Rain.

  The kind the foothills produced in this season — not the vertical downpour of summer storms or the horizontal driving of winter, but the continuous, low-pressure drizzle that existed as a state rather than an event. The air was rain. The sky was rain. The terrain was the place where rain accumulated in puddles and channels and the sodden quality that made every step heavier than the last.

  You were wet.

  Your pack had darkened with moisture. Your hair plastered. Your outer robe clung heavy with saturated fabric. You moved with the resigned efficiency of someone who had accepted wetness as a condition of existence. Your acceptance did not prevent the low, continuous muttering.

  You cursed the rain. You cursed the path. You cursed the quality of mountain clay that turned everything into a surface designed to reject footwear. You cursed with the methodical persistence that characterized everything you did — not explosively but systematically, the way a scholar might annotate a text he disapproved of.

  Your inventory of grievances was impressive. Allegedly the clay was a personal vendetta. The rain was biased. Your left boot had betrayed you.

  I almost said something. I didn't. But almost.

  I was dry.

  Dry the way a stone at the bottom of a river was smooth — shaped by conditions, not by choice. My qi — vast and autonomous — operated without my direction and deflected rain. The droplets reached the three-pace radius and curved.

  You had been watching the rain's behavior near me for two days — the observation that characterized your attention, the detection of phenomena that most observers would dismiss. This one was harder to dismiss.

  "It bends around you," you said, between curses.

  "Hm?"

  "The rain. It bends. Like — " You searched for the comparison. "Like water flowing around a stone in a river. You're not wet."

  "I am not."

  "I'm soaked."

  "I can see that."

  "So you just get a private pocket of dry air," you said. You lifted a hand into the space near me and watched the droplets curve away as if they had manners. "Convenient."

  "It's three paces."

  "Three paces," you repeated, as if the number could be negotiated by repetition. "Do you realize how unfair that is?"

  "Don't step closer," I said.

  You paused. Not because you agreed, but because you heard the edge in it.

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  "Stop testing it. You'll drown in rain."

  You took half a step closer, experimentally.

  The rain still avoided me.

  It did not avoid you.

  You stared at the invisible boundary where my qi treated water like an obstacle. "It stops exactly there," you said. Then, with the stubbornness that governed your entire personality, you added: "I'm going to write that down."

  "Write it down," I said. "And keep moving."

  I kept moving in the direction that was in front of me. The direction the body selected without the input of the mind, the default trajectory that produced motion. All the while you chose the path. You adjusted the trajectory. "Left," you would say. "There's a bridge that way." And I would go left, or toward the bridge, because left and right were equivalent in the absence of preference and your direction was as valid as any other direction.

  You supplied choices. I supplied motion. It was easier than pretending I still had my own.

  We moved through the rain for days. Through terrain that was terrain and foothills that were foothills and the geography that separated the mountain forest from the lowland plains. We encountered the geography by passing through it, noting its features without caring about its design.

  This wasn't an adventure. This wasn't the wandering of curiosity. It was a body that moved towards something, away from something else and a companion who followed because that was your project.

  Two people moving through rain. One dry. One cursing.

  At each nightfall, you made camp. Each time you followed the standard procedure. Attempt a fire, which was thwarted by the rain, but kindled eventually through sheer stubbornness that you brought to all tasks. You cooked with difficulty, because the ginger became less fragrant in the humidity. You opened your notebook, protected from the rain inside your robe, and started to write in it with your miniature letters that were ink-marks-against-forgetting.

  I sat. Six paces. The distance that had become the arrangement during cooking — the fire-proximity, the food-proximity, the being-near-without-being-in. The rain bent around me but not around you. I had stopped finding cosmic editorial comments meaningful several millennia ago.

  You ate. I did not. You wrote. I did not.

  "Does it do that to smoke too?" you asked. You held your hands over the fire, palms up, as if the question could be tested by warmth alone.

  "Probably," I said. "It bends what it can."

  "Day twenty-eight," you said, closing the notebook. "And you've spoken thirty-three words today already. That's a new record."

  You were counting. Of course you were counting. The words were data points and the data points were the trend, which was ascending — from zero in week one to thirty-three words on day twenty-eight. The trend was your evidence. Your reason. Your being here.

  I did not tell you that thirty-three was, by certain historical standards, a deluge.

  The rain continued. The fire hissed. You curled onto your side, protecting the notebook with your body and slept.

  I sat. Dry. In rain that was everywhere except near me.

  The world was grey. Had been grey since the departure, would be grey for the foreseeable continuation, would be grey until grey changed to something else. But something else was not visible from this position. Yet, this position was the only position available.

  Grey was the color of functioning without living. I knew this the way I knew the rain bent around me — not from learning but from the accumulated evidence of thousands of years of grey periods, of centuries where the body walked and the mind observed and the heart beat and the combination produced existence. Not life. Existence.

  I had done this before. I would do it again. The repetition was the cruelest part — not the grey itself, but knowing that the grey had an expiration date and that it would return regardless. Immortality had many structural disadvantages. The foreknowledge of recurrence was the one no one mentioned.

  Two people in the rain. One counting words. One producing few of them.

  Morning would come. We would move. You would curse. I would be dry. The arrangement would hold until the arrangement changed. The change was — not yet.

  Not yet.