It is a story of Lisse, a girl from a ruined world who steals a war spaceship to seek revenge. She is from the people who carry (and communicate with) actual "ghosts" of their ancestors (the tradition called "ghostweight").[4]
The philosophy and the plot of the story are closely associated with origami. Origami serves as a metaphor for history: "It is not true that the dead cannot be folded. Square becomes kite becomes swan; history becomes rumor becomes song. Even the act of remembrance creases the truth."[5] A major element of the plot is the weaponry called jerengjen of space mercenaries, which unfold from flat shapes: "In the streets, jerengjen unfolded prettily, expanding into artillery with dragon-shaped shadows and sleek four-legged assault robots with wolf-shaped shadows. In the skies, jerengjen unfolded into bombers with kestrel-shaped shadows." The story says that the word means the art of paper folding in the mercenaries' main language. In an interview, when asked about the subject, the author says that he became fascinated with dimensions after reading the novel Flatland.[6]
The story was reprinted in Yoon Ha Lee's collection Conservation of Shadows, The Humanity of Monsters (ISBN1771483601, 2015), and in the 2017 collection Galactic Empires (ISBN159780617X, a selection by Neil Clarke of Clarkesworld).
Paul Kincaid notices that while the story is fast-paced and the reader is not left confused, the story lacks a clear resolution.[9]
^Molly Brown, "King Arthur and the Knights of the Postmodern Fable"; in: The Middle Ages in Popular Culture: Medievalism and Genre - Student Edition, 2015, p. 163
