The question came on the third night.

  We'd covered distance — more than a village boy should have managed in three days of mountain travel, but Wei's enhanced conditioning was making itself felt. His legs didn't tire when they should have. His wind didn't fail when the path climbed steeply. The qi in his channels was feeding his muscles with a steady supply of energy that bypassed the normal metabolic limitations of a thirteen-year-old body and the result was a stamina that looked, from the outside at least, like he was going purely on determination.

  It was more than determination. But I wasn't ready to think about why.

  The camp was in a hollow between two ridges — sheltered from the wind, invisible from the path, a tactical position I chose automatically and Wei accepted without question. He'd started to notice my choices. Not commented — noticed. His eyes tracked the terrain when we stopped, evaluating sight lines and approaches with the unconscious competence of someone absorbing tactical thinking by exposure. My caution was becoming his caution. My paranoia was becoming his baseline.

  I wasn't sure how to feel about that. So I didn't.

  A fire with rice for him and nothing for me. The routine that was already forming. Three days old and already ritualized, the small architecture of habit that humans build against the cold.

  Wei watched the fire.

  "Do you think, someone will follow us?"

  I'd been expecting it. Not the timing — the timing was earlier than I'd predicted, which either meant he was braver than I'd assessed or more frightened — but the question itself. The question that every person who has ever fled with someone more powerful asks, eventually, because it addresses the thing that matters more than direction or destination: whether the leaving will be enough.

  "Yes."

  He processed that. His face worked — the muscles around his eyes tightening, his jaw setting, the physical manifestation of a mind encountering an answer it had expected and still didn't want.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  "Who?"

  "Everyone."

  The word dropped into the silence between us like a stone into water. No splash — just the ripples, moving outward, reaching the edges.

  "Everyone?"

  "Everyone who felt what I did. Everyone who heard about it from someone who did. Everyone who has people who look for things like me and report back to people who collect things like me." I paused. "Everyone."

  Wei was quiet. The fire popped. A spark rose and died in the cold air.

  "But you —" He stopped. Started again. "You stopped the sky."

  He meant: why run.

  "That's why they're coming."

  The logic landed. I watched it arrive — the moment a thirteen-year-old understood that the thing that had saved him was the thing that had ended everything else.

  "And then?"

  "Then we go further."

  He considered that. His hands were in his lap — the tremor had subsided to a low-level vibration that was only visible if you knew what to look for. I was looking.

  "How long?"

  "I don't know."

  That was honest. Two honest answers in a row — an unusual frequency for me. I noticed it the way I notice a shift in wind: not the thing itself but what it implies about whatever is producing it.

  "Okay."

  He lay down, but didn't sleep immediately — I could tell from his breathing, the pattern irregular, the holds too short, the exhales too fast. He was thinking. Processing. Running the calculations that a thirteen-year-old runs when he's been told that the entire world is looking for the woman next to him and the best plan available is "go further."

  Eventually the breathing steadied. The pattern locked in. One, two, three. One, two, three. Sleep.

  I sat in the dark and listened to the mountain and the wind and the distant sounds of a world that was, right now, reorganizing itself around the knowledge that something unprecedented existed and was moving north through the passes with a boy who shook when he stood still and couldn't cook rice.

  They would come. I'd said "everyone" and I'd meant it. Not simultaneously — the information would propagate through channels and networks and the infrastructure of gossip that cultivators maintained with the same diligence that farmers maintained irrigation. First the scouts. Then the representatives. Then, eventually, the people who had decided that asking politely wasn't going to work.

  Not you, though. You'd gone south.

  The timeline was — uncertain. Weeks, probably. Months if luck held and the northern route was as unmonitored as I believed. Time enough to move. Time enough to establish distance. Time enough to turn the linear pursuit into a geometric problem by changing direction often enough that prediction became impossible.

  Time enough for Wei to learn what his body could do. And what it couldn't.

  I fed the fire. For him — though I would have said for warmth if anyone had asked. Yet no one was asking and the distinction between the two was a line I'd stopped being able to draw.

  The stars turned. The mountain held still. The boy slept.

  I watched.