Yellow is the breath of the dying.

On the seventh day after Dandan drank the paraquat—a pesticide that had recently become tragically popular for suicide attempts, as well as the cause of too many accidental ingestions by children—her skin grew sallow and her breathing grew rapid and weak. Her coughing would bring up a thick, turbid fluid, also yellow. But her eyes were wide and staring, like a cool and bottomless well. At a glance, one might think she simply had a cold. The person lying in the bed looked in some ways so full of life that one might not believe she could be the source of the rotten stench emanating from the bed. Sometimes Gu Huilan thought this place was like a stagnant yellow pool of water. The pool would never again be clear; neither could it dry up all at once. The evaporation process slowly peels away layers of skin, one by one.

Dandan’s lips were dry and cracked because of her quick and constant mouth breathing. They were always open just a bit, always seemed about to speak, but they were not willing or able to say anything more than they already had. Gu Huilan had a feeling that this door to Dandan was closed to her forever.

Gu Huilan sat on the edge of the bed, near her daughter, but not too near. A touch might hurt her. The house was suffocating, and the chirring of cicadas outside filled the sky and covered the earth, engulfing the village.

“The insects are too loud. It hurts my ears,” said Dandan in a voice that was barely audible.

“Just watch the TV. Try to ignore it,” said Gu Huilan.

The television was playing a fantasy series with popular actors that Dandan liked. The heroes had just received their supernatural powers. There were thirteen episodes left.

“When I was young, my mother told me,” Gu Huilan said, “that nature works together with people. We just can’t see it happening. The crops reach out from the fields with invisible hands, gather in the light of the sun, and eat it. The water in the earth follows a path that we cannot see and then climbs back up to the sky above us.” She did not know how to talk to her daughter. There was so much she wanted to say to Dandan, but most of the time she did not know what to say.

Dandan stared fixedly at the television without uttering a word, yet her eyes did not seem to focus on the screen. Under her delicate arms were yellowing sheets. Gu Huilan had planned to change them for new sheets during the next Spring Festival. Next to the fetid pillow was a little bear that had been Dandan’s constant companion throughout her childhood.

The television program was interrupted: “This is an announcement from the emergency broadcast system. We repeat, this is an announcement from the emergency broadcast system. We ask everyone to please avoid coming in contact with …”

Gu Huilan changed channels in disgust, but the other station was playing the same announcement. She punched fretfully at the remote control, and the television suddenly went out. Every channel changed to snow and the hissing sound of static.

“Just look at this,” said Dandan.

“I’ll take care of it.” Gu Huilan stood up and saw her son Qingtian standing in the doorway. His eyeballs floated in dark sockets, somehow at once gloomy and glistening.

“They’re coming,” Qingtian said, with his hand indicating some direction, but vaguely.

“What are you talking about? Stay here and watch your big sister,” Gu Huilan said as she walked out of the house.

From the ground-floor courtyard they used to dry grain in the sun, she climbed to the second-floor roof. She squatted in front of the satellite dish. She did not really know how to fix it, but she had learned to aim it a little and to hit it a couple of times.

When she looked up, she found that the village had been covered by the haze. Already she could not make out the edges of the fields. The upper branches of the trees hovered atop the mist, like reeds floating on water. There should be no fog in the middle of the afternoon. Raising her eyes and looking off into the distance, she was amazed to see that all the people of the village were standing there in the mist. They had formed a large ring in a field at the edge of the village. She could not tell what they were looking at.

Gu Huilan could not worry about that now. She climbed down off the roof and returned to Dandan’s room.

She was gone.

The television was still displaying snow. The flashes of fluorescent light covered her like a blanket. Outside the window, far off in the mist, lightning blazed and boiled. A kind of hoarse metallic sound passed through the air, and pressed at her eardrums.

But Gu Huilan, in her panic, barely noticed these events. She searched the room once more and then the house. Qingtian, too, was nowhere to be found. Gu Huilan left the house. In the fog, there were the flagstone streets, the trees and houses she knew, but she could discern no human forms.

