Chapter 10 · free to read
Month nine. Ploy's name was second from the top, which had never once happened before.
Two years. Full fees. Travel. Studio. Begins in November. She read it four times before she found the sentence that mattered.
They were the lantern drawings. All nine of them. The private ones, the ones that had spent eight months inside bamboo ribs over a river.
Month nine's lantern went up empty for the second time that year. This time she did it on purpose, and it was not a question.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.