By the end of the first week, Sori had a dictionary.

It was not a proper one. It was a book of folded paper that she had sewn together with a needle borrowed from Mokryeon, the pages ruled into two columns with a charcoal stick and a straight edge. The left column was headed with a small drawing of a hand held flat and turned outward. The right column was headed with a hand held in a loose curl, the way the physician made the sign for *rest.* She had decided, in a moment of vanity, that she would call them *Hers* and *His.*

She had filled eleven pages.

Hers were mostly the signs she had grown up with, drawn in careful, schoolroom lines, each with a note about the grammar written underneath in tiny English that she hoped no one could read. His were stranger. Some she had worked out by watching, some he had acted out for her with such elaborate mime that she had had to put her face in her hands and laugh. She had drawn them as best she could, with arrows to show the movement and little dashes to show the speed.

Some of them she did not have to draw at all. They simply stayed in her fingers, soft and obvious, as if they had always been there.

On the eighth morning she propped the dictionary open on her knees and looked at the page she had been staring at for most of an hour.

"I do not understand this one," she said, aloud, and held up her hands to show him. The sign she made was a small one, the fingers of one hand pinched together and tapped against the other palm, twice, lightly. "This is *cat,* yes? And this is *bird.* And this one. This is your sign for *remember.* But the way you make them. It is like."

She stopped.

The physician had paused in his work. He sat on his heels across the room with a basket of mugwort in his lap, picking out the stems, and she saw that his hands had gone still.

"It is like they were made for someone small," she said slowly. "Not a child's language. A language *for* a child. Look at the way you do *mouse.* Nobody makes that sign for an adult. Nobody would think of it. It is so, so gentle." She did the sign again, the two fingers scurrying up her arm. "Who taught you these?"

He did not answer.

She waited. This time she had a feeling that the waiting was not simply politeness, that something was happening behind his face, as when a man stands at the top of a staircase in the dark and tries to feel for the first step with his foot.

He set the basket down. He lifted his hands.

*Little,* he signed, with the flat of the palm held low, close to the floor. The sign for something small, something close to the ground.

Then *hands.* Both of them, held up in front of him, the fingers spread.

And then he stopped.

His hands hung in the air, open. The next sign was there, she could see it, waiting at the ends of his fingers, as a word waits on the tip of a tongue. His lips parted. His chest moved. And then, as if without his permission, his right hand came up and closed over his own throat, and held, and held.

She did not move. She did not breathe.

After a moment he lowered the hand, very slowly, as one lowers a weight that has been lifted for too long. His eyes were on the floor. There was a tightness around his mouth, and a tremor at the edge of his jaw, and he did not look at her.

Sori laid the dictionary aside.

*Thank you,* she signed, small, hardly more than a motion of the fingertips. *You do not have to say.*

He did not look up, but he nodded, once, and something in his shoulders eased. The morning moved on. Neither of them mentioned it again that day.

But she thought about it all afternoon, grinding ginger in the shed with her sleeves rolled to the elbow, and by evening she had drawn a small box in the corner of the *His* column, with a note beside it in tiny English. *Little hands. Someone small.*

And under it, because she could not help herself, *Someone gone.*

---

The rain began on the ninth day.

It came out of a clear sky with no warning. At noon the mountain had been bright, the blossoms thinning on the boughs and the first green shoots pushing up between them. By midafternoon a long grey bank of cloud had rolled in from the west, and the light in the courtyard turned the color of dishwater, and the wind began to pick up the dust.

Sori was sitting on the veranda with her back against a post, mending a sleeve, when the first drops struck.

They fell heavy and sparse, splashing on the stones. Then the clouds opened, and the sound came down all at once, a roar of water on tile and earth and leaf, and the whole courtyard disappeared behind a silver curtain.

She loved rain. She always had. In another life she had sat on her mother's kitchen windowsill during every storm of her childhood, with her forehead against the cold glass, watching the drops race one another down. Rain was the sign her mother always made with the most pleasure, the fingers fluttering down through the air with a soft little *pat-pat-pat* at the end.

