Shao had been taking his turn at the rear of the convoy to make sure no one lagged behind. Now that another scout had taken his place, he made his way up the line, rummaging in his rucksack for the steamed bun he’d saved from the previous day. Then he remembered he’d already eaten it. He sighed. Hunger was no longer a novel sensation. Nor the cold. His hands, wrapped in rough woolen mitts, were chilled, and his lips were chapped from the cold wind.

A hand on his elbow interrupted his thoughts. “Would you like a bun, Young Master?” Sparrow said. “The cook’s assistant gave me an extra.”

Shao devoured the bun. The heavy steamed bread weighted down his stomach like lead. As if she knew what he was thinking, Sparrow poked him in the stomach, and he pretended to recoil, as though they were children again. Her face was still that of the girl he remembered, especially when her eyes crinkled in laughter. She reached in her pocket and pulled out a paper bag. Dried apricots.

Shao bit into one. It tasted of summer, sweet and intense. He chewed slowly, transported back to his childhood, to the orchard behind his grandfather’s summer house in the Moganshan Mountains. He closed his eyes, remembering how the air had been scented with ripening fruit, pears, apricots, and peaches. The tickle of long grass brushing against his bare legs as he chased Sparrow through the trees. Both of them collapsing in giggles. She’d been allowed to go with his family on that trip, for some reason.

He took another apricot. “You can have the bag,” she offered.

“No, that’s all I need.” He pulled his rucksack more firmly onto his shoulders. “Before we left Nanking, did you even guess what it would be like?” He gestured at the surrounding countryside. “That things were so, well, so backward in so much of this province?”

The names of the small towns where they’d stayed for rest stops were already fading from Shao’s memory, yet what he had seen was lodged in his mind. Towns that hadn’t changed in a hundred years, where electricity was still a rumor. Counties where a single family owned all the land, ruling what was practically a feudal system with tenant farmers toiling in the fields. Children and adults shitting over open troughs, faces emaciated from hunger and wasting illnesses. He saw a peasant population steeped in superstition, farmhouses where livestock and people shared the same quarters.

“Not just in this province,” she said. “The poverty, the primitive rural villages, this is what conditions are like in most of China.”