“She’s not actually bleeding,” your mother assured me. “It’s the heart coming out.”

Mother lifted her wrist carefully, then pressed it into the next page. During the brief instant her wrist was raised, black dripped from the gash.

At last, a bit of red crept into the ink. Mother stopped, and your mother bandaged her wrist. I continued staring at the notebook, already knowing what was going to happen and not wanting to miss a moment of it. Something would appear, fresh and dripping, like my drawings from the pencil I had given you when you first came to Shanghai.

The wet mass of ink shifted right before our eyes, moving across each page, drawn to different corners. It was not long before the shapes turned into columns of characters falling down each page, the single mass separating into thin, elegant strokes.

“That’s what the pencil wrote before?” I asked.

“Before you are its memories, Reforged.”

“Can I try?” I asked Mother eagerly. That was when your mother brought over one of the sample pencils. Mother sharpened it for me.

“Be careful,” she said softly before handing it to me. With the pencil heart gone, her phoenix had faded to pale scars.

I hovered the pencil over my wrist. I refused to let my nervousness show. But I also could not watch the heart break into my skin. So I found your eyes instead. You held my gaze as I pierced my wrist.

It stung only briefly when the skin tore. Then a numbing sensation as I pushed the heart into my bloodstream, all the while never looking away from you. But something strange happened as I pushed it into my wrist. Your face faded, as if I was seeing you through fog, and another image appeared, students milling around the front of the pencil company. One of them grabbing a sample heart and writing on a scrap of paper, a quick message to test it out, as he scratched the heart against the paper—hello, hello, hello! Only when the heart had melted completely into my wrist did the image fade. I looked down. The same phoenix pattern that adorned all of your wrists finally adorned mine.

Mother handed me the knife.

I tapped the blade to my phoenix. Its dark lines gleamed, daring. I sliced.

Again, it only hurt for a moment. Black seeped out of my cut, and I pressed it to the blank notebook as Mother had. It had barely been used, and so the ink covered the center of one page before it turned into my blood. Your mother was ready with the bandages again.

hello, hello, hello! slowly formed on the page. More came afterward, words I had only caught glimpses of earlier—today is Tuesday, wow, this is smooth, and when will this war end?

“How do you feel?” Mother asked gently.

“I saw them,” I said. “The people who wrote with the pencil before.”

All three of you nodded.