I stood up slowly, the way someone stood when the thing they were lifting was not their body but the weight of everything their body contained — slowly, because slowly was the only available speed.

  The silence held, the world without sound — persistent, total. Not the world being quiet but my perception refusing the world's noise.

  Under my feet the grass was green, late-summer settlement grass that had been walked on by settlers and animals and children for years. Alive because grass was alive.

  Then it died.

  Not metaphorically — under my left foot the grass turned brown, spreading outward from the sole like a stain. Under my right foot: the same. Brown, dry — plant tissue exposed to qi that was grief expressed as energy expressed as destruction.

  The circle widened. Five paces. Ten. Fifteen. Dying in a radius — outward from where I stood. The qi leaving my body the way heat left a furnace: through every surface, in every direction, without intention.

  Twenty paces. The flowers at the edge of the communal garden: wilting. Stems bowing. Petals falling. The small herbs along the path: curling inward, browning.

  Twenty-five. Thirty.

  Not the entire settlement. Not the world. A radius. Limited by limits I possessed — the only thing between the dying and everything dying.

  The settlers felt it.

  The man by the well — one who had stood at the wall with farming tools — staggered, his hand on the well's edge, his face going pale, then green. He bent double with nausea, the response of a human body exposed to qi-emission at a frequency human systems rejected because rejecting was surviving.

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  Another — a woman by the north wall — had blood in her mouth, not from injury but from the capillary response that qi-saturation produced in untrained bodies. She spat red, looked at it and looked at me.

  The expression on her face.

  A person seeing something they could not categorize — a woman standing in a circle of dead grass whose standing was the cause.

  Another man was on his knees with his balance disrupted at high frequencies — he couldn't tell up from down, his hands searching the ground.

  The air hung heavy, metallic — blood and ozone and something older, something predating this century.

  I was not doing this. I was. Both. The distinction between intention and expression — between murder and weather. The weather was this.

  I stood.

  The dead grass was spreading, the nausea spreading, the blood-taste spreading — each one a symptom of the same cause and the cause was me. Standing in the middle of a dying circle in a grey morning beside a dead boy with torn hands.

  The settlers who were close enough moved away. Staggering, crawling. The way animals moved from fire — because fire's nature included burning, regardless of intent.

  No one approached the body. No one approached me. The circle was isolating. The dead grass became a border. The border was mine.

  I existed in the circle. Only me. No boy of fourteen with a bright core that was empty now.

  The silence. The dead grass. The spreading radius.

  Shen — the boy, Wei had saved — was outside the circle, fifteen paces beyond the edge, sitting on the ground, crying soundlessly in my perception. His mouth was open, his hands over his ears and whether the sound was too much for him or the silence was too much for him was a distinction I could not make.

  I stood in the dead grass, holding nothing, touching nothing, looking at the body I did not dare to touch because touching was the thing I denied and the denial still held because denial was the only structure remaining.

  I will not collapse into this.

  I will not become the version that collapses.

  I will stand.

  In dead grass.

  In silence.