He left the cabin, heading toward a new section of the wall. The section that he had seen his sister working
in previously was completed, thus they would have moved her. To where, he could not say, but he knew that
there were only a few of such sites left to complete, and so he would find his sister in one of them.
He broke off his thoughts as he reached the edge of the cover. It was time. He looked, and there! His sister
was at the edge of the trench. What was she doing there? No matter. He left the trees behind him, screaming
incomprehensible noises that were all he could say. He went straight for the one holding his sister, but was
waylaid by a group. He blocked one, disarmed another and used that to slip through in time to see his sister be
thrown into the pit. He screamed.
He woke later, surrounded by the mangled corpses of soldiers that had tried to subdue him. He had killed
them, but not without a cost. They had taken one of his legs, and his arm was now a stump. He crawled to the
edge of the pit, searching for the sight of his sister’s face. He found it. His sister, and mother’s blank, unseeing
eyes stared back at him. Unbelievingly, he stumbled forward. They were dead. All he had lived for, all he had
trained for, was gone. They were dead. He stumbled one more step. Then his face set. He would fulfill his oath.
He almost laughed at how easy the solution was. He would guard them now, for all eternity. And so he fell,
happy to have done something right.
Xiaoren woke, opening her eyes slowly. She traced the line she had finished on. “…no one can work out
where the corpses are.” She knew now. The wall, the great long snaking wall, was a monument to the millions
who died building it. She slipped out of the house, ran up to the wall. Somewhere, below her, untold numbers of
rotting corpses lay. Somewhere, down there was the boy she had dreamed of. And somewhere, she imagined,
something was playing. A song. A requiem. A requiem unto her dream.
* * *