Chapter 1: Opening Her Eyes to a Thatched Hut

Mei opened her eyes to a roof of thatch and a smell of woodsmoke, and the first thought of her new life was: I am going to have to fix that roof.

The second thought arrived with the memories — two lives' worth, stacked like sheaves. In one she had been an agronomist who died at her desk over a drought report. In this one she was a farmer's daughter in a mountain village a thousand years from any laboratory, with two acres of land so poor the weeds had given up on it.

Her grandmother set a bowl of thin porridge in front of her and apologized for it. Apologized. For feeding her.

Mei looked at the grey field beyond the door, at the stream the village used badly, at the slope everyone said was cursed because nothing grew there.

Nothing grew there, her trained eye said, because the soil was exhausted, the water ran wrong, and nobody had ever once rotated a crop. All fixable. All of it.

"Grandmother," she said, and her voice only shook a little, "after breakfast, show me the boundary stones. I want to see exactly what is ours."

The old woman blinked. Then, slowly, she smiled the smile of someone who has been waiting years for exactly that sentence.