The first escape

Stupid, stupid animals, ringing in my ears. My father’s last words, screaming, thundering in my head. I was terrified. Excited. Frustrated. But still, from the cloudy chaos of my thoughts and emotions, one impulse shot out like a beam of light: it’s time to leave, right now.

I ran from my father’s office and never looked back. The tube took me back down the tower and I sat and watched the floors flicker before me. I was breathing so violently I thought I’d pass out. The faster the tube raced down the tower, though, the greater the distance created between my father and me, and the better I felt. My mind began to calm, my breathing steadied. My fear drained away and by the time I reached our floor, I was already thinking about what I needed to do.

I ran across the boulevard and burst into the house. I hurtled through the rooms, grabbing what I could, what I thought I’d need. I had no idea what that was, though; I hadn’t a clue where I was going, what challenges would be waiting on the outside. So I filled my rucksack with nothing but warm clothing, a two-litre bottle of water, dehydrated food cubes, and the only printed photograph of my mother in the house. I double-checked that her letter was still in my back pocket, swung the rucksack onto my back, and took a brief moment to look about the cold and hollow house.

There had been life there once. I could still hear my mother’s laughter as we chased each other through the rooms. I could still smell her perfume—a trick of memory; I had long been denied her scent. Honestly, I told myself, there truly is nothing left here of home, no echo off the walls. The glints of light off the metallic surfaces, the glowing neon of the visual-glass, the drone of the air conditioner—they would buzz and shine on forever, irrespective of whether anyone was there.

I ran from my childhood home. At the tube stop, a man was waiting for a ride. He was wearing a grey coat and hat, reading off his palm-plate. I slowed my run to a nonchalant walk. I waited next to him without looking up, but could see from the corner of my eye that he had dipped his head in my direction.

You’re going to be in big trouble, young lady, he said.

My hand tightened on the strap of my rucksack, my face filled with heat, my breath lodged like a stone in my throat. He didn’t know, I thought; he couldn’t know! Your teacher isn’t going to be happy you’re late for school, he added, returning his gaze to his palm-plate.

I snapped up at him, saying that I didn’t go to school. Of course, that made him realise he was speaking to the daughter of the CEO. I regretted having said anything. I should have tried to leave without being recognised, but even at that point I suppose there was a remnant of childish pride left, of loyalty to my family’s name.

Ms. Huang! My apologies. He tipped his hat. I didn’t recognise you. Of course you don’t. No, of course not.You have a lovely day.

The tube doors hissed and parted. I smiled uneasily at him and went inside. He came in after me but I sat two rows above him, staring at the top of his head all the way down. I expected him to look up and ask me some question I couldn’t answer, like So where are you off to? or Does your father know you’re here? but a few floors later, he exited and I was taken by myself to the bottom of the tower.

I spotted the red button across from me, climbed on my seat, leaned across the tube, and stretched my arm out to push it. My chair clicked, whirred, and began its rise to the top of the tube, its descent on the opposite side.

The doors to the secret floor slid away from each other, and the corridor rolled out ahead. I stepped out cautiously and my small shoes clacked on the tiled floors. The doors closed behind me and the tube raced back up.

The sound of my breath was louder and harder in the narrow corridor. It seemed longer and wider, colder and more daunting, like one in a dream that would continue to lengthen no matter how quickly I ran along it. I wished my mother was with me. I dreaded having to continue all by myself.

I remembered being down in the corridor with my mother that first time.

But I hadn’t been with my mother. The robot had been holding my hand that day. So why did my memory say her, and not it? I’d filled in the gap between the machine and my mother, something I hadn’t been able to do at the time. The thought sickened me. How stupid I had been. The moment she’d taken her own life, that was when I had really lost her, when she had truly ceased to be. Before then she had been with me all the time and I hadn’t appreciated her for what she was, for the huge effort she had made on my behalf. All I had now was her letter, but the words of the letter would never change … they would never show me some new way.

