Chapter 1

"Boy or girl?" The woman on the bed had just finished giving birth. Her face was soaked with sweat, but she held herself up long enough to ask.

Granny Zhao stood holding the baby with her face set hard. She looked at the row of little girls in the doorway and glanced away in disgust. "Pah. Yu Lili, you've still got the nerve to ask? If the Zhao line dies out with us, you can take yourself back to your mother's house."

She had the one son. She had picked his wife out of dozens, too. An educated youth, schooled, well-mannered, and she had looked like a woman who would bear sons. Four children later there wasn't a boy among them. Rotten luck, all of it.

The midwife had just washed her hands in the yard. She came back in looking awkward.

Granny Zhao dug out the egg she had ready in her pocket. "Sorry to put you to the trouble, auntie. There's nothing in this house. Just the one egg."

The midwife took it. That was the going rate in the village. Not every family had spare money for a hospital. "I won't say no, then. This little girl of yours isn't like other people's. She looks like a lucky one to me." She said a few kind words over the egg as she pocketed it.

Granny Zhao's smile was stiff. "Let's hope so."

That was the end of the talk. The midwife saw herself out.

Yu Lili heard it and knew something was wrong. She couldn't make sense of it. All through the pregnancy she had craved sour food, and sour was supposed to mean a boy. Then she saw her mother-in-law's face and the fight went out of her. The village would know by tomorrow, and there was no telling what they would say about her behind her back. She looked at the baby in her mother-in-law's arms with hate in her face. She didn't want to be laughed at.

"What am I supposed to do now? God help me." Yu Lili started crying quietly into the bed. She had no luck, that was all.

Granny Zhao frowned, turning it over and over. She looked down at the baby. Newborn, and somehow not ugly at all. The skin was fair and soft, and the eyes weren't squeezed into slits the way the other girls' had been. Her mood lifted while she looked, and the frown came loose.

"Ma, the egg drink's ready." Zhao Fangsong had been in the kitchen beating an egg into hot water. With a pregnant woman in the house they had been saving eggs, holding them back for his wife's month of lying-in.

Granny Zhao looked up when her son called. She thought about the good mood she had been in a moment ago, and for no reason she could name, the bowl in his hands set her off. "Take it away. Eat, eat, eat. Can't even produce a son. You'll be the death of me."

Zhao Fangsong was a plain, honest man. He was frightened of his mother and frightened of his wife, but the scales in his heart had tipped long ago. He looked at the wife who had borne him all those children, then carried the bowl over and stood by his mother, coaxing.

"Ma, it's made now. If Lili doesn't have it, who will? And if she doesn't get her strength back, how's she going to give us a son?"

Granny Zhao looked at her daughter-in-law on the bed. Hearing that she still needed the woman for a grandson, she said nothing, which meant yes.

Zhao Fangsong saw his mother let it go and hurried the bowl over. He set it on the table by the bed and helped Yu Lili sit up.

Yu Lili's face was still wet, but she eyed the egg drink hungrily.

Granny Zhao watched her drink it down without a care in the world, then looked at the three girls lined up in the doorway, and her temper rose. Her son was the only strong worker in the house, the only one who earned full work points. She could manage eight at best. So many mouths, and they weren't a worker's family from town. And later there would be a grandson, and school money, and a house to build, and a wife to fetch for him. None of it came free.

Yu Lili kept her head down and drank carefully. There was brown sugar in it. Sweet all the way down, lovely.

The little girls leaning at the window swallowed.

"Big sister, I want some too. I didn't get enough supper." Zhao Lanlan was the third girl, three years old, born in 1965. It was 1968 now.

Zhao Qingqing, the second, tugged at her big sister's arm. "Big sister, I want some too."

Zhao Wanwan's head was a fog. She had only stayed up late reading a novel. Now she had woken with someone pulling at her clothes and two small children standing beside her.

"You want some what?" The voice came out wrong. She looked down at her hands. Dirty, and small. These weren't hers.

Zhao Lanlan was too little to notice anything odd about her sister. "Egg drink."

Zhao Wanwan's head gave a stab of pain and a run of memories dropped into it. She had landed inside a book. She was Zhao Wanwan, from the family that got used up and thrown away in that rebirth-era novel. She was the eldest Zhao girl. She worked for the Zhao family her whole life: in the fields for work points before she married, and after she married she handed every last thing she had to her brother. Her husband turned away from her, her children had no time for her, and when she was old there was nobody willing to keep her. She shook her head. No. She wasn't living that life. So what was happening right now? She looked into the room. The original's little brother seemed to have been born already.

