She took a deep breath. We could hear all her subsequent ones too. She took her time. Her hands gripped her knees. Instead of giving us her normal piercing look, she stared at the floor.

“He is my only son. My only child.” She took a shaking breath. “And he is out in a war where so many have already fallen. He hasn’t been around for half of his daughter’s life. I want . . .”

She raised her head. For once, she was the one looking up at Mother, asking something of her.

“I want her to know him. Your power—it would allow this, correct? Even if . . . even if he didn’t come back.”

Mother gave a slow, single nod.

“Teach her, then,” my grandmother sighed in defeat. “Teach her so she can know where she comes from, and what she can do.”

Mother bowed deeply.

“I will,” she promised.

As grandmother started to hobble out of the room, I went to her side, offering my arm. She held on to it tightly.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

She did not reply until we were in the courtyard. The bamboo lattice of the fence cast a web of shadows over her face in the moonlight.

“I can’t protect you forever,” she said. Her tone once again stern. “But I also cannot keep you isolated from your family forever. Be careful and use the power to survive.”

Decades later, I understand why grandmother did not want me to learn and why Mother went along with it. How much pain the pencils have brought to the both of us! But it cannot be denied that you helped that woman and her son. You helped restore a story otherwise lost and reconnected a family through it. That is the moment I always returned to when the world went dark, and our power really became the only way I survived.

It would be easy to keep all this from Monica. To not let her see the pain we once caused. But then I think back to that woman, who desperately wanted a way for her son to connect to his father, so much so that as she fled for her life, she stopped first for his pencils. I think back to my grandmother, who wanted me to be able to connect to my father. And of course, I think of myself and Monica, and here I am, with such little memory left, and I’ve come to realize I want us to connect in the way only Reforging can allow. I want her to know you, and our mothers, and all those who came before her, so she knows she is not alone. How she might use a pencil or our power in her technology-filled life, I do not know. But the cruel lessons we learned from the pencils transcend the wood and graphite. Who is to say she won’t find a bit of pencil within her pixels?

Chapter 7