Chapter 1

The day my father returned to his old trade, the sky was dark with storm clouds.

Thunder rolled in the distance.

He dug his dust-covered shoulder pole and baskets out of a corner, bound my sister’s hands and feet along with mine, and crammed us inside. Then he carried us all the way to a human broker’s shop.

The broker woman inspected us as carefully as if we were cats or dogs. “Redeemable sale or outright?” she asked my father.

Young as I was, I knew the slave market had its rules. In a redeemable sale, the family might buy you back if they ever came into money. In an outright sale, even wealth or high office could not easily erase your slave status.

My father lowered his head and hesitated.

Not because his heart hurt. Because he was calculating.

The tofu seller next door could not bear it. “Peddler Zhang, if you must sell them, at least leave the children a way home.”

My father did not seem to hear. He stared blankly at a shop across the road, where coils of white smoke seeped through a crack in the window as if beckoning his soul.

Only when the broker clicked her tongue twice in impatience did he raise his head and grit out, “An… outright sale.”

The tofu seller stared at him, then erupted. “I knew you were rotten when you sold your wife, but I never imagined your heart was this black! Two living, breathing little girls, and you would sell them outright?”

“Do you know what happens to children this young when they are sold that way?”

Of course he knew.

He had once been the most famous peddler on Qingyun Street. He had carried thread and thimbles, rouge and powder, cakes and candy through every lane. He knew the street gossip and the secret language of every trade.

I was eight. My sister Yaer was only four. Children as small as us fetched little whether sold to a pleasure house as prostitutes or to a rich household as maids.

There was only one place where we were prized: the human-meat market east of the city.

It had the fiercest butchers, the sharpest axes, and the hottest cauldrons.

My father knew that too.

He simply chose not to know. As though the sin would not be his if he did not personally deliver us to the market.

After inspecting the goods, the broker went to the back room for the money. Yaer, being younger, sold for one and a half taels. I was older and brought only one.

My father tucked the two and a half taels carefully into his coat. He stroked my cheek. “Zhier, don’t blame your father. I had no other choice.”

Yaer looked up at him, bewildered.

She could not understand why the red cord Mother had bought her at the temple fair now bound her wrists and ankles. Or why the baskets once filled with cakes and candy had become our prison.

I looked at the tenderness in Father’s eyes and almost laughed.

For no reason except that he had worn the exact same expression three months earlier.

That time, he had said, “Qingliu, don’t blame me. I have no other choice.”

Then he dragged Mother out and sold her back to a brothel.

Mother had gone willingly because Father swore that if she let him sell her, he would never sell my sister or me.

Within months, he had smoked away every coin from her sale. After Mother died, he turned his eyes on us.

He watched me now, plainly hoping I would be as obedient and understanding as she had been.

Instead, I smiled and met his gaze with quiet accusation. “Did you truly have no other choice? You couldn’t sell the cottage or our fields?”

He froze.

Thunder cracked overhead, and rain began to patter down. As if the storm had handed him an excuse to flee, he snatched up the pole and ran.

Watching his retreating back, I suddenly understood.

We had been born girls.

Perhaps, from the very beginning, we had been nothing but goods in his baskets.