I pulled my rucksack up my shoulder and made my way along the corridor. I checked the paper for the number and punched it into the keypad. The door opened and I entered the underground house. Once again, light upon light flashed on in sequence, revealing each ornament and piece of furniture. It smelled musty down there, untouched by fresh air. There were probably fans and ventilators somewhere, but they weren’t on, and the place stank.

I studied the map and keyed in the same code to enter the room behind the staircase. It was unnervingly cold and practical—a bunker, a panic room, a paranoid’s dream suite. Blue UV tubes lined the walls, saturating everything in their light: padded body-armour, large black guns slotted into metal brackets, holding out their many hands, insisting, Go on, take one. You’re going to need us where you’re going, little girl.

Droplets of sweat were beginning to form on my brow. I scoured the wall, searching for a suitable weapon.

What was I doing? As I tried to select a weapon I realised I had no clue—no idea of what lay ahead. All my life the outside world had been labelled a wilderness of nameless evils. There were predators out there, my father had once said to me, that’s why the tower had been built in the first place. To protect us. To keep us safe. And so once again questions peppered my mind in a shower of hot sparks: Jai-Li, what are you doing?

I turned from the wall and studied the armour and the glass cubicles housing the gas masks.

I should grab one of those, I told myself. What if the air outside was bad? What if I was poisoned as soon as I stepped out into the open? Maybe my mother had been wrong, maybe she knew no better, bless her. Maybe my father knew the awful truth. But I couldn’t go back.

No, Jai-Li, a second voice chimed. You’re leaving here. You’re getting out of the tower. Don’t lose your courage or your hatred now, Jai-Li; you’ll need both for a while to come.

I opened the cubicle door, quickly whipped the mask out, and gave it no more thought.

My eyes narrowed as I scanned the blue map. I proceeded to the hatch door at the far left corner of the room, grabbed the handle, lifted it and peeked through.

Beyond lay a short narrow tunnel, illuminated by a sequence of glowing glass floor tiles. I crawled through. My breathing began to quicken in that constricted space and my escalating heartbeat thudded in my ears. The hatch door closed behind me and after crawling a short distance I came to a large, dimly lit space.

Several bright white lights flared at once, and for a moment I thought I had been lured into some trap, but the lights revealed only a cube of a room without doors or windows. In the centre of the room something shone bright and new and astonishing. On the map it had been labelled “air-pod,” but this was like nothing I had ever seen before.

It was bean-shaped, a vehicle of some kind—metallic, curved and immaculate—like a gigantic drop of mercury, with no windows or doors to break its smooth surface. The vehicle was inactive, but something was keeping it hovering off the grey tiled floor. Beneath, I could see no stand, no wheels, no platform. It was clearly sitting in a state of rest, as light as a cloud in the sky, as a bubble under water. This strange machine was, according to my mother’s map, what I would be using to make my escape.

On the map, I had read “air pod—speak your name.” So I did. I said my name out loud and the side of the pod opened along seams so fine I hadn’t noticed them. The door rolled out and touched the ground, revealing the rungs of steel steps which led directly inside.

As I took my first step towards the pod, I was encouraged by the strong sense that my mother was still guiding me. The thought gave me strength, filled me with hope. I was charged up, ready to go up those rib-like steps. Ducking my head, I slid into the miniature cockpit. Four red chairs were positioned near a panel of instruments. I took the front seat. The outside of the vehicle was mirrored, but from my seat I could see the entire room.

The door rolled up and closed behind me. I surveyed the instrument panel. I had no idea what to push, what to pull, how to get the thing started and moving. I stopped my frantic thoughts, reassured myself. If it was that complicated, surely I’d have been given instructions? And sure enough, the door sealed of its own accord, securing me in the metallic bean. I heard the hum of a generator and steadily a vibration began to build in my seat …

The vehicle lifted—I could feel it in my gut before I could see it—and as the ceiling of the room slid apart I saw rays of light.

I tilted my head. I had never seen it or felt it before, but I knew what I was feeling and seeing.

The sun. Rays of natural light. The powerful, incomparable sun blessed my face and I ascended slowly into it. This was the real sun, the one that had lassoed the planets, wrenched trees from the dust, man from the oceans. It felt like the real sun. The tower engineers had designed and constructed the sun-orb to generate heat and light, but this sun did something more than all that. It had designed and constructed us, and inexplicably, I knew the difference.

