The rooster was the hardest part.

  Mrs. Zhao's rooster had survived the fall from the roof with the offended dignity of an animal that considered gravity a personal insult and it expressed this offense by refusing to be caught. It dodged. It feinted. It achieved a sustained velocity that contradicted everything I understood about the aerodynamics of overweight poultry.

  Wei chased it through the village square, around Elder Li's cracked house, behind the water barrels and into the gap between Mrs. Liu's house and the grain shed, where it turned and regarded him with the serene contempt of a creature that knew, with bone-deep certainty, that it was winning.

  "Come here," Wei said.

  The rooster did not.

  Wei lunged. The rooster launched itself vertically — an achievement of pure spite — cleared his outstretched hands by centimeters and landed behind him. It strutted away. The strut was deliberate.

  "Use your feet," I said from the wall where I was watching. "Circle left. It will go right."

  "How do you know—"

  "Roosters always go right."

  He circled left. The rooster went right. He was ready. The rooster was not. Wei scooped it up with both hands, pinning its wings against its body and held it at arm's length as it kicked and screamed and attempted to communicate, through the medium of flapping, its legal objections to the proceedings.

  He handed it to Mrs. Zhao, who tucked it under her arm without ceremony and carried it back to the coop. The rooster went silent, which was either acceptance or the beginning of a longer campaign.

  Wei shook feathers from his sleeve and picked up a hammer instead.

  The fence took an hour. Wei worked with Chen. They didn't talk about the explosion. They talked about the wood — which pieces were salvageable, which needed replacing, how the joints should be angled to resist the next impact. Practical things. The vocabulary of survival, which has no words for fear because fear doesn't fix fences.

  I replaced the roof tiles. Two clay tiles, standard provincial design, fired in the kiln that the village maintained communally and jealously. The whole operation — finding the replacements, climbing the ladder, seating the tiles in their brackets, climbing back down — took eleven minutes and required no thought and no qi.

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  By late afternoon, the village was repaired. Not restored — repaired. The distinction mattered. Restoration implies return; repair implies continuation. The fence was standing but weaker. The roof was complete but the tiles were mismatched. The well was still yellow. The fields were still cracked. The air still tasted like ozone and stress.

  But the village was standing. The people were standing. The children had stopped crying. The rooster was in its coop, planning its next escape.

  Near the well, Wei's brother was filling jars with careful hands — rationing, measuring, the arithmetic of drought written into every pour. His sister sat on the roof she'd patched in autumn, watching the treeline for nothing in particular.

  As we worked, I heard the first version of the story being assembled.

  "She was already there," someone said — a woman I didn't recognize by voice alone, near the well. "Before the sound finished."

  "The herb woman," another voice answered, lower. Not accusing. Not admiring, either. Just placing the words carefully, as if they might have teeth.

  Elder Li said nothing. But when I climbed down from his roof, his eyes followed me the way they did when he was measuring grain.

  Wei found me at dusk.

  I was at the barrier wall — the one that had shifted, the compromised one. I'd spent the afternoon resetting the fallen stones, adjusting the angle, packing clay into the gaps where the shockwave had loosened the foundation. My hands were dirty again. The blisters from last time had barely healed before new ones formed over them, layers of manual labor that my body wasn't accustomed to and my pride wouldn't let me heal.

  "You moved faster than me today," he said.

  I fit a stone into the wall. Tapped it with my palm until it seated.

  "When you stopped me — you were behind me. Then you were in front of me. I didn't see you move."

  "You were running," I said.

  "I was running and you were not."

  He didn't sound curious. He sounded tight.

  "Tell me the trick."

  "There is no trick."

  "Yun." His voice cracked on my name and he hated that it did. He tried again, rougher. "I need to know what I'm learning."

  I picked up another stone. The wall was nearly complete. One more row and the reflection angle would be restored — better, actually, because I'd reinforced the weak points that hadn't survived the first test.

  "You're stronger than you look," he said.

  I didn't answer.

  "You don't eat. You don't sleep. You don't get tired. And today you—" He stopped, swallowed, forced the words out without flinching away from them. "Today you were impossible."

  Silence held between us.

  He waited.

  It was a new kind of waiting. Neither patient nor obedient. He sat there like someone refusing to be moved.

  "It matters," he said finally, quiet. "To me."

  I took the stone he handed me. The right stone — granite, dense, the correct weight for the position in the wall. He'd been watching me work. He'd been learning the pattern.

  We rebuilt the wall in silence. Stone by stone. Hand to hand. The sun went down.

  The wall held.

  The stars came out. From the east, Xu Ran's signature pulsed — rhythmic, patient, tightening.

  Soon.