The memory lingered. Present, hovering. A bruise that you can avoid pressing but can't avoid knowing is there.

  I carried it through the next day. Through the rain that continued with mechanical persistence. Through the mud and the climbing path and the misery of mountain travel in weather that had decided to be a character rather than a backdrop.

  Wei noticed. He always noticed — the boy had developed an awareness of my emotional temperature that was simultaneously impressive and irritating. Not a qi-based skill. This was human. The basic, ancient capacity of one person to read another through accumulated shared time and the pattern recognition that comes from months of watching someone's posture and breathing.

  He noticed and he said nothing.

  "Your pace is different today."

  I didn't respond.

  "Slower. And you keep looking south."

  "I'm not looking south."

  "You're looking at something that's south of where we are. Same thing."

  The impressive part — not the perception but the restraint. He'd learned that my silences had different textures and that some textures meant "leave me alone" and some meant "I'm processing" — and the appropriate response to both. Which usually was the same for him: be present, be quiet, don't fix anything.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  He walked ahead. Not to escape me. To give me space in the way that people who have been close too long understand — distance as courtesy, not rejection.

  I hated it.

  Not him. Not the learning. The vulnerability. Being known — incrementally, imperfectly, through the persistent pressure of proximity — by someone who would eventually take everything they'd learned about me and carry it into a grave.

  He would die. In sixty years, or seventy, or even longer if his cultivation extended his lifespan. But inevidably everything he knew about me — the textures of my silence, the tells of my discomfort, the angle at which I tilted my head when I was remembering something I didn't want to remember — would go with him.

  Like yours will. Eventually.

  That was the contract. The unspoken, non-negotiable contract that I entered into every time I allowed someone close: they would know me and then they would stop knowing me and then nobody would know me and then I would start again.

  "Do you want to talk about it?"

  "No."

  "Okay." A pause. "But you should know that your right hand has been clenched for two hours."

  I looked down. He was right. I opened it. The nail marks were white crescents against the palm.

  "Noted."

  "Just saying."

  He walked ahead. Not smugly — practically. The economy of a person who has delivered their message and expects no response and is fine with that.

  He was becoming something. Not just stronger — something. A person whose shape was emerging from circumstance and training and the pressure that my proximity applied to everyone who endured it long enough.

  The scholar had become something too. Something brilliant and ultimately broken by the same proximity.

  Not the same. Different circumstances. Different person. Different outcome.

  Probably. Hopefully.

  The rain fell. We walked. The memory sat in my chest and didn't move.