Soon, the pod had emerged entirely from under the ground. I could see the boundless expanse of brown and orange desert sand. The sky was bluer than I had dreamed. The two peaks I had been able to see through my bedroom window were revealed as being two anonymous tips on a horizon of distant peaks … but the sand! The kilometres of flat sand! There was nothing out there. The desert stretched in every direction except one: directly behind me. There the glass and steel monolith that was Huang-345 sprang from the dirt, cementing itself just as firmly somewhere up in the clouds.

The pod stopped rising and was now only humming and hovering. I had risen like Lazarus but had not gone anywhere yet.

Yet.

Without warning, the pod accelerated from its spot, racing at full tilt across the sand. It blasted off horizontally, low to the ground, whipping the fine sands into clouds. Nonetheless, not a hair on my head moved; the internal atmosphere of the pod was perfect. Looking down, the world flashed by in a formless blur. Twisting back over my seat, I watched as the tower shrank in the rapidly increasing distance. In a mere minute that “glittering megalith of human ingenuity,” that “city in the sky,” had become a needle pulled back into the earth.

And I was alone.

I still had no clue where I was being taken, though. I had been so ready to leave that I’d given my destination almost no thought.

After a while I saw something else in that desert, far in the distance. At first I thought it was another mountain. It was an enormous machine of some kind. A machine or a ship, simply sitting in the desert as if it had crashed from the sky. I’d heard about such a thing. I’d overheard people in the tower talk about it. My father had mentioned it the moment I’d run from the office.

Only much later in my life, looking back and puzzling together small pieces of information, did I come to know what it was: Chang’e 11, a spaceship my father’s company had once built.

The small screen on the panel in front of me lit up. I took my eyes off Chang’e 11 and sat back in my seat. The screen bleeped once and an image appeared. It was my mother, looking young and beautiful. No hanging skin. No untidy, entangled hair.

Hello Jai-Li, she said. For a moment I thought it was actually her, that she was alive and able to see me, but then she said, I have made this recording for you. I hope, for the moment, that it will be enough. You may have some questions. I cannot guarantee I will be able to answer all of them, but perhaps you will find some of the answers to your questions in the same way as we all try to do: through experience, over time, and with unfailing hope.

This pod was created for an emergency, a kind of life raft in the event that we ever had to make a quick escape from the tower. But by now I’m sure you know your father will never abandon his tower. Like the captain of a sinking ship, he will go down with it, if necessary.

And so, now, this vehicle is yours. Your life raft. Your quick escape. And if you are watching this, it is serving its precise purpose. This is the Silver Whisper, my dear. May it serve you well and take you far …

The voice continued as the vessel sped across the surface of the sand. The range of mountains rose high ahead of me. The sun beat down from a blue infinity. Time and space warped, boom by sonic boom.

Her words trickled out: … you are probably wondering where this pod is taking you. Well, my child, there is a place, a very safe and special place, where you can stay as long as you need to. This destination has been programmed into the vessel. In this place, are people who can take care of you. It is a place I know well, and have known since I was a young child. It means a lot to me, has changed me in ways I could not hope to expect. It has remained in my dreams for as long as I can remember. Some may try to convince you otherwise, say it is a mythical, imaginary place, but I can assure you—it is real. It may even be the last real place on earth. It is a place to which I have been indebted my entire life.You know this place. I have told you about it. For certain reasons I feel I should not record its exact location. That is a chance I cannot afford to take. But I am sure, if you think hard enough, you will remember it.

As soon as my mother said this, I was disappointed. I did not remember it immediately. As the vessel raced across the land, I trawled my memories for something my mother might once have mentioned. I forced myself to relax, take a deep breath, and all at once it came to me. A story. It was utterly obvious. Not only a story, but the one story. The story she had told me a few times, not onlybecause it was my favourite, but, as she often reminded me, because it was true.

It was the story of something that had happened to my mother when she was young. As I watched the world outside roll itself out, the details of her story fell into place like a puzzle I had done many times.