So it took her a moment to understand why her chest had suddenly gone tight.

The wind swung. A sheet of water blew in under the eaves and across the boards, and a cold spray struck her face and neck. It was nothing. It was a few drops. But her body did not know that. Her muscles locked, and her heart slammed once against her ribs, and the needle fell from her fingers. She heard a rushing in her ears that had nothing to do with the roof. She saw the porch posts slide and double and swim.

*Dark. Cold. Weight on my chest. Water in my mouth.*

The images were not hers. She knew that, even as they came. They were a drowned girl's memories, pressed into the flesh like a pattern into wet clay, and she could not push them away.

Then a hand closed on her arm and pulled.

It was fast and firm, and it jerked her up off the boards and back through the doorway, and the door slid shut on the rain with a bang. The roar dropped to a drumming. The light went dim and warm. She was standing in the middle of the clinic floor with her back against something solid, and the something solid was the physician's chest.

He had hauled her in with one arm around her waist, and in the moment of the pull he had pressed her to him, her back against his front and her head tucked under his chin, a quick reflex, the way you would shelter a child from a falling branch. She could feel his heart. It was going almost as fast as hers.

He let go as though she had burned him.

She staggered a half step, caught her balance, and turned. He had retreated to the far side of the work table, and he stood with both hands flat against the wood and his head down, breathing hard. His ears were scarlet. His eyes, when they flicked up and quickly down again, were stricken.

*Sorry,* he signed, in the sign that was not yet *the* sign but the one he had used before, a hurried tap at the chest. *Sorry. Sorry. I should not.*

"It is all right," Sori said. Her voice was not quite steady. "It was the water. My body. It is afraid of it, and I do not know why. You did not do anything wrong."

He did not look convinced. But after a moment he took a slow breath, and straightened, and went to the shelf, and brought down a stone cup and poured something warm and amber from the kettle, and held it out to her at arm's length.

She took it. Her hands shook. He watched them until they were still.

The rain beat on the roof.

---

They sat on opposite sides of the brazier for a long time without speaking.

It was a different kind of quiet, Sori thought. She had learned to read them now, the way she had once learned to read the weather. There was the quiet of strangers, which was stiff and polite. There was the quiet of wariness, which was thin and sharp. And there was this one, which was soft at the edges and deep in the middle and had a sort of fragility she was reluctant to disturb.

The rain fell and fell.

After a while, the physician put out one hand and tapped the floor between them, twice. She looked at him. He lifted his fingers, deliberately slow, and held them out where she could see.

*Rain,* he signed.

It was the sign she already knew. The hands lifted high and falling, the fingers tapping down through the air. She nodded, and signed it back.

He shook his head. He did it again, and this time it was different. The fingers fell more lightly, spread wider, like a scatter of drops. *Rain,* he signed. *Fine rain. Mist.* He did it again, harder, the whole hand dropping fast. *Rain that comes all at once. Summer rain.* A third time, his hand swinging low and heavy, the fingers sweeping sideways. *Storm.*

She watched, fascinated. "You have more than one."

He nodded. There was something faintly shy in the gesture, as if he were showing her a collection he had never shown anyone. His left hand came up to join the right. A fourth sign, slow, with the fingers curling softly down in the dark. *Night rain.* A fifth, quick and crisp, bursting upward and then falling. *Rain on a hot day.* A sixth, with a long drawn-out motion, as though a curtain were being drawn closed. *Rain that will not stop.*

He was no longer sitting on his heels. At some point in the telling he had leaned forward, his forearms resting on his knees, and the firelight caught the planes of his face and made him look younger. He was not performing for her. He was simply, for the first time in her sight, speaking, with the whole of himself, in the only way he allowed himself to.

Then his hands stilled.

He was looking at them. He seemed to be gathering something. When he lifted them again, they moved more slowly.