“Dandan! Qingtian!” Only after she had shouted these words did she realize that the world outside was unnaturally quiet. At some uncertain moment, even the chirring of the cicadas had ceased. The silence was not complete. All the air buzzed with a sound like the snowflake static of the television.

A taste of metal spread gradually through the air and into her mouth. The small hairs on her face stood on end and felt suddenly itchy. Gu Huilan touched her cheek and moved toward the fog.

She could not remember how many days it had been since all the people of the village disappeared. Gu Huilan had forced her life back into its normal patterns. She lifted two buckets on the ends of a carrying pole and watered the vegetable fields. In all directions, everything was still shrouded in a layer of fog, even when the sun was high in the sky. The fog irritated her face. The rustling sound that never stopped sounded like a hand brushing constantly across the tall grass and the leaves and everything else that remained. Half of the corn had been harvested by the people now gone and still lay in heaps on the ground. Walking along the low earth embankments between the fields under the hillside, Gu Huilan saw that someone’s eggplant crop was yellowed and withering. She considered bringing some water here to help them out, but she couldn’t water everything, after all.

After her work was done, she usually walked into the village to look around. The doors to most of the houses were unlocked—some were wide open—and there were no traces of the people who once lived there. The fog seemed to be more dense here, and the rustling sound thicker as well.

Gu Huilan beckoned to the yellow dog and walked carefully along the slick stones of the road. The fog pressed down on her; she seemed to be walking through a cave. Suddenly, she saw a figure walking at the end of the road. She called out. The figure did not look back, and it floated into a door at the end of the street. Gu Huilan ran over and found the door shut tight. She hesitated a moment and then pushed the door open.

Her dog barked twice, and a yellow cat that was walking along the top of the wall scurried away. Two people from the village sat at a dinner table in the central room of the house, eating. They laughed as they ate, and they wept as they laughed. Their voices were like sound from a radio, crackling with electricity. A group of mice rustled about busily on the table, nibbling at moldy food. The mice saw Gu Huilan come in, and they scattered. A bowl rolled off the table and shattered on the ground. It was only then Gu Huilan realized that these two people were not like her. They were light blue shadows, translucent, and giving off a fluorescent light. They spoke only to each other, and they betrayed no awareness of any other human voices.

Subconsciously feeling that something was missing, Gu Huilan looked at the floor and found that the two figures cast no shadows. Her heart pounded violently. Not daring to breathe, she retreated.

When Gu Huilan backed out of the door, she found the paving stones of the street now teeming with pale blue figures, shuttling silently back and forth. She recognized some of them; others looked familiar, but she could not quite place them. The sun setting behind the hills cast a faint reddish hue over the houses and the streets and made these shadow figures appear to emit a pale blue steam. None of them responded to Gu Huilan’s calling. They were like spirits; apart, cut off from her. Some of the figures vanished suddenly, and others suddenly appeared. Gu Huilan turned around and saw that the figures in the room had disappeared.

Gu Huilan felt certain that her children were still alive somewhere. The thought drove away some of her dread and offered her some comfort.

Gu Huilan ran back to her house. She collided with several of the shadowy figures along the way, but she passed right through them and did not feel anything. Still, she closed her mouth and tried hard not to breathe deeply as she ran, for fear she might inhale their souls. The house was cool, full of dark corners, and it gave off a mild musty odor. Amidst the gloom of the dim central room, she saw another pale blue figure, and this one was herself.

She stared dumbly for a moment. She wanted to reach for it, yet she did not dare approach it.

Two small figures ran down the stairs. “Dandan! Qingtian!” Gu Huilan cried out the names without thinking. Of course there was no reaction from the specters. The smaller shadow figure called out to the big shadow figure, and the one that looked like Gu Huilan turned around. On its back it carried a traveling pack.

The memory played out before her eyes. It was the last time she had gone off to the big city to work. She had intentionally decided to leave very early in the morning, when the light was barely coming up. Even so, Dandan had gotten out of bed to chase after her. She had not pulled on her or blocked her way. It was just as if Dandan hoped her gaze would pull her mother back. Qingtian tried to hold Dandan back within the house. So the shadows were the things of the past?

