He woke up shouting.

  Not from a nightmare — from discovery. The kind of shout that a prospector makes when he finds gold in his pan, or that a child makes when the present under the wrapping is the thing they'd been afraid to hope for. He sat up, held his arm out, turned it, flexed it, made a fist, opened the fist, rotated the wrist, bent the elbow — performing a systematic inventory of function with the thoroughness of someone checking cargo against a manifest.

  "It WORKS."

  I was on the porch. Had been since before dawn, which was two hours ago. I was drinking tea — Mrs. Zhao's tea, the chrysanthemum-barley blend she left on the stump each morning with the wordless consistency of a woman who had decided something and saw no reason to discuss it. The tea was adequate. The morning was cool. The village was waking up around me with the usual soundtrack: dogs, chickens, someone hammering something that had come loose in the night.

  Wei burst through the door. The splint was off — he'd removed it himself, which the healer would later describe as "irresponsible" and "baffling" and "actually, how is that arm—" before trailing off into a silence that had no medical precedent.

  "You—" He pointed at me with the hand that should have been crippled. "You did this."

  "I've been out here all night."

  "My arm was shattered."

  "You heal fast."

  "It was shattered. The healer said—"

  "The healer said many things. Drink some water. You look pale."

  He did not drink water. He stood on the porch and stared at his arm with the expression of someone reunited with something they'd given up on — not the arm itself, but the future the arm represented. The herbs he could collect, the stones he could climb, the baskets he could carry for his mother.

  The healer arrived within the hour — summoned by Wei's mother, who had woken to find her son armless-of-splint and had responded with the blend of terror and hope that parents reserve for situations that violate the rules they've structured their anxiety around. Healer Wen examined the arm. Pressed. Probed. Asked Wei to rotate, extend, grip, push, pull.

  He looked at me.

  I looked at the tea.

  "This is not medically explainable," he said.

  "He heals fast," I repeated.

  The healer had the professional dignity not to argue with something he couldn't disprove and the human intelligence not to believe something he couldn't explain. He packed his tools, told Wei to be careful, shot me one more look that contained approximately sixteen questions and left without asking any of them.

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  Wei's mother stood in the doorway. Her eyes were wet. She didn't wipe them — letting them dry on their own, the way she let everything happen on its own, because intervention was a resource she'd depleted. She looked at Wei's arm. Looked at me. Opened her mouth. Closed it. Nodded — the smallest motion, a dip of the chin, an acknowledgment that existed below the threshold of language and above the threshold of everything else.

  Then she went inside to make rice.

  The forest was quiet, but a different quiet than the dead silence of the previous weeks. The insects had begun to return — tentatively, experimentally, testing the air the way a swimmer tests water with a toe. A cricket chirped from a bush near the path. A single cricket, alone, as if it had been sent ahead as an ambassador to determine whether the world was safe enough for the rest.

  "Run," I said, when we arrived at the edge of the village.

  Wei ran. Badly — arms pumping, feet slapping the ground with the flat-footed enthusiasm of a boy who had learned to run before he'd learned to walk efficiently and had never updated the habit. He reached the forrest, turned, ran back. Panting. The arm swung at his side, fully functional, as if it had never been introduced to the interior of a qi-mutated cat's paw.

  "Now," I said. "Feel the ground before you touch it."

  He blinked. "With what?"

  "Your feet. The same way you hear the qi in the soil — the same sense. Route it down. Through your ankles, into your soles. Feel the root before you step on it."

  He tried. The first three steps were indistinguishable from his normal running — heavy, loud, fully committed to impact. On the fourth step, his right foot came down on a root that crossed the path at ankle height.

  He tripped. Caught himself. Swore.

  Mrs. Liu had stopped on the path to watch. Her water bucket rested against her hip, forgotten.

  "Again."

  He ran again. Fell again. A different root.

  Two children had appeared at the edge of the village — drawn by the sound of someone running and falling and running again. They watched with the frank curiosity that adults train out of themselves.

  "Again."

  The fourth attempt, something changed. His stride shortened. His weight shifted forward, balanced on the balls of his feet rather than his heels. His breathing synchronized — by the same instinct that had once helped him detect qi currents through a stone. For three steps — three smooth, almost silent steps — he glid over the forest floor as if the roots had rearranged themselves to accommodate him.

  Then he went over a stone and landed face-first in leaf litter.

  "You curse better than you run," I observed.

  He spat out a leaf. "Thank you. I practice that longer."

  He stood up. Brushed himself off. The gesture was so familiar — brushing off dirt, resetting, trying again — that I almost recognized it. Almost saw someone else performing it, in a different forest, in a different century, with the same stubborn refusal to interpret falling as a reason to stop.

  "Again?" he asked.

  "Again."

  He ran. Fell. Ran. Fell. Ran. On the ninth attempt, he cleared a stretch of thirty paces without stumbling, his feet finding the gaps between roots and stones with a precision that was part qi-sensitivity and part the sheer bloody-minded determination that was, as far as I could determine, his primary talent.

  He stopped at the end of the run. Looked down at his feet, as if they had done something remarkable without asking his permission. Then he looked at me.

  I was already walking away.

  "Was that good?" he called after me.

  "It was adequate."

  "That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me!"

  I kept walking. I did not smile.

  Later, I was told my expression changed. I never confirmed.