Morning came. A grey morning with no sun.

  The sky was flat and low, the colour of metal that had been left in rain — far from the golden mornings I'd watched from the step with tea and the feeling that things might be okay. This morning was their opposite which was kind of its own honesty.

  I was high at the west wall. The position I'd chosen because the position offered overview and that was what I needed. Barriers humming under my palms, the signs I'd carved last night, my qi in the stone, functional, alive.

  The first qi-blast hit the horizon. East. A line of white-blue light cutting through the grey.

  Then two more. Then four more. Seven total. Coordinated — the timing was the signature, each blast offset by precisely two seconds. A rehearsed pattern. Professional.

  Guo of the Iron Lotus Sect. Of course it was him.

  I'd met him once. Centuries ago. A border dispute that neither of us had started and both of us had ended, standing on opposite sides of a river that was the excuse, not the reason. He had looked at me across the water and known what I was. Not specifically — nobody knew specifically — but enough. The way a dog knows a wolf by the shape of the silence around it. He had inclined his head. Not deference. Recognition. The gesture of a man who catalogued threats by precision rather than fear.

  I had not returned the gesture. I rarely did, with sect people. With most of them, the omission was contempt. With Guo, it was something closer to caution — the kind you reserved for competence you couldn't dismiss. He was the sort of man who would sacrifice two of his own people to gain three seconds of tactical advantage and then sleep soundly, not because he was cruel but because the arithmetic was clean. I didn't like him. He didn't like me. The mutual dislike had the quality of professional respect between people who would rather the other didn't exist but acknowledged that they did, and did well.

  The well-gong rang. Someone — I couldn't see who — swinging the hammer. The metallic toll spread across the settlement, bouncing off walls, off roofs, off the barriers that accepted the sound and carried it further. Alarm.

  Movement below. Fast. Fragmented. The settlement waking into its emergency, the pattern I'd never explicitly trained but that humans adopted naturally under threat. Wwomen and children usherd toward the marked escape routes, men running toward the walls, tools in hands. My protection signs at the doors: glowing faintly as people passed through them, the activation of each one confirming that the wards worked and the wards working was the only thing working.

  Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

  Auntie Huang stood at her door. Shen stood beside her — the boy who didn't hear well and who followed Wei like gravity was a person.

  Auntie Hunag pushed him toward the southern escape route. Her mouth moving. Shouting, probably, the way she always shouted, the volume that was her nature. He resisted. She pushed harder. Her hands on his shoulders, turning him, aiming him toward the trees.

  He went. She watched him go and turned back.

  The qi-blasts came closer. At the east perimeter, my barriers absorbed and deflected. They would hold. Against this level, they would hold indefinitely. But the blasts were not the point. The point was behind them — the bodies moving in formation, the signatures I'd been tracking for days.

  Eight. Plus Guo. Plus the deployment pattern.

  Wei came through the door already standing — not from sleep, from readiness. The sword was in his right hand, Lao Chen's blade. His feet were bare and his shirt showed the light at his sternum bleeding through the fabric in the grey morning air, a second heartbeat visible to anyone with eyes.

  He ran.

  Across the central path, between the houses, toward the east gate. Running the way he always did — fast, direct, the straight line that adolescence believed was the shortest distance between two points and that adolescence was right about.

  He didn't look back.

  Not at the house. Not at me. Like he did so often before, when he ran to Lao Chen's, the morning receding behind him. Except then it was safety. Now it was the opposite.

  I tracked from the west wall. The formation being visible in its precision. The primary assault vector was headed to the east gate. South-west saw the secondary incoming. I could feel signatures there, two, flanking. And in the north there was one, maybe two, holding position.

  Containment. Guo wanted something exact.

  A qi-blast hit the east wall again. Stone cracked. My barrier absorbed the follow-through. Dispersed it, scattered it, the structural integrity holding. The crack was cosmetic; the barrier remained functional.

  Another blast. Another. Every two-seconds - like clockwork intervals, a rehearsed pattern, a professional unit executing its operation.

  I stayed high at the west wall. Keeping an overview.

  Below me, the settlement responded. Settlers armed the walls, themselves armed with farming tools — shovels, hoes, the instruments of agriculture repurposed as the instruments of survival. They were no soldiers. They were civilians with steel.

  Wei arrived at the east gate. He stood in the opening. His sword up. His qi flaring.

  And west — behind me, beyond me, 200 paces into the treeline and up the slope — something else.

  A signature.

  Neither Guo's people nor sect. Something larger. Deeper. The kind of presence that displaced the air around it like an announcement.

  I am here and here is wherever I choose to be.

  I marked it. Filed it away for future investigation, but turned my attention back to the east gate for now.

  Wei was about to fight.