Madou Ai Li stepped out. She was no longer wood and paint. She was a girl of porcelain flesh and sorrowful joints, moving like water poured down a gentle slope. She did not speak, but when she touched a wilted flower, it remembered how to bloom. When she touched a broken heart, it remembered how to break again—more beautifully.

The boy blinked. Madou Ai Li fell into sawdust and indigo paint.

In the floating village of Hanyu, nestled in the crook of a mountain that wept perpetual mist, there was a legend: Madou Ai Li . The elders said the name wasn't a person, but a wound the world had forgotten to heal.