"Has the baby brother come?" Zhao Wanwan asked under her breath.

Granny Zhao was in no mood for it. She was still holding the little girl. "What are you talking about, you wretched child? Go and clear the firewood in the yard, or you can eat air tomorrow."

Zhao Wanwan had been raised soft in her own time and nobody had ever sworn at her like that. She thought about where she was and swallowed it. She took her two sisters by the hand and got out of the doorway.

Zhao Fangsong was busy feeding his wife and noticed none of it.

Yu Lili had enough on her mind and didn't want to face any of them.

Zhao Wanwan took the girls to the kitchen. She was hungry herself, if she was honest.

Zhao Qingqing was a bit older, five. "Big sister, it isn't a brother. It's a sister. Mum had another girl and Granny's in a temper about it."

Zhao Wanwan's eyes went wide. That was wrong. In the book the Zhaos had three girls, and Yu Lili's fourth was a boy.

In the kitchen she found some egg drink left in the bottom of the pot, not scraped out properly. She poured it into a bowl. The brown sugar was still out on the board, so she stirred a little in. She was hungry, but she looked at the bowl and couldn't face it.

"You two have it. I'm not hungry."

Zhao Qingqing and Zhao Lanlan looked up at their big sister, touched, then took it and drank.

In the room, Yu Lili finished hers. She had no strength left and her head was swimming. She wanted to sleep.

Zhao Fangsong tucked the quilt around her.

Granny Zhao gave her a sideways glare.

"I'm telling the pair of you now. The fourth one. This family isn't raising her."

Yu Lili woke right up at that. She and her husband looked at each other.

"Whatever Ma says."

Zhao Fangsong wanted a son too. Nobody wants to be the end of his own line, and for the Zhaos the line came down to him alone.

"I'll do as Ma says as well. As long as Ma's happy."

Hearing her son say it settled something in Granny Zhao.

"Right. I'll see to it. Tomorrow we say the birth went wrong and the baby didn't live. As if she was never here."

Zhao Fangsong nodded hard. He had never once seen the child's face properly.

Granny Zhao had been holding the baby all this time. Once the thing was decided her heart started going fast, thumping away. She looked down again. The child had been asleep and was awake now, round eyes fixed on her. She lifted her head quickly and didn't look again. If she looked much longer she would go soft.

She waited for full dark and slipped out of the house with the baby.

Zhao Wanwan heard the door from the kitchen and put her head out. So that was it. The sister had been given away. Her thoughts ran on. She had only just worked out what year it was. The girl whose body she was in was eight and had never been to school. Grim. She looked at her two grubby sisters and couldn't help a flicker of distaste. With all the novels she had read, she reckoned she had come here to be the heroine. She thought about the heroine of this book and rubbed her hands together, thrilled. This was going to be her era.

Granny Zhao took the long way round with the baby. Her house was at the west end of the village and she walked to the east end. She saw the old Chen place and thought of their three grandsons and nearly sighed. She turned the corner, heard someone coming, put the child down on the ground where she stood and ran. She couldn't be caught. The brigade leader had given them a talk only a few days ago. Abandoning a child was a crime. She wasn't going to break the law.

Chen Yougong had gone quietly to the next village that day to see his father-in-law, who had been sent down there. He did it out of pity for his wife. A woman from a family like hers had married beneath her, and his own mother made things hard for her on top of that. He had nothing much to give her, so he carried sweet potatoes over on the quiet.

He was rounding the corner for home when he saw something on the ground by the moonlight, a baby by the look of it, wrapped in a ragged quilt. He looked around. No telling who had left it. He knew nobody in the village had it easy, but if you didn't want a child you shouldn't have one, and once you had it you fed it. You didn't put it down in the road. He thought about it, sighed, and picked her up. He pulled the cloth off the little face. A pair of eyes rolled round at him, and a small hand worked its way out of the wrapping with the fist shut tight. That did it. He couldn't put her down again. His mouth went up at the corners. "Hello, sweetheart."

Before he picked her up he had been planning to see the brigade leader in the morning and find her parents. Once she was in his arms he had no intention of letting go. He wanted to keep her, and that was the truth of it.

At his own gate he called softly for his eldest. "Shaoyuan. Open up for your dad."

Chen Shaoyuan came running at the sound. He saw his father holding something, scratched his head, then shut the gate and barred it.

"Dad, what've you got there?"