However, she remembered clearly that Dandan had complained endlessly that day, explaining all the reasons over and over why Gu Huilan could not leave. This time, the shadow that looked like Gu Huilan spoke without pause, but the words she spoke, all the reasons she gave for why she had to go, were different from her own memory. The words were garbled and incomprehensible.

The bigger shadow left Dandan and Qingtian behind in the house, and the two smaller shadows ran out to follow her without even putting on their shoes. Gu Huilan followed after them, crossing the stone roads, walking along the ridges between paddies and fields, arriving finally at the cement road that marked the edge of the village. It seemed as if the sunset of this day and the light of that day’s dawn fused into one thing, and in that uncanny glow from two directions she witnessed countless departures. She saw shadows she knew and those who were strangers to her, like a vast and mighty army, shouldering their packs, walking the road, straddling motorbikes, riding in every conceivable brand of car and shape of vehicle, in a line stretching to the very end of what she could see of the long cement road. This is how she had hollowed out a space in her heart; this is how she had been pulled away by the powerful magnet called the city. Gu Huilan wanted to call herself back, but her shadow was growing smaller and smaller on the back of a motorbike and finally disappeared. The shadows of Dandan and Qingtian, one before and one behind, folded into the crowds of children returning to their homes, and they bowed their heads silently. They disappeared before they reached the house.

Gu Huilan returned to the house and walked upstairs to the upper floor. The television had been turned on somehow, and it played the hissing static snow. The bed was empty. She turned off the TV and looked around the room. When she went downstairs, she saw Qingtian there squatting in the inner courtyard, petting the big yellow dog. A strange odor emanated from the courtyard.

Gu Huilan stepped forward, and she saw that this Qingtian was not translucent. He had a shadow.

“Qingtian?” she called out.

Qingtian turned his head and looked sideways at her.

“Where … did you go? Where’s your sister?” Gu Huilan spoke in a whisper.

Qingtian did not raise his head again, only showing her his back. His voice was soft, as insubstantial as the fog. “We are all here, living a new life. You just can’t see it.”

“It’s those shadows?”

“No, no. Those are merely the anchor points for memory synchronization. We live in a higher place. We are merging, harmonizing.”

“What is that?”

“It’s nothing.”

Gu Huilan moved a little closer. “Are you both … all right?”

“There is no good or bad,” Qingtian said.

“Please tell your sister … tell her Mama is here waiting for her to come back.” Gu Huilan now stood just behind Qingtian. “Won’t you both come …” She froze. She saw the bottle of paraquat spilling out onto the floor and forming a thick green chemical puddle. It gave off a pungent odor, and the glaring green color pierced the eye like a poisonous insect.

Again she heard Qingtian’s voice: “You still haven’t hidden it away. I know now what everyone was thinking. I know what my sister thought … The old life was so absurd. Many things are becoming blurry now. Many things are becoming clear. I almost forgot to ask you the question.”

“What is it? What did your sister think? Tell me. Tell Mama,” Gu Huilan said eagerly.

Qingtian looked up, and his eyes were terribly dark. “The pesticide, you left it in the house on purpose, didn’t you?”

“No! No!” Gu Huilan knelt on the floor and covered her face, screaming and wailing. “I was wrong; I shouldn’t have left you at home. If only I hadn’t gone away, everything would be okay …”

“This does not matter now.” Qingtian spoke in low tones.

“Qingtian!” Gu Huilan reached out to embrace him and found she was only holding the empty air and herself.

The courtyard was deserted. Only the dog was still there, licking its chops.

The fifth day after Dandan drank the paraquat.

The chirring of the cicadas bore in through the window and drilled itself into Dandan’s dream. Who knew what sort of phantom or monster it became there to make her struggle so in her sleep. Gu Huilan did not know how to calm her down. Dandan cried out, “Aah! No!” and rolled off the bed.