The seventh sign was one she had not seen. The right hand rose a little way, and the fingers dropped, very softly, one after another, like the first fall of tears, and the left hand came up beneath them and cupped, as if to catch what fell, and then opened, and there was nothing in it.

He held it there. His eyes were on the empty palm.

"What is that one?" she whispered.

He did not look at her. He made the sign again, and then, with one finger, drew a line in the air. Rain. Then a pause. Then his two hands separating, one going away, the other staying where it was. Then rain again.

*The rain,* she read slowly, *that comes when someone is gone.*

She did not know she had been holding her breath until it left her.

She thought of the hospital window on Fourth Street. She thought of nights when she had stood in a corridor with a cup of cold machine coffee, watching water streak the glass, and had not been able to name what she felt. There was no word for it in English. She had never thought there could be a sign.

The physician had made a sign for it. He had made it years ago, perhaps, alone in this room, under this same roof, with this same sound on the tiles.

Her eyes stung. She lifted her hands because she did not trust her voice.

*My mother,* she signed.

He looked up.

She had not planned to say it. It had simply arrived, as the images had in the rain, only gently, as if a door had been left on the latch and a draft had pushed it open. She made the sign slowly, the right hand touching the chin and then the heart, the old sign for *mother,* the one she had learned before she could walk.

*My mother,* she signed again. *She is like you.*

He did not move.

She was not sure how much he understood. The grammar of it was too complex, the idea too large, and her hands were unsteady. She tried to make it plain. *She does not speak. She cannot hear. She talks like this. With her hands. I grew up in her hands.* And then, because it was the truest thing and the hardest, *I am the one who talks for her.*

The fire popped. The rain beat on the roof.

She watched the understanding come to him slowly, like dawn over a field. He had gone entirely still. His eyes had gone very wide, and then very dark, and then they filled, and he did not blink, and he did not look away.

He lifted a shaking hand.

*Where,* he signed. *Where is she?*

Sori looked at the fire.

*Far,* she signed. She made it as large as she could, the right hand sweeping out and away across the whole width of the room, past the walls, past the mountain. *Very far.*

He took that in. He did not ask how far. He did not ask why. He did not ask whether she could go home, or whether she wanted to, or whether, as the old woman had said under the trees, the door that took her back would cost her something. He only nodded, slowly, and brought his closed fist up to rest against his chest, the way a man might lay a hand on a coffin.

He knew. Not the facts, not the shape of her story. But he knew the thing underneath, and for a moment the knowledge sat between them, bare and unbearably gentle.

She had her mother, somewhere, in a place she could not reach. He had a someone-small, somewhere, in a place he did not speak of. Neither of them would say it aloud. They did not need to. They had both stood in the same rain.

---

The storm blew itself out by evening.

Sori was sitting on the mattress behind the screen with the dictionary on her knees. The lamp was lit, the brazier banked for the night, and through the paper walls she could hear the last slow drip of water from the eaves. The physician had gone to the dispensary to put away his tools. She could hear the soft knock of the jars as he set them in their places.

She took up her charcoal.

She drew, in the *His* column, a small and careful picture of a hand with fingers falling like drops. Beside it she wrote the English word that came nearest, though it did not come near enough. *Rain.* Then she drew the seventh, the cupped palm, the fingers falling one by one into emptiness.

Beneath it, she hesitated for a long time.

Then she wrote, in her cramped, quick hand, in the language no one in this kingdom could read.

*Seven rains. Seven ways to miss someone.*

She looked at the line. It was only a note, a fragment, a thing a translator jots down in a margin. But she found that her hand was not quite steady as she closed the cover, and that for the first time since she had woken in this world, she did not feel like a person standing alone on a bridge.

Behind the screen, in the dark, the footsteps passed. They slowed beside her partition. They paused.

A small sound, a whisper of fabric, as if a hand had come up and rested briefly against the paper. Then they moved on.

Sori lay back in the lamplight and listened to the water ticking down from the roof, one drop at a time, until the sound of it was no longer a sound she was afraid of.