I came in the night.

  The village slept the way villages sleep during hard times — lightly, uneasily, with one ear turned toward the forest and the other toward the crying of children who'd absorbed their parents' anxiety through the porous membrane of walls too thin to keep anything out. A dog whimpered somewhere. A shutter creaked.

  Wei's house was dark. His mother had fallen asleep in the chair by the pallet — her head tipped forward, chin on her chest, hands still folded in her lap as if she'd been praying and lost the argument with exhaustion mid-sentence. Wei lay on the pallet, his splinted arm elevated on a folded blanket, his face turned toward the ceiling. His eyes were open.

  The door didn't creak when I entered. Or it did and neither of us acknowledged it.

  "You," he said.

  "Quiet."

  He closed his mouth. His eyes tracked me across the room — wide, alert, sharpened by pain into a focus that his training hadn't yet achieved on its own. Sweat glistened on his forehead. The splint smelled of camphor and desperation. His skin was hot — the low-grade fever of a body fighting inflammation with the only tools it had.

  I knelt beside the pallet.

  His arm lay between us on the blanket — swollen, purple-black at the joint, the splint holding the bones in approximately the right alignment. Approximately was the best a village healer could do. Approximately wasn't enough.

  I placed my hand over the break.

  The contact was light — my palm against the wrapping, fingers curving around the forearm without pressure. My skin was cool. It was always cool.

  "What are you—"

  "Quiet."

  He went quiet.

  I closed my eyes. Closing them narrowed the world to touch and frequency and what I was about to do required precision at a scale that made surgery look like guesswork.

  I released qi.

  A thread. Less than a thread — a filament, thinner than a spider's silk, carrying just enough energy to persuade bone fragments that they had never separated. I guided it through the wrapping, through the swelling, into the fracture zone where three pieces of ulna sat in positions that nature had not intended and the village healer had done his best to approximate.

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  The fragments moved.

  Wei's jaw clenched. His back arched — involuntarily, the body's protest against being rearranged from the inside. The sensation would not be pleasant: a deep, grinding pull, accompanied by a warmth that started at the bone and radiated outward through the soft tissue. Not pain exactly — or not only pain. The feeling of something returning to a position it remembered, the way a dislocated joint remembers its socket.

  The first fragment aligned. I held it. Fused the fracture line with a pulse of qi so precise that the bone's crystalline structure reformed along its original grain.

  The second fragment. Smaller, more displaced, lodged in soft tissue that had already begun to swell around it like a river rerouting around a stone. I moved it. The tissue protested. I persuaded it. The fragment slid home.

  The third. The joint itself — the damaged articulation surface, cartilage torn, ligaments stretched past their elastic limit. This took longer. Cartilage was slower to rebuild than bone; it required coaxing rather than commanding and coaxing with qi was like trying to whisper through a storm. I reduced my output to almost nothing. A breath of energy. A suggestion.

  The joint reformed.

  Three minutes. Four. Under my hand, the swelling receded — not vanishing, but redistributing, the excess fluid being absorbed back into the tissue faster than any healer would call sane.

  The air flimmered.

  For one heartbeat — too brief to count and too strange to dismiss — the world hesitated. The edge of the window light looked wrong. The walls felt thin, like paper held up to a lamp. Wei's face, my hand, the splint — everything went flat, then deep again, as if something behind reality had blinked.

  Then it was gone. The world resumed.

  "What was that?" Wei whispered.

  His voice was careful — held low, held close, carrying something he wasn't sure he wanted to put down. He'd seen it. Felt it.

  "Nothing. You're tired."

  He shook his head. Not a denial — a rejection. He didn't believe me. But the moment was already fading, dissolving into the unreliable architecture of memory, where it would settle alongside dreams and déjà vu and the thousand other small impossibilities that the human mind filed under probably didn't happen.

  "Flex your hand," I said.

  He flexed his hand. The fingers curled and uncurled. The wrist rotated. The elbow — the joint that the healer had declared permanently compromised — bent and straightened with the fluid, painless ease of something that had never been broken.

  He stared at his hand.

  I stood up.

  The memory surfaced — uninvited, as they always did.

  A girl. Five, perhaps six. Hands blistered from a forge fire, held out to me, palms up. Silent. I healed her. The burns retreated under my fingers — red to pink to smooth. She cried when it stopped hurting.

  Three years later, I found the forge cold. The village gone. The girl was ash.

  That was when I stopped healing. It was the most rational decision I ever made. It was the only decision I could not defend.

  And now I had healed the arm of a boy who would die and the arm was flexing in the moonlight and he was staring at me with an expression I could not look at. I know. You're wondering why I did it. I'm still wondering.

  "Go to sleep," I said.

  "But—"

  "Sleep."

  He lay back. His arm — whole, sound, functional — rested at his side. His eyes closed. He trusted me enough to close them.

  I left. The door did not creak.

  Outside, the stars were cold and the night was empty and I stood in the dark for a very long time, doing nothing, feeling nothing, convincing no one.