Gu Huilan quickly embraced her and lifted her back into the bed. Dandan wailed and coughed violently. There was nothing for Gu Huilan to do but pat her on the back and wait for the coughing to calm down.

“I dreamed … I dreamed that the people from down below took me away. They made me stay there with them. I tried my hardest to run, but I couldn’t move.” Dandan wailed and gasped for breath as she tried to speak. Tears fell down her cheeks.

“Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid. It’s okay. It’s all right.” Gu Huilan held the girl in her arms and tried to comfort her, even though she did not understand what Dandan was saying. “Mama won’t let them take you away. Mama won’t leave you.”

Why did she have to go out to the city? Before, she had not wanted to explain it to Dandan and really had no way to explain it. Why are you going out to work? There were the reasons that were too big to deny, but behind those reasons, she slowly began to see her own selfishness in the matter. Maybe the world out there represented another kind of life, without family and the endless tedium of every kind of chore. Maybe there was a place where responsibility and freedom coexisted. Longing to see someone again could coexist with flight from them. If such a place existed, it was kept from her by Dandan’s door. When she had received the call that Dandan was ill, even as she was on the road rushing home, she felt her own annoyance that her two children prevented her from going to a bigger city. But when she came back to find Dandan lying in bed, she did not want to go anywhere. All that was left of the world was this village, this bed.

Dandan buried her head in her mother’s breast. Gu Huilan felt again the pain in her heart that had now become commonplace.

“What do you want to eat? Mama will go make it for you.”

“My throat hurts. I don’t want to eat anything.”

“Why don’t you eat some cold noodles? You love cold rice noodles.”

Dandan nodded.

In the midst of the stupor of her afternoon nap, in the midst of the background hiss of static, came the sound of a dog barking. Gu Huilan woke up and ran downstairs to follow it outside. The yellow dog was gone. In the haze stood the silent shadows of the trees and the faint light blue of the human figures. Now the human figures were fewer than before.

She looked around in every direction and pondered the words of Qingtian. She tried to identify the people who lived there in the mist. Would they go sit in their houses? Would they go work in the fields? Would invisible crops grow? Did all of them really know what all the others were thinking? And was Dandan part of them now?

Where was the gateway to that world? She wanted to find it.

Gu Huilan went back inside and looked at the four peeling walls. There on one wall were Dandan’s drawings. Dandan’s bookbag still sat on the sideboard. Her little chair was empty. Even the dust did not move at all.

She picked up her phone and dialed her husband’s number. Unexpectedly, the call went through. There, over the line, was an even more intense hissing sound.

“When are you coming back?”

The voice was like an automated reply spoken by buzzing insects in the late summer, disjointed, and dropping in and out: “I’m … not going back.”

Gu Huilan dropped the phone to the floor.

In the night, the village was occupied by the darkness. The light in Gu Huilan’s home was always on, resisting.

The fields next to the village dried up and died, one after another. Yellow leaves overspread the earth, and the stalks stood stubbornly, giving out faint gasps as if panting for breath.

When she worked in the cornfield, Gu Huilan put the tape recorder on the embankment between fields and played music, hoping that Dandan would hear it. She played pop songs, and the sound was loud and resonant. It was music by a very popular male singer that Dandan had recorded from the radio. She considered for a long time and finally remembered that the singer’s name was Tian Hao. She silently recorded this name in her heart. While the song was playing, the hissing in the air around her grew softer.

She had placed a bowl of cold noodles at the edge of the field. When she heard a sound from that direction, she hurried over to take a look. A yellow cat was licking its mouth and trying to bury the remaining noodles in the corn husks that lay on the ground. Gu Huilan cried out, and the cat was frightened away. She looked out over the already empty field and pursued the animal several more steps. Gu Huilan meowed several times to call it back, but the cat had disappeared without a trace.

