Pei Gusheng was scraping the periosteum from a shinbone when the tip of the sixteen-year-old girl's bone in his palm suddenly swung around to point at him. It was a fine-quality bone, worth three hundred bone tokens, but when he pressed it to his chest and listened, he heard congestion inside, as if the bone were a prison cell. The girl's wrist bone had healed crooked from an old injury. She had been harvested for bone while still alive. He filled out a disposal form, intending to burn the vengeful bone, but the Bone-Ban Office's people had already surrounded the place. They confronted him with bone-testing spikes, accusing him of hiding bone stock. Pei Gusheng pretended to cooperate, then suddenly splashed bone water mixed with bone fragments onto their testing spikes. In the confusion, he overturned the supply racks and broke through the blockade. On the unfinished disposal form, he had written only one character in the column for material type.