I remembered my mother sitting on the edge of my bed, pulling my duvet up to my shoulders. I saw myself snuggling into the warmth, listening …

It always began in the same way: with my mother reminding me that, unlike my father, she had been born into a very poor family, nothing like the tower in which I was born. Her concept of luxury was having more than a single meal a day. Her concept of power was watching her father—my grandfather—labour continuously for the Chao-Bren Glass Factory. Sometimes he’d get no more than three or four hours of sleep a night. Her family lived in a shanty house in the village of Yihezhuang, deep in the mountains between Hebei province and the city of Beijing. She remembered the streets smelling like dust and burning metal, how putrid the village was, drab and dilapidated, but it was her home, and she knew no other. Her father worked long and senseless hours for a meagre income. He would often come home early in the morning, having walked a great distance from the factory, and sometimes, she said, she’d lie awake listening to him as he sat in the dark room, dry-coughing and mending the soles of his shoes with wire thread. She never wanted to let him know she was awake, it would upset him, she thought. The time he worked—nineteen hours a day was his sacrifice to her and her mother. He wanted to know that they were well rested, strong, as healthy as he could never be.

It was around this time, she said, that people were becoming agitated about a particular problem. Old men talked about it in the streets, she read it on the communal news board. Later she learned that the problem was widespread, not restricted to their village alone. Scientists and doctors were noticing a sudden increase in cancers and nervous disorders. They all had different theories about the cause, but most surmised that the launch of a series of experimental military x-ray grid-satellites was generating dangerous levels of radiation. More than a thousand of these interlinked satellites were bombarding the earth with rays powerful enough to look through the rooftops of buildings and down into underground bunkers. This was all taking its toll on the earth’s atmosphere. Babies were being born undeveloped or deformed. Tumours were sprouting in people’s bodies like mushrooms on wet forest floors. The air was being poisoned, not only by chemical pollution, but electronic pollution too. Devastating physical effects were becoming more and more prevalent.

Around this time, my mother became sick. She wasn’t sure whether it was connected to these rays, but her symptoms did present themselves as the stories began to go around. She awoke one morning with a headache, which became a migraine, which led to her having a violent seizure. Soon afterwards, she slipped into the first of a series of short comas. Her parents were, of course, devastated. It needn’t be said that they could afford no treatment, no hospitalisation. Her father continued to work, her mother took care of her at home, but each day her condition worsened. She was young, she said, but not too young to understand that it would not be long before she died. It was something she now knew for certain. The imminence of death is felt deep within one long before it occurs, just as someone who has been long at sea smells land before she sees it.

Then, one cold and rainy night, her father came home with a man she had never seen before. She was burning up, shivering in her bed, and the strange man standing over her in his sopping hooded raincoat seemed like a hallucination induced by her raging fever.

Her father stood behind him, holding his hat in his hands, twisting it round and round as if he was trying to open a tight jar. Her mother stepped aside and the man leaned over her. He put his hands under her thin body and lifted her into his arms easily.

It was a hazy memory—she said—being carried out of the house by that strange man. All she could recall was seeing her parents standing in the doorway, watching as she was taken away. She was placed gently on the back seat of a vehicle, a needle was plunged into her arm, the door was shut, and she passed out. She had terrible dreams that night, and she remembered waking intermittently only to realise she was still in the vehicle. Night turned to morning, and then to night, and then to morning again … and still she lay there in her sweat-drenched blanket.

On the third day, the vehicle stopped and the door opened. The large man leaned in and lifted her out. He carried her away from the vehicle, and though she could see little, she could smell the most incredible things. The air was clean, cold and fresh, teeming with the sweet fragrances of flowers, trees and soil. She heard water running over rocks and through crevices. She heard birds cheeping and insects twittering. The man carried her up a large number of steps. At last, he stopped and laid her down on a patch of the greenest and softest grass she had ever seen or felt. He stood, blocking the sun, and said, You must be hungry. That was all. Then he walked away.

She sat up and looked around—her curiosity superseded her physical pain and discomfort—and what she saw stunned her as she had never been stunned since.