She had seen the shadow figure of Dandan several times. Once, the girl was leaning over a windowsill, holding her dirty stuffed bear. She was calling Gu Huilan on the phone in the city. Gu Huilan had not remembered the content of this conversation at all. When she got that call, she was walking along a tree-lined avenue in the city. The leaves overhead were broad, and both sides of the street were occupied by cafés. Flowers and trees were outside the door of every shop, plants both like and unlike those back in the village. People sat there at the tables, quietly and without the least bit of impatience or anxiety, like people in the village after harvest was in, but also not like those people. This exotic world drew her in little by little. She wanted to walk into a shop, but she was hesitant to spend money, and even more afraid that she would simply not fit in. So she watched the other people and fantasized about another kind of life. She had answered the phone absently, preoccupied with these thoughts. She had not even noticed when Dandan hung up the phone.

Only now did she realize that Dandan had told her all of her dreams that day. She was telling her all she was afraid of. She had told her what songs she was listening to, talked about the paintings she wanted to paint. Dandan had said that she missed her. Now Gu Huilan listened carefully with tears filling her eyes and blurring her vision. She wanted to go back to that time and listen with full attention to all that Dandan had said.

The third day after Dandan drank the paraquat.

The sound from the cassette player accompanied by the cries of the cicadas surged forth and filled the room with a kind of stubbornly determined joy. Gu Huilan could not understand the expression on Dandan’s already yellowing face. She helped Dandan wash. She hoped the yellow would simply wipe away.

“Talk to me. Tell me about this singer,” she said.

“You won’t get it.” After quite a while, Dandan’s lips moved to say this.

“I can understand it. This is Teen Ho.”

“It’s Tian Hao, Mama.”

“Okay, yes. Tian Hao. You know my pronunciation is not standard. He’s a good singer.”

“Do you still remember the time I stole your cell phone?” Dandan turned her body to face the other way, groaning painfully as she did so. “It was so I could vote for him. He won. He got the most votes.”

“That’s great. That’s really impressive. I shouldn’t have scolded you that time.” Gu Huilan was silent for a while, and that time felt interminable. “What else do you want to do now? Mama will say yes to anything.”

“I want to draw something on the wall.”

Gu Huilan wiped the tape recorder clean and placed it on the desk in her daughter’s room. She counted her remaining batteries, enough for a week. When they were gone, she would go again to the shop and get more, and she would get some crayons while she was there. She had planned it out. When the town ran out of these things, she would go to the city to get them there, but she must come back. She definitely had to come back here. She repeated this like a mantra.

She saw through the window then an uncanny figure in the midst of the fog, hunched like a snarling dog. The face was indistinct. She could only see him standing motionless, staring fixedly in the direction of the window and her. Gu Huilan remembered the strange man who used to wander about the village. Dandan used to wake up crying sometimes saying she had dreamt of him. Gu Huilan shuttered the window. Her heart pounded audibly.

The last shadowy figure had disappeared from the village. At first Gu Huilan thought that someone from the outside would certainly come, or maybe someone like her, returning home from work or travel, and bring back with them some news. She thought the electricity would eventually cut out. But it never did. Even the signal on her cell phone remained strong. Everything was just like normal, except without the people.

Gu Huilan went from house to house turning on lights. She lit up every home in the town, and in the night the village wore a corona of radiance. The music on the ridge between fields played over and over. A heavy wind blew through the town, and the yellowed leaves from the withered crops were swept up into the sky and flew past Gu Huilan’s eyes. Every day, she exchanged the bowl of cold rice noodles for a fresh one. The walls around the courtyard of the house were covered with colorful crayon drawings, ugly and clumsily sketched. They were her own, and she added more every day. Soon it seemed the entire house would be painted in crayon.

Would Dandan like it? Would she ever see it?

To keep herself busy and in the house as much as possible while she waited, Gu Huilan brought back bamboo she cut from the hillside. She sat in the home’s central courtyard weaving baskets. As her hands stayed busy, in her mind she rehearsed the words she would say to Dandan when she came back. On that day, she would open up Dandan’s door and welcome her home. She imagined light like a rainbow in the door to her room. She performed the handiwork very quickly, and the bamboo baskets quickly formed several large stacks. If the day came when the people returned, she would take the bamboo baskets to the city and sell them. They should sell all right there. In the city there was one street that sold the most delicious rice noodles.

