At the Ninth Crossing, in the shed by the ferry, Shen Yan sealed away an old man's memory of an infant crying and collected forty yuan. He never used tools. Other people needed a Listen-Lan instrument to peel memories away and seal them inside a crystal, but he only had to listen, then reach in and take them. When he pressed a finger down, gray-white light flowed into the bottle along its cracks. His palm grew hot, so hot it hurt. After the pain came emptiness.
The brown, soft-cover notebook lay open to the third page. The first two lines read: Mother was short, her left hand trembled, and she smiled before speaking. The Chanqiao accident happened on November 17, a rainy day, and took eleven people. The third line had been traced over three times in pencil: You did not cause the deaths of those eleven people.
He didn't know what he had just thrown away, but as long as the notebook remained, he was still himself. Someone had left a blank, ocher envelope on his desk. He tipped out a memory crystal, thicker than the common kind, its edges worn smooth. Its color was wrong. The light inside ordinary memory crystals was dead, like oil frozen solid. The light in this one floated gently.
As soon as he touched it, something rang in his bones. This memory was alive. Not alive because it had just been sealed and had not yet frozen, but alive in the way something is when it is still growing and breathing on its own. Someone was moving inside it.
He pressed the crystal to the burn scar on his left hand. Every sound in the shed faded away. But he still couldn't remember who had written the third line in the notebook, the one traced over three times in pencil.
