“Hey!” he called. “Child! Whatcha doing here?”
She looked up, blinking in surprise. “Oh,” she said. “Hello.” Then came to them, and when she approached, the man thought she seemed, somehow, sad.
“What in the hell’re you doing out here?” he said. “Y’shouldn’t be here.”
The girl seemed confused. “Really?”
“Hell’s wrong with her?” the short man mumbled. “Kid out an’ all, like this.”
“Get on home,” called the taller man. “It isn’t safe.”
The girl blinked again. So strange, so motionless in the twilight. “Maybe,” she said.
“Who are you? What’s your name?”
She shifted, like she was trying to remember. “I think I’m a ghost,” she announced. “Once I was a princess. Like the autumn princess. I had her name. And then…” She smiled a quiet, unnerving smile. “Yes, that’s right. But I died.”
She moved closer to them, one little step.
“Somebody murdered me,” she said. “You see? They made me like this. They made me. That’s why I’m still here.” She moved closer still. “I can’t rest.”
“Stay back now,” the tall man said.
“I heard what you were saying,” said the girl. “About a new era. You were right. This is the start of a new era. A whole new time… that people will remember for a thousand years.” She took another little step. Flies buzzed around them, shifting, swarming. “This is the start of it all.”
The men backed off, unnerved by the girl and her stillness, her lack of expression, the way she walked so easily through the field of the dead.
“What do you want?” the tall man said, gripping his broken spear.
She stopped, to consider it. “I don’t think I know.” She spread her hands. “Sorry.”
He edged forward, trying to seem threatening. “I said hold on!”
The girl didn’t move at all. A little statue in the melting snow and mud. She spoke quietly. “It’s not your fault, you know.”
“Huh?”
“That’s what this is really all about.”
“Whoareyou?”
“Hanbei, don’t.” The short man pulled him back. The girl turned, just enough to glance in his direction too, as though only now seeing him.
“Oh,” she said.
“Who are you?” the tall man said again.
The girl shrugged.
“I show you what you are.”
She drew a small, round mirror from the folds of her clothes. “You see?”
And he saw his own reflection. It was a gaunt, maggot-eaten face. Covered all over with broken skin and mud and blood. His eye had been ripped out. His throat cut.
He was a corpse.
The world changed; the spell was broken. Beside him, his friend was a dead man, leg smashed, arm missing, a spear still sticking from his shredded gut.
