The hand on my throat didn’t squeeze to kill. It squeezed to silence.

  It was cold, calloused, and reeked of the cheap, acrid tobacco the man at the village post had been smoking. But the voice—the voice was my uncle’s, vibrating through the bones of my neck.

  "Don't breathe, Jun," he hissed. "The glass is broken. If you inhale, you take them in. And there isn’t enough room in one body for ten thousand histories."

  Around us, the darkness was no longer empty. It was swarming.

  The sound of shattering glass had given way to a frantic, wet whispering—thousands of tiny, translucent breaths escaping their jars, looking for a new vessel. I could feel them brushing against my cheeks like the wings of moths, cold and desperate. Each one was a fragment of someone the village had "corrected." Someone who had been forgotten.

  "Why?" I managed to choke out, my eyes stinging as the unseen vapors swirled around me. "Why did you bring me here?"

  "Because the ledger is full," my uncle’s voice cracked. "Ninety-seven, ninety-eight... it doesn't matter. The village is a stomach, Jun. It’s been digesting us for centuries. But it can't digest a Liu who knows the truth. You’re the only thing it can’t swallow."

  The Ninetieth—the man in the silver cage—began to moan. The purple flame in his throat flared, casting a strobing, sickly light through the room. In the flashes, I saw the "97" fabric monster. It wasn't attacking anymore. It was cowering, its red rags being shredded by the invisible swarm of released breaths.

  "Blow it out!" the Ninetieth screamed, his jaw unhinging further than humanly possible. "End the record! Let us be dead! Truly dead!"

  The hand on my throat tightened. "If you blow out that flame," my uncle warned, his face momentarily illuminated—he looked like a man made of wet salt, melting into the shadows—"the walls won't just fall. The outside comes in. The thing the grass is hiding. The thing that breathes under the fields."

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  I looked at the purple flame. It was beautiful in a horrific way. It was the only light in a world of suffocating rules.

  I had a choice.

  I could stay a "witness," live in the dark, and watch as my name was chiseled into a stone post tomorrow. Or I could break the world.

  I lunged.

  The hand tried to yank me back, but I was fueled by a pure, animalistic terror. I collided with the silver cage. The wire bit into my skin, but I didn't stop. I pressed my face against the cage, inches away from the Ninetieth's translucent, parchment skin.

  The heat from the purple flame was frigid. It didn't burn; it numbed.

  "Do it," the Ninetieth whispered, his eyes (or the hollows where they should have been) staring into mine.

  I took a deep breath—ignoring the cold, stinging vapors of the released souls—and blew.

  The flame didn't flicker. It screamed.

  A shockwave of violet light erupted from the Ninetieth's mouth. The silver cage disintegrated. The glass jars exploded into fine dust. I felt myself being thrown backward, hitting the stone floor so hard the world went white.

  Then, the sound started.

  It wasn't a scream. It wasn't a knock.

  It was the sound of a massive, heavy door being unbolted across the entire horizon.

  The "History" room didn't just go dark; it ceased to exist. I felt the floor beneath me dissolve into soft, damp earth. I felt the wind—a real, biting wind—hit my face for the first time since I stepped off that bus.

  I opened my eyes.

  I was lying in the middle of the village square. It was still night, but the "Unlit Village" was no longer unlit.

  Every single house was leaking a thick, oily black smoke. And from the fields of tall grass surrounding the village, thousands of tiny, glowing eyes were emerging.

  The grass wasn't moving because of the wind. It was moving because the things beneath it were finally standing up.

  My phone, lying in the dirt next to my hand, buzzed with a final, terminal vibration.

  Unknown Sender:

  The count has hit Zero. The ledger is closed.

  A new message appeared immediately after.

  Unknown Sender:

  The Correction is no longer required. Now, there is only the Harvest.

  I looked up. Standing over me wasn't my uncle, or the man with the cigarette.

  It was the old woman from the roadside. She was holding a scythe made of sharpened bone, her eyes glowing with the same purple fire I had just blown out.

  "You were a good witness, Jun," she said, her voice sounding like a thousand people speaking in unison. "But the village is hungry. And you've finally invited everyone to dinner."

  She raised the scythe.