

“You put them in places.”

“Places kept them alive.”

“Not all of them.”

The words struck him. He had lost three people in the first flood. He had recited their places all night so that no one would say they had vanished. Hua saw, suddenly, the kindness inside his error. He had treated people as marks because marks did not disappear when a body did.

“You want the sky to remember your dead,” she said.

Shuo’s face folded. “Someone must.”

Hua picked up the black stone. It was cold now.

“Then let it remember them without putting us all in their place.”

Fuxi stepped between them. “The center will be laid.”

“No,” Hua said.

“You do not decide that.”

“Neither do you.”

“I hold the square.”

“It is broken.”

Fuxi glanced at the green branch in his hand. “A broken instrument can still show an angle.”

“An angle is not a command.”

“Without command, who will move when the sky falls?”

“The person who chooses to.”

“And if they choose wrongly?”

Hua thought of Sui in the dragon’s mouth. She thought of Mo putting down the basket to reach for her. She thought of every person who had been made before they understood how to refuse.

“Then someone else will choose after them.”

Fuxi’s eyes narrowed. “You would make the world depend on correction.”

“It already does.”

Nüwa took the black stone from Hua.

For the first time since the sky broke, the two creators stood apart. Their tails were no longer intertwined. Fuxi held the broken square. Nüwa held the stone.

“We cannot both be right,” Fuxi said.

“We do not have to be,” Nüwa answered.

He looked at her as if she had said something impossible.

“The world needs one shape.”

“It needs enough shape to be lived in.”

“That is a human answer.”

“They are the ones living in it.”

Hua felt the people behind her. Mo’s shoulder brushed hers. Sui held the bowl. Shuo stood with his hands empty.

The sky began to fall again.

Not rain. Pieces of white fire broke from the crack and struck the hill. The five stones rolled. Fuxi shouted for the corners. Nüwa cast the black stone aside. The people moved without waiting for the lines.

Hua seized the red. Mo took the blue. Sui took the white pebble and held it over his head. Shuo caught the yellow.

No one had assigned them.

Together they carried the colors to the edge of heaven.

XI #

The mending was not beautiful while it happened.

Nüwa pressed the red stone into the eastern edge. The stone melted and ran like a wound. Fuxi set the green square against it. The angle slipped. He adjusted it by hand.

Mo brought the blue. Hua brought the yellow. Shuo held the white. Sui stood in the center with his small pebble, waiting for someone to tell him where to put it.

“Do not wait,” Hua called.

“Where does it go?”

She looked at the five colors. There was no empty place large enough for the white. The sky had four edges and one long wound. Every arrangement wanted a center.

“Where do you want it?” she asked.

Sui looked at the crack.

“There,” he said.

He pointed to the narrowest part of the seam, where the stars moved behind the white light.

Hua carried him. The wind tore at their clothes. Fuxi shouted that the place was unstable. Nüwa shouted that the stone was too small. Mo shouted Hua’s name.

At the seam, Sui opened his hand.

The white pebble did not fall. It entered the crack and became a line of pale fire. The line ran along the wound without closing it.

The sky inhaled.

The sound was enormous. It drew the flood upward. Water lifted from the fields in shining sheets. The people clung to one another. Fuxi drove the four pillars deeper into the earth. Nüwa wrapped her serpent body around the hill and held the world down.

Hua felt herself pulled toward the seam.

She could see everything below: Mo, Sui, Shuo, Fuxi, Nüwa, the river, the black stone lying outside the work. She could also see the thought of each person, not as a voice but as a private distance. The world was not one body. It was a collection of bodies capable of holding one another without becoming the same.

The seam widened.

“Hua!” Mo called.

She reached for him. Her hand closed on air.

Nüwa’s fingers seized her ankle. Fuxi caught Nüwa’s wrist. For a moment the three of them formed a chain between earth and sky.

“Let go,” Hua said.

“No,” Nüwa said.

“You cannot hold me and the world.”

“I made you.”

“You did not make the place I am going.”

Nüwa’s grip tightened. “You will be lost.”

Hua looked down at her mother’s face. The white light had erased every color except the black at Nüwa’s eyes.

“Then remember me without putting me back.”

Nüwa’s hand opened.

Hua fell upward.

She entered the seam.

There was no heaven on the other side. There was the space between two finished things. It was cold, and it was full of possible shapes. Hua felt the first people before they became people. She felt the river before it had chosen a bed. She felt the dark dragon gathering its weather. She felt the hand that wanted to shape everything and the hand that wanted to be free of shaping.

In that place she understood why Nüwa had made the rope.

Not because she was tired. Not only because she was tired.

The rope allowed the mud to leave her hand before it was complete. It gave the unfinished body to the world, where other hands, other eyes, other inward rooms could continue the making.