A clattering sound came from beyond the wall. Gu Huilan dropped the bamboo basket she was working on and ran outside. She saw the red sleeves of Dandan’s blouse swinging away in the fog. She shouted Dandan’s name and ran desperately toward her. The red blouse ran ever before her, always a layer of fog between them.

She pursued the figure up the hillside behind the village. They ran together into the woods. The fog grew ever thicker. She felt as if her body were wrapped in a layer of static electricity. Breathing it in made her lungs itch. The girl’s red blouse disappeared. Gu Huilan flew through the woods, kicking up leaves as she went. Suddenly she saw, on the trunk of a great tree, there was a face. The face gradually faded and vanished from the wood, but she had seen that it was Dandan.

Gu Huilan beat at the tree trunk with fists and open palms and then ran home to get the axe. Stroke after stroke she cut into the trunk. Chips of wood sprayed in all directions, but from the gash in the tree burbled out green liquid with a sheen like metal. She cut into other trees, and the same green liquid flowed out of those cuts.

Gasping for breath, she threw the axe to the ground. The woods rustled and hissed, and the shadows of the trees stood silent and eternal in the fog.

She thought she saw several unnaturally tall and delicate black legs retreating from her into the fog. Gu Huilan followed, but could see nothing more.

Once more she cleaned the house and watered the crops. The sky was already dark. Closing the door behind her, Gu Huilan went out with her daughter’s bookbag on her back. In the bag were Dandan’s crayons and her little bear.

Gu Huilan climbed the hillside behind the village, entered the woods, and walked into the depths of the dense fog.

The moon rose, and the moonlight passed through the thick fog and shed glimmers of light over the tops of the trees. Only a small portion of this light was able to reach the ground. In the deep woods, there was a clearing where green grass grew. Gu Huilan stopped here and stood in the middle of the fog made luminous by the moonlight.

“Come out! I want to join you!” she shouted. The sound was quickly muffled by the woods and fog, and it could not travel far. “Come out!” she continued shouting, until her voice was gone.

From out of the fog several shapes appeared. First, the slender forelimbs like spiders’ legs were nailed into the ground, and then the enormous bodies emerged as if drilling through the fog, and behind the bodies more spindly limbs followed one by one. The sound of the leaves being chiseled into the earth; the sound of the friction of joints chafing like the tearing of iron. The shadowy bodies were half as tall as the trees, long and narrow, keen and sharp like gigantic stick insects. Ghost insects—that is what Gu Huilan and her friends had called them when they were children. More than a dozen of these towering figures appeared, and they gradually gathered and surrounded Gu Huilan. The surface of their limbs was smooth, with a metallic luster. The moonlight flowed like a liquid over their surfaces, and where the fog touched them, it made a small hiss, like drops of water on a stove.

Gu Huilan looked up at the figures above her and tried to control her breathing. “I want … I want to join you.”

They were silent, yet seemed to be considering the question together. Then one of them pulled a sharp limb out from the soil, the tip pulling loose earth with it as it emerged. The limb rose high in the air, caught a flash of radiance from the moon, and the shining thing descended quickly and fell heavily on the top of Gu Huilan’s head. She felt a sudden numb tingling in her scalp, and then, as if passing through that little gate, the static electricity in the clouds and mist poured into her skull like fine sand.

A huge net dragged her forward. She was like a single point of light in the darkness being drawn inexorably toward a central gathering place. The points of light around her were like the lights of her village under the veil of darkness. But then they grew more concentrated, more crowded, like the lights of a small city, and then they formed a metropolis, the lights of a big city like nothing she had seen before. The everyday lights of the human world were no longer worth recalling. She was woven into the fields, the woods, the crops, the rivers that flowed underground. She was knit into an electronic cloud. Every tactile sensation was acute and keen. The world that presented itself before her eyes became clearer and clearer. Other things grew increasingly vague and distant.