A ragged sweep of enormous, snow-tipped mountains stretched below and ahead of her, like the resting place of old, forgotten gods. The green lawn was on the edge of a mountaintop of its own, the steep precipice rolling down to a deep, shadowy valley. On either side of her, trees lined the lawn, powdering the ground with light pink petals. Behind her, a grey temple sat firmly beneath the large rocks.

It was a paradise, she said. A beautiful shelter from the storm of clutter and chaos that had battered the rest of the world into diseased oblivion. And it was to be her new home for just under a year.

The stranger who had collected her from her parents’ house was a man named Sun Zhang. He’d built the place himself and lived there with his three daughters, tall and slender women who welcomed her eagerly, gently stroking her soft hair, handling her as tenderly as a fragile doll that might shatter at any minute. When she had rested they took her on a tour of the temple. The inside of the temple was lit by a myriad of crooked candles. The halls were lined with stone pillars, and each of the few rooms contained nothing more than a mattress on the floor and a small table carrying several slim candles. She was given a room of her own, ate dinner with Sun Zhang and his bowed, respectful daughters each evening, and was encouraged to read various books during the day.

Mr. Zhang was a hard and unruffled man. In the evenings after dinner, he smoked a long wooden pipe by himself. During the day he did little but work in his garden and practice a form of t’ai chi ch’uan she did not recognise. At first she thought he was treating her with an almost resentful aloofness, but soon she realised that he treated her precisely as he did his own daughters, entertaining no idle conversation, with little humour, and demanding utter paternal respect.

He said nothing about her father and mother, or why he had come to collect her from her house inYihezhuang—and she didn’t ask.

Most importantly, and strangely, every day that she stayed there, a bit of her strength returned, a morsel of her energy. She spent her mornings and evenings sitting on the lawn where he had first laid her down. She watched the clouds weave in and about the abundant peaks. She watched the sun move across the sky and thought about her parents, but never asked him to take her back. She couldn’t say why, except that she knew the place was healing her and she trusted Mr. Zhang to return her if he thought it the right thing to do. But, she told me, this was no mere temple on the mountains. There was something else about the place that she only learned much later—something that transcended its beauty and purity.

She learned that Mr. Zhang had once been a very rich businessman. When his wife had died because of a brain tumour many years earlier, he’d left his business and had the temple built on top of the mountain using a special material that, ironically, had provided his wealth in the world of money and men. The temple and the foundation had been built out of a synthetic substance used to counter the negative effects of electromagnetic radiation near power plants, radio towers and pylons. It had once been bought and distributed around the world but funding was low, and most companies abandoned using it altogether, preferring to believe, or even disseminate data that said the harmful effects of electromagnetic frequency pollution had been proved to be negligible.

The result of this, Mr. Zhang explained to her, was that the true benefits of his material had been severely undermined and underutilised. He discovered that the material had other properties: it caused plants and vegetables to grow at alarming rates, to incredible sizes. His mountaintop garden bore the largest and most delicious plums, the reddest, juiciest tomatoes. His new substance could purify water, slow the ageing process, speed up self-healing. Increased altitude, where the air was pure and free, accentuated all of these properties.

This material, it just so happened, was the accidental harbinger of a new natural world, and his temple on the mountains a retreat like no other. A magic existed there. It was a place of life and energy. A true Shangri-La, and a carefully guarded secret. How Mr. Zhang had come to meet her father, and why she had been chosen to stay with him on the mountain with his three beautiful daughters, she never did find out.

One day, at the end of her year, once she had more than overcome her ailment and attained what can only be understood as a “resistance” to the fears and insecurities that had once beset her, he took her back to her parents. His final warning rang in her ears: The world has not changed. While people can temporarily alleviate some of their problems, the real problem isn’t in the air. It’s in the mind. And the mind of Man is sick with rot. Though my home is a secret I urge you to keep, I will give you one final gift: you may, at any point in your life, send one person in need of healing to live with me at my home for a year. I promise you this now, as I once promised your father, and someone else before him. But only one person, and for one year only. I’ll be waiting.

