I came by an abandoned hut.

  In the forest, off the path, the kind of structure built by someone who wanted distance. One room, four walls, a roof that leaked.

  The door looked broken. One hinge remaining, the other a hole in the frame where the metal had been and was no longer. The door hung at an angle — open, but not invitingly. Open by failure rather than design.

  I went in.

  Not because the hut offered something, but inside was a direction and direction was a change.

  I saw dust. Layers that had accumulated where air moved but brooms did not. On the floor, on the single surface that served as table, on the window frame where a shutter had been. Dust on everything.

  There was a fireplace. Stone. Cold. The cold of months, of mineral surfaces that had forgotten heat. Ash, old.

  I sat. On the floor. Against the wall. The position that the body chose when the body required just a surface that was available.

  The hut contained space. Four walls of it. A ceiling's worth.

  Wei would have fixed the door. Or tried to.

  The thought arrived without being summoned. Not a memory but a projection. Wei would have looked at the broken hinge. Would have assessed the damage. Would have found a piece of wire or a strip of bark and tried fixing it. Not because fixing was important but because broken things bothered him.

  The door hung. Broken. Unfixed. The absence of fixing was the absence of him.

  Wei would have made fire. I didn't.

  The fireplace stayed cold. As did the hut. The kind of cold that fire would have corrected. He would have gathered kindling, complained about it being wet, probably, the complaint that fourteen-year-olds produced when the world was insufficiently cooperative. Would have arranged it. Would have lit it. Would have sat opposite it, waiting for the warmth, waiting for the smoke, waiting for the routine that made nights bearable.

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  The fireplace stayed cold. Because no one made fire.

  For the duration of a breath or two, the disconnection wavered. The cable between stimulus and response trembled. Not reconnected. Trembled.

  The smell of damp wood. The hut's walls were rotting, slowly. The smell arrived. Familiar. The universal signature of shelters that were kept alive by use and that died when nobody used them anymore.

  It had smelled like this before. But not in another hut. In the mountains under a roof, that was a rocky overhang. It seemed from another lifetime — no, in this lifetime, in the part of this lifetime that contained him. The fire when Wei had first talked about fear.

  "Are you afraid of me?"

  He had denied. "I'm not."

  He should have been.

  I wanted it to cut. The sensation of his voice in the rotting hut. My fingers pressed into my knees. My breath shifted, shallow, tight, the body bracing for something the mind had already missed. I wanted the pain. The pain would have meant the nerve was pinched, not severed. That the capacity for feeling was dormant rather than destroyed.

  It didn't cut.

  It arrived. It sat in the space between stimulus and response. And then it receded, into the archive of things received but not processed.

  Another smell. Older. Before Wei. Before this century.

  A creature. The last of its kind. The knowledge that came from being old enough to recognize endings. A plains-runner. Six legs, hollow bones, the adaptation of a continent that no longer existed in its original form. Beautiful. And the last.

  I killed it. From boredom. The boredom of a being who had existed long enough that existing had become the texture and new textures were rare.

  The smell of bone marrow. Hollow bones broke differently, the marrow thinner, the scent lighter. The satisfaction that lasted three seconds until I returned to boredom.

  Then and now. Different century, different target, same pattern. The spirit-beast this morning — yesterday — whenever. It was the same act. Kill a thing. Wipe blood from fingers. Walk. The continuity that spanned millennia. I had been here before. In this state. In this hut. In this version of myself that killed things because killing was louder than silence and silence was the thing I could not bear.

  I should have recognized the pattern sooner. But then, I never did.

  Wei would have hated this hated me in this state.

  The thought arrived. And receded.

  Night.

  Inside the hut.

  Against the wall.

  Eyes open under a ceiling of rotting wood, gaps in the planking where starlight entered in thin lines that crossed the floor like scars.

  Not sleeping. Not refusing sleep. The eyes open because closing them required something I didn't have.

  I waited for more. More memory. More cutting. More of the thing that had briefly trembled the cable and that had almost connected and that had receded.

  Nothing came.

  Silence. The hut. The cold fireplace. The broken door.

  The ceiling with its scars of light.