## Prologue: The Last Briefing

  A cracked ceiling. A bulb the color of old teeth.

  The smell hits first — coal dust, boiled cabbage, the ghost of someone's cigarette from three apartments over. Then sound: a tractor, far off, grinding through frozen ground.

  *1983.*

  The word arrives like a fist. Not a guess. A certainty.

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  Lin Wei sat up.

  The motion was automatic — muscle memory from a body that wasn't quite his yet. He looked at his hands. Small. Unmarked. The hands of someone who had never done anything.

  He remembered the missile. The analysis center. The ceiling coming down in a white column at 3:47 AM. He had flagged the threat vector three times. He remembered thinking, in the half-second: *I knew this would happen.*

  Now this ceiling. This smell. This cold.

  He lay back down. Outside: the tractor, grinding. His father was on night shift. His mother at the textile factory. The apartment was entirely quiet and he was sixteen years old and forty-seven years old and the two facts sat inside him without resolving.

  He stared at the ceiling and let what he knew settle into what he was.

  *Good,* he thought, finally. *We have time.*