He’d said it after my mother had climbed out of the vehicle and into the dusty streets of home. And then the door of the vehicle closed and he sped away, never to enter into her life again. She knocked on the door of her parents’ shanty. They opened it and cried when they saw her. And her life, although forever changed in the deepest way, continued on as it once had—except that she was never sick. No colds, no flu, not even a migraine, she said. That year on the mountain had strengthened her body in some wonderfully strange and incomprehensible way …

And that’s where the story she told me ended. And I’d go to bed and dream about that place, and wonder if I’d ever see it, if it truly was as real as I had hoped.

It was now obvious that the temple was the Silver Whisper’s intended destination. Though I could only be there for a year, it had been her only option. Hopefully, when my year there was up there’d be somewhere for me to go. Perhaps, she said, Mr. Zhang would be willing to let me stay.

I stared back down at my mother’s digital face. On top of everything, what really lingered now was the reminder that my mother had been sick as a child. She had come away believing she’d been cured for life. But even though cured, her life hadn’t been a happy one. She worried about me, about my father, feared that something might happen and she would not be in a position to save me. Perhaps she saw that his dynasty was heading for some sort of cataclysmic collapse. And if that happened, would she be able to save me? She had to have a plan in place that would get me away, because my father would never put me before his precious dynasty. If anything, he’d keep me in captivity there, let me sink with him in the hopes that the heir I was programmed to deliver would provide some miraculous means of salvation.

Maybe my mother thought he would separate us, keep her from telling me what his plans for me were. Whatever the case, she had worked hard to have an escape plan in place, to save me, to make up for what she had allowed him to do to me. Of course, the one thing my mother never foresaw was the situation that had arisen, where the sickness came back to take her once more, like a devil who had returned to claim a soul bartered for a few untroubled years of good health.

I was filled with the deepest sympathy for her, reminded that she hadn’t always been my mother. She’d once been a young girl. She had endured a childhood of poverty and sickness, an adulthood of loneliness and marital enslavement. She had done her best … until the day the world had become so unbearable she’d had no choice but to leave it …

Beauty. Grace. Wisdom. She’d had each, but life hadn’t cared, hadn’t shown her any favour. What were the rest of us supposed to live by, if anything at all? Tragedy, I learned that day, floats … And then it lands arbitrarily, like a feather from an indifferent bird high in the sky.

The pod left the flat plains of the desert, zigzagging between the gorges of the mountains, swinging around wide bends, gusting a rippling wake across the surface of a narrow lake, bending reeds and gliding slickly over stone slabs. I flattened my hands against the side and looked up to the tops of the rocky cliff-faces. The sun popped in and out of the cracks and gaps, my constant, protective companion.

It was then that an unexpected heaviness filled my head, the weight of a blanket soaked in water. I collapsed back into my seat. I felt nauseous. Outside, the walls of the valleys still raced rearward. The sun struck out, but now the rays were an expanding, blinding sheet that grew whiter and brighter. The heaviness intensified and became a sharp, piercing pain, followed by a penetrating noise.

My mother’s face began to warp and distort. The pod that had whipped over the land so smoothly was now shuddering and shaking …

I’m sure you’ve already guessed. The growing pain, the shrill sound … all happened the moment our memories were wiped clean and humankind lost a link in the unending chain of advancement and accumulated knowledge.

Day Zero, we now call it.

Of course, I had no idea that at that very moment everyone else in the world was suffering in the same way. As that malfunctioning glass bubble spluttered through the rocky vales, I thought it was an environmental factor, some sort of karmic penance even, for daring to leave the tower. These thoughts lingered for a short, bewildered while and then everything ended in sudden, mind-blotting blackness.

Who knew how long I had been out?

It could have been hours, weeks, or months—there was no way to tell. When I came around, my memory was gone, drained like old water from a tub. Everything I’ve just told you has been dug up and pieced together over many years—detail by detail, word by word. I’m like an archaeologist, delicately picking rock from fossil. At that moment, though, when my eyes opened, there was nothing.

