The north slope gave way.

  Not gradually — the instant of failure that happened when qi-destabilized soil. Rocks, earth, ancient root systems torn from their moorings, the vocabulary of collapse expressed in mass and momentum.

  Three buildings near the slope took the hit. A storage barn collapsed inward, walls folding with the finality of wood asked to bear more than it could.; The half-built extension crumpled. The kitchen wall of someone's house cracked and leaned, held together only by stubbornness and mortar.

  Screaming filled the air — the sound of crisis, universal, unchanged across every era I had witnessed. This sound never changes.

  Wei ran.

  Not to the buildings — to the people. The priority hierarchy that was correct. People first, structures second.

  "You — get water. You — support the roof. You — get the children away."

  Fourteen. Saying these things with the register of command that emerged because the situation demanded it. Natural, organic, the thing he was rather than the things he'd learned.

  The settlers obeyed. In the chaos, in the dust and the screaming and the debris, he was the one person providing instruction that made sense.

  He directed. Moved through the rubble — lifting debris with qi-enhanced strength, supporting a beam while three settlers pulled a man from underneath, compressing his qi into reinforcement for a wall that was about to fall on someone's children.

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  He showed competence. He inspired. Someone not merely responding to crisis but energized by it, capacity expanding under pressure — his element.

  I helped. Quietly. In the margins — lifting things from angles no one watched, reinforcing walls from outside while they reinforced from inside. Invisible, because invisible was my register and the foreground was him.

  Auntie Huang appeared beside me. Her son was running somewhere, in every direction at once.

  "Yun."

  I looked at her.

  "When he's with Wei — when they play in the garden or whatever — just keep an eye on him? You know how they are at that age. You turn around and they're gone."

  You turn around and they're gone.

  She said it casually. Domestic. Child management, the arrangement of mothers who shared proximity and proximity sharing the settlement.

  I nodded.

  Said nothing.

  You turn around and they're gone.

  The sentence, was sitting heavy in my chest. The kind of heavy that felt like prophecy — the forward-echo of words that would acquire meaning later and whose meaning I could neither know nor prevent yet.

  Wei emerged from the rubble, dusty and tired, his arms scored with small cuts from jagged debris. He'd pulled people from damaged structures, stabilized walls and directed a team of adults twice his age.

  He looked at me. Across the wreckage. Through the dust.

  The grin. Dimmer — exhaustion, the physical cost of being fourteen and saving things. But present.

  I looked back. Held the nod. The promise I'd made — casually, implicitly, to a loud woman about her son.

  I believed in that moment, that I would keep it. But deep in my stomach I knew, that the turning-around would happen. That the would be gone permanently.

  That was later, though. Not now. Not here. Not in this moment.

  Everything that counted now, were the buildings. The rubble. The people. Wei in the dust, grinning, having saved everyone he could reach.

  You turn around.

  And they're gone.