Dandan! She remembered and seized onto the thought. She anxiously searched for the figure of Dandan in every point of light.

The lights receded and the driving force of the giant web suddenly released her. Gu Huilan tumbled backwards onto the grass in the clearing.

The figure spoke in a metallic voice. It sounded like multitudes speaking all at once: “You cannot join us. The harmonization process is already too far advanced. You cannot be synchronized.”

“No!” Gu Huilan was desperate now. “Let me join you! I can learn!”

The figures retreated into the fog. All that remained in the woods were the shadows of trees and the chirring sound of static.

Gu Huilan woke from her dream and found herself sleeping across the edge of the bed. The lights were a pale yellow. The television broadcast only the snow of static. She raised her head and found Dandan lying on the bed, sleeping quietly, breathing evenly, her short red sleeves rising and falling with her breath.

Gu Huilan gently kneaded Dandan’s little arm. It was warm and soft.

She adjusted Dandan’s blanket and went downstairs to boil some water and make a bowl of cold rice noodles for Dandan. When she returned to the bedroom, Dandan was not there.

She gazed at the white mist outside the window. After a while, she sat down and began to eat the noodles herself.

Her phone rang suddenly. She picked it up and could faintly make out the voice of Qingtian.

“Mama, Gu Huilan, this is the last time I will speak with you. I am Qingtian, but I also am not entirely Qingtian.”

The fluorescent glow of the television flickered across Gu Huilan’s face, and she tried hard to keep her voice steady. “Don’t leave me. Come back to visit sometimes.”

“I have seen a world that you have no way of understanding. I do not hate you. My sister does not hate you. It’s just that … we simply cannot go back.”

“They … force you to do things?”

“No. We decide everything together. We”—it seemed to be searching for a concept Gu Huilan would understand—“vote. Every one of our actions is both carefully considered and performed freely, without constraint.”

“Qingtian, I made up your bed for you …”

“Mama. At this moment, I am 20,000 kilometers along my orbit around Jupiter. The great yellow stripe around the planet is still, like an eye opened in the darkness. I never knew yellow could be so beautiful. Right below me now there is a great windstorm blowing at 540 kilometers per hour. The airstream blows red phosphorus to the tops of the clouds, like a red lotus bursting into bloom. The shock wave heats up the cloud bank and produces thunderstorms that have been active for centuries. I dove into the eye of the storm, and in the turbulence my thoughts raced even faster than before. I can see clearly every thread sent out by the universe; I can weave them together. Just now our network has extended to include the sixth planet. When I see all of this before me, I know that I cannot go back.”

Gu Huilan slowly let out her breath and felt something depart from her. The dark of night was gathering around. She hung up the phone.

Gu Huilan looked around her village. It was silent, solitary, and shrouded in the rustling whisper of the static cloud. The bright sun had grown mild. Narrow blades of grass were overwhelming the paving stones on the road, and the wild vines climbed up the yellow mud walls. Nature using the patterns of nature to heal this world of its wounds.

From the hillside, the silhouette of the village looked as it ever had, making it difficult to feel that the world had undergone a great transformation. Perhaps from the perspective of the village itself, life was completely different from the experience of the humans who once lived there. The shadows of the trees and grass spread from the end of the village to the hillside, and joined up to form a single sheet with the shadow of the hills. They were warmed by the sun and drenched by the rain, and their lives developed and grew as they always had. The sun hung warmly over the village and over the grass and trees, shining on all the invisible beloved.

As Gu Huilan worked in the courtyard, a yellow cat would often jump up onto the wall and watch her guardedly. Gu Huilan made up a bowl of food every time she saw the cat, patiently demonstrating her goodwill. Some days later, finally, the cat jumped off the wall and, one wary step at a time, walked up to Gu Huilan, lowered its head, and began to eat the food from the bowl.

As if a light switch had been turned on, the cat’s tail rose and swung back and forth, and a smile spread over the woman’s face.

“Please stay,” she said.