In the twelfth month, Chen Yan is clearing slag from the abandoned furnace pit at the official kiln in Liuli Ferry when a scorch mark on his palm presses against the hot ash. He digs out half of a broken blade, about three inches long, black all over with a dark blue edge. The break has two layers of splintering, one curled outward and one inward. A natural fracture would only split in one direction; someone had struck it sideways twice with a hammer to break it.
He can hear the echoes of objects: a plowshare calls out for the mother who died the year its master did, an iron pot murmurs about a dish left unfinished, and a knife refuses to admit whom it stabbed. This broken blade is crying, saying it has yet to grow into what it was meant to be.
Jiang Sanqi steps to the edge of the pit and plucks the blade away. "It's scrap iron. Throw it out." Chen Yan says that if they smelt it in a furnace, they could get three liang of steel core and forge it into a plowshare or sickle to sell. Then the firewood wouldn't have gone to waste. Jiang Sanqi lets him keep it for a day. Tomorrow, they'll weigh it, and if it's heavy enough, he'll count it as half a day's work and add half a bowl of soup. Chen Yan says, "I don't want half a day's work. I want this piece of iron." Jiang Sanqi laughs. "Your life is a debt on the contract, one of thirty-seven households, number nineteen. It comes due this winter. You have to deliver three finished tools. If you can't, they'll take your child. You're going to be taken away yourself, and you're worried about keeping a piece of iron?"
Chen Yan trades today's and tomorrow's soup for the broken blade. Jiang Sanqi lashes him across the shoulder and says, "Fine. Don't come crying tonight when you have no soup either." Chen Yan picks the blade out of the ash and grips it in his hand. It burns, but its crying is clearer than the heat. The pattern on the broken edge is unfinished, like a sentence choked off in someone's throat. And this piece of iron isn't scrap. Someone broke it on purpose, someone who knew there was still something hidden inside.
