Chapter Three: Whose Face Did the Moon Borrow?

With every repetition, an unfamiliar life flashed through her mind: herself in wedding red at a mine entrance; slicing open her palm inside a fire; holding a man with a bullet wound in his chest; signing her name beneath a contract. They felt neither like dreams nor memories, but sealed photographs being pulled from within her body. At the town marker, desert wind swallowed the voices. Iron bars sealed Shaft Seven. Four numbers on the back of Granny Qiao's map opened the lock. The tunnel descended, its silver sand glowing in moonlight. After ten minutes, her phone lost both signal and time. The offline camera kept recording, but the date in its corner cycled through the present year, forty-six years ago, and a century before that.