I was lying on a bed in a room. I had no memories of the tower, or the pod, or Sun Zhang’s temple on the mountain. For all I knew, my life had begun right there, sprawled on those brown blankets.

The first thing I noticed was a damp patch on the ceiling. The centre of it was dark, bulging—water waiting for the opportunity to burst through. The air was warm and musty, the room small and unfamiliar. I climbed out of bed and walked unsteadily to the door. I turned down a dark corridor, and found myself in a quaint kitchen with sunflower-patterned curtains on the windows and an old refrigerator droning like a disgruntled house spirit. A man and a woman stood near the sink and gawked morosely back at me. They said nothing as I entered. The elderly man was thin and weathered with a balding crown, and he wore faded overalls and mud-caked blue worker boots. The woman was about the same age, her face hidden in a scrub of thick black hair. Rolls of fat swelled from the shoulder straps of her purple dress like baked bread. They didn’t recognise me … no reaction, no change in expression. Then the man turned and left the kitchen as if he’d forgotten to do something out there. The woman sat down on a chair at a round table, fingering the petals of plastic pink flowers in a jar. She ignored me as I stepped to the door that led outside and swung it open.

I was on a farm. Fat, blotchy pigs snarled and fought to secure their places at a mucky food trough. A boy was leaning over the crude, wooden fence, watching them. As I descended the steps of the porch and planted my feet on the muddy earth, he looked at me over his shoulder. He pushed himself off the fence and approached me, took my hand, and led me back to the fence. I leaned against the post alongside him. The sty smelled like rotten vegetables and excrement. Beyond the sty, the few acres of farm were grey and neglected. Clouds tumbled in high winds, sliding patches of shadow across the land like a desperate, migrating herd.

I never did fully remember the three people I saw in the house that weird day, but as the weeks continued, there were more and more clues. I saw myself in photographs on the walls. If the pictures were to be trusted, I had spent my entire life with those strangers. I saw myself as a young child in the woman’s arms. There was a picture of the boy and me bathing together in a steel tub. I saw each of these pictures, yet recalled nothing of the moments.

Over time, their memories slowly came back, but mine didn’t. On several occasions, the man sat me down and tried to convince me that he was my father, the woman was my mother, and the boy, my brother, but I struggled to accept it. Not only did I experience an absence of connection between us, I had also begun to dream of other places and other people.

In my earliest dreams, I saw nothing but a long white elevator. I had flashes of a beautiful woman applying her make-up before the mirror of a large, elaborate dresser. I saw a gigantic room containing nothing but a window that spanned the length of a massive wall, and a small desk. I saw one room drenched in blue light, another containing a floating metallic vehicle.

Night by night, the dreams became clearer and more consuming. By day, I helped my alleged brother on the farm (a boy whose company I had grown to appreciate, although I could never see him as my brother), cooked with my “mother” in the kitchen, and sat at my “father’s” side in the evenings while he watched a fire burn beneath the mantelpiece and drowsed on tumblers of whiskey. But all the while I felt that I was merely pretending to be a part of that rural family.

Sometimes, when everyone was sleeping, I would wake, climb out of my bed, sit by my window and stare off into the outlying mountains. My eyes were always drawn to the same spot—a valley I could just about make out in the obstinate mist that shrouded the land. It was not long before I decided I couldn’t continue in such a way.

One crisp morning, a few months later, I met the boy in the barn beside the house and told him I needed to go. I was carrying nothing but a small bag filled with food, water and a sweater. He asked where I needed to go, and I said I didn’t know. I was being drawn to some place in the mountains; some mysterious location was pulling on me like a magnet, and I knew I could no longer ignore it. He tried to convince me to stay, but when I told him I could not, he decided he’d come with me. He said he would return to the farm, to his mother and father, but he’d go with me as far as he could. I was relieved. I was terrified of what lay ahead and welcomed the thought of his company. I thanked him and we agreed to leave the following day.

