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oil; could have climbed into pilots’ cabins, running her hands on the instruments and imagining what it would be like, hanging suspended in the void of space with only the stars for company.
    Life wasn’t fair, and she certainly wasn’t going to wait any longer to become an adult.

    There probably was a divinity somewhere watching over thoughtless adolescents; for Rechan had made it into the mountains, and to the plateaux, without any major trouble. She hitched a ride on a peddler’s cart—so many things that could have gone wrong there, but the peddler was nice and friendly, and glad for the company—and then, when there no longer were villages or people, she walked. From time to time, she’d had to duck when a flyer banked over the path. At this height, it had to be rebels, and they’d kill her if they found her, as they had killed Second Uncle and Seventh Aunt, and Cousin Thinh and Cousin Anh; all the absences like gaping wounds in the fabric of family life. Demons take the rebels, all of them; how much simpler would life would be if none of them were here.
    And then she stood on the plateaux—her feet hurting, her bag digging into the small of her back, her breath coming in fiery gasps—and it didn’t matter, any of it, because there was the stone.
    She’d only seen the blocks the traders brought down. The one for her cousin’s exhalation had been roughly the size of a woman; of course, with lamsinh at such a dear price, people would buy only what was necessary. But here were no such constraints. The stone towered over her, cliffs as tall as the Temple of Mercy, broken bits and pieces ranging from the size of a skyscraper to the size of her fist; colours that ranged from a green so deep it was almost black, to the translucent shades Flesh-Mother so valued, the same colour used for all the family’s breath-siblings—all the stone’s veins exposed, streaks of lighter and darker nuances that seemed to be throbbing on the same rhythm as her own frantic heartbeat.
    She walked among them, letting her hand lightly trail on the smooth surfaces, feeling the lambent heat; the faint trembling of the air where the sun had heated them through, like an echo of her own breath. People had always been vague about exhalation: they’d said you’d know, when you saw your block of stone, what kind of breath-sibling you wanted to carve, what kind of birth master you wanted to give to your children yet to come. But here she didn’t just have one block of stone, but thousands; and she wandered into a labyrinth of toppled structures like the wreck of a city, wondering where she could settle herself, where she could make her first cut into the incandescent mass around her.
    And then she rounded the edge of the cliff, and saw it, lying on the ground.
    It was huge, easily ten times her size, with streaks the colour of algae water, and a thousand small dots, almost as if the stone had been pockmarked; a pattern of wounds that reminded her, for some absurd reason, of a tapestry that had used to hang on Seventh Aunt’s wall, before the bomb tore her apart in the marketplace.
    In all the stories she’d heard, all the tales about girls running off to have adventures, there was always this moment; this perfect moment when they reached the plateaux, or when someone showed them a block of stone, and they just knew , staring at it, what it would look like when whittled down to shape; when they’d freed, measure by agonising measure, the limbs and head and body of their breath-sibling, the one who would be their constant companion as they travelled over the known planets. In the stories, they didn’t carve; they revealed the stone’s secret nature, gave it the life it had always longed for.
    Rechan had never given that credence. She was the daughter of an engineer, and believed in planning and in forethought; and had brought sketches with her, of how her own