Hua reached into the seam and pulled the edges together—not closed, only near enough for the colors to touch.

The sky settled.

The water fell back into its channels.

Hua came down hard on the hill, with Mo’s arms around her.

For a while neither of them spoke.

Then Mo said, “You were gone.”

“I was there.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere you cannot follow.”

He considered this. “I dislike it.”

“So do I.”

“Good.”

She laughed. The laugh became a cough. Mo held her until the cough stopped.

Above them, the sky was repaired.

The five colors made a long visible seam from east to west. It was not a rainbow. It did not arch. It was a line of red, blue, white, yellow, and black, each color remaining itself. Between the colors ran the pale fire Sui had placed there.

Fuxi stood beneath it with the green square. He had cut one arm shorter than the other.

Nüwa stood beside him, her tail wound around the four turtle pillars.

Their bodies did not touch.

XII #

After the repair, people began to ask for names.

Not everyone wanted a new one. Some kept the names given by Nüwa. Some kept the sounds they had made when they fell from the rope. Some chose names from things that had survived the water: reed, fish, ash, root, ember.

Sui kept Sui.

Shuo stopped reciting the places of the dead. Instead he made small clay markers and asked each person to tell him what the marker should remember. He learned that a place could hold a person without replacing them. It took him many seasons to stop asking whether he had done it correctly.

Fuxi redrew the settlement. He kept the square but left one side open. He kept the trigrams but added a broken line that meant, according to him, “the sign has not finished becoming itself.”

When Hua asked why he had not simply called it “freedom,” he said the word was too large for a mark.

“It is not large,” she said. “It is difficult to draw.”

“That is what I said.”

He taught the people nets. He taught them to read wind in a stretched cord and water in a trembling line. He taught them the rules of joining a household. But he changed the first rule.

No person would be joined to another because the lines required it.

The pair would stand apart, each with a bowl between them. They would name what they could not know about the other. If they still wished to stand together, they would pour water into the bowl from opposite sides.

Hua and Mo were the first to do it.

They stood beneath the seam. Nüwa watched from the clay yard. Fuxi held the shortened square. Sui held the old broken bowl, its three pieces bound with reed fiber.

“What do you not know about me?” Mo asked.

Hua looked at him. She knew the shape of his hands, the way he slept, the sound he made when angry. She knew the scar the net had left across his palm. She knew all these things and still did not know him.

“I do not know what you will become when I stop looking at you,” she said.

Mo’s face went very still.

“What do you not know about me?” he asked.

“I do not know whether you will stay if I become someone you did not expect.”

He poured water into the bowl.

“I do not know either,” he said.

Hua poured from her side.

The water met in the middle. It did not become one color. It made a small current that turned the three pieces of the bowl against one another.

Nüwa looked away.

Hua went to her after the ceremony. The creator was kneading yellow clay beside the river. Her hands were clean now. The colors had faded from her skin, though a black line remained in the crease of one palm.

“You let the sky keep its wound,” Hua said.

“It is not a wound.”

“What is it?”

“A place where the world remembers it can be broken.”

Hua sat beside her. The river had returned to its bed. Fish moved under the clear water. Nothing about the bank suggested that a dragon had lived there.

“Did you know the rope would make us unfinished?” Hua asked.

Nüwa pressed her thumb into the clay. “I knew finished things were lonely.”

“You made me by hand.”

“Yes.”

“Was I lonely?”

Nüwa smiled, but the smile carried an old grief. “You had not yet met anyone to miss.”

Hua looked toward the hill. Mo was teaching Sui how to knot a net. Sui kept pulling the wrong cord. Shuo was trying to remember which knot came next. Fuxi was drawing a circle around the open side of the square. He had started three times.

“You are making more people,” Hua said.

“I am.”

“Will you shape every face?”

Nüwa lifted a length of rope from beside her knee.

“No.”

She dipped it into the yellow mud.

When she raised it, the rope sagged between her hands. A line of drops gathered along its length. Each drop held the sky in miniature. Each drop trembled with a different possible face.

Nüwa looked at Hua.

“Go,” she said.

Hua did not move. “Where?”

“Where you are not yet expected.”

Hua stood.

Above the settlement, the seam brightened. The colors did not blend. The pale fire ran between them like a thought no one could finish for another person.

Fuxi finally completed his circle. It was not centered in the square.

He looked at it, frowned, and left it that way.

Hua walked toward Mo and Sui. As she went, she heard Nüwa’s voice inside her. She heard Fuxi’s too. She heard the dragon’s old invitation, the river, Shuo’s counting, the small hurt in Mo’s palm.

None of the voices was hers.

None of them was entirely not hers.

She carried the distinction with her beneath the repaired sky.

And because she carried it, the world remained open.