We set off in the morning and walked for almost three days. The boy had brought a tent and essential supplies and we camped in bushes when we needed to rest. He tracked and killed small game and we cooked rabbits and pigeons over a fire. The boy said little to me; I knew he was worrying about his parents alone on the farm, but he did not complain, did not once suggest going back. He could see I needed to go on, to reach the place I sensed I needed to find, and he stayed to protect me. Perhaps he too was curious.

On the third day, filthy and exhausted, we saw something in the valley of the mountains—light, reflecting off the surface of an object partially hidden between the rocks. We hurried ahead to examine it further.

It was the pod, half-buried in the dirt, its mirrored exterior layered in rain-streaked dust. Behind it, trees and bushes had been ripped from the damaged soil. It had clearly come crashing down at a great speed …

I must have blacked out when it hit the ground, I said. It’s a good thing your parents found me when they did; I’m not sure I would have survived.

We circled the object for a few minutes, and I could see him trying to make sense of its strange shape.

This is mine, I said. The Silver Whisper. I was escaping the tower and on my way to the temple … From the look on his face I could tell he did not understand a word.

As before, I spoke the word Jai-Li and, with a hiss, a door rolled out. I held my breath, gave the boy a last blank look, and climbed inside.

In the cockpit, the air was foul. I saw four red chairs, a bag and a gas mask, lying on the floor. Those few items didn’t surprise me; I remembered them all.

No, what surprised me was the figure of a small person slumped over in the front seat, head against a shattered panel of instruments. At first I thought it was a loiterer, a sleeping wanderer who’d taken shelter in the wreck. But how could anyone get in? And what was that awful smell? I struggled to catch my breath. I leaned over and touched the stranger’s shoulder. The body lolled back, exposing her face, and I drew back in horror.

It was a girl. A dead girl. Her face was cut and scratched and the blood had clotted and crusted. Her yellow dress was splattered in dark brown smears. Her arm had been broken and twisted in an unnatural position. It was her, Kayle. Her, and somehow, me.

I recalled that a letter had been written, and carefully reached into her dress pocket and pulled it out. I unfolded it, recognised the handwriting, the roughly drawn map …

I stumbled out of the pod and threw up on the ground outside. Tears ran down my face. Wait. Wait a minute, I muttered No, no, no … it’s not right. It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t!

The boy crouched down. What wasn’t right, he wanted to know, what didn’t make sense?

I answered: It was me. It was supposed to be me.

I couldn’t speak for a few hours. I huddled in a corner reading and re-reading the shabby letter. The words were precisely as I had remembered them: the story of a young couple who had failed to resist a family empire, the programmed pregnancy, the need to escape …

But the girl.

She looked nothing like me, but I knew her face. I knew her face as well as I knew my own. It was one I’d somehow once had, but what did that mean? If I wasn’t her, who was I? Who was she?

The boy camouflaged the pod with dirt and bushes. We set up camp, made a fire and ate another small animal, then went to sleep. At first light, I helped him pack up and he laid his hand on my shoulder, Come on, Jun; let’s go back. Let’s go home.

And so we did. We travelled back to the wooden house on the farm—to our parents, our pigs, our grey and neglected acres.

When I entered the house, the man and woman threw their arms around me and hugged my limp, exhausted body, but I felt nothing. No love. No connection. They were my real parents—I knew that now—but it didn’t matter. Not at that point, anyway.

I lived out the rest of my childhood with a family I never entirely accepted as my own, even though they continued to love me. I never shook the feeling that I was supposed to be the girl in the pod, that my true mother had been the one who’d strangled herself with her own robot avatar, and that my father had been the man on the throne of a monstrous city-scraper. I remembered, too, that I despised it, but that didn’t stop me from feeling as if some furtive injustice had been done to me—against my identity and my history. My mother hadn’t loved me; she’d loved the girl in the pod. And that girl’s escape had never been my own, the plan to live in the temple with Sun Zhang and his three daughters, never promised to me. I had lived her life—but only through the memories that had jumped from her to me at the point of her death. And while I did try to make a new life for myself in the years that followed—growing to genuinely love my brother, Huojin, meeting my one true love and husband—I have never been able to let go of what I remember of “my” childhood, of a young, hopeful girl named Jai-Li, and of her curious life in the sky.