You and I did not fully comprehend the danger of our work then. There were rumors about a former Chinese hotel that had been converted into holding cells and torture chambers, right in the International Settlement. I didn’t learn about that until much later—our mothers shielded us from the worst. The Japanese imprisoned Chinese and foreigners there. They wanted information on Chinese patriots, anybody related to them, and that was us—my father was still fighting in the war, and perhaps even worse, we were Reforging messages to aid his cause. But Mr. Gao kept his promise. He protected us and our operation. None of us came close to ending up in that building. Still, we were always on edge. Your mother, normally so calm and collected, startled violently whenever there was an unexpected knock on the door. Once, she even screamed at us for wearing short sleeves, our phoenixes exposed, though we were in the house, the black curtains drawn.

In the last year of the war, the two of us Reforged the majority of the pencils. Our mothers insisted on handling the impure ones, and so we did the rest. We became very good at it, discovering tricks like how to bleed out Mr. Gao’s pencils but not each other’s stories. Our days became routine. Wake up, Reforge, see what Ah-shin could scrape together for us, Reforge, eat any leftovers, and end the night by working on our story. Sometimes we were too tired to write and just lay there whispering about what we would do if there was no war. The shops we would visit, the boys we would meet, the places we would take our mothers. Those memories are hard for me to reach, each day blurring into the same.

My grandmother listened to the radio constantly. It received the best signal in the workshop. While we Reforged, she would relay snippets of news to us. That the Japanese were losing ground and there was a new curfew, that the Americans had invaded and opened a military base in Okinawa, not far from us.

Even without the radio, we could tell things were changing. The Japanese soldiers in Shanghai were increasingly old and injured, the young, healthy men sent to the front lines where they were needed. We heard the drone of American planes overhead. One day, hundreds of them flew past, and the street outside the company erupted in cheers. The Japanese soldiers did not even attempt to punish us.

Soon after that, we heard the emperor of Japan’s voice over the radio. We all froze, pencils in hand, waiting for the translation, and then the news, a blur drowned out by a gasp from our mothers, a single sob from my grandmother. A terrible bomb in Japan. The empire’s unconditional surrender.