The fire was smaller than usual.

  Not by design — by necessity. The drought had extended its jurisdiction from water to wood, drying the forest floor until every branch snapped clean and the kindling crumbled to dust between your fingers. Finding wood that would burn slowly enough to last a conversation required going farther than it had a month ago and neither of us had the energy for farther tonight.

  Wei had come back with driftwood from the riverbank — pale, half-sanded, the kind that burned too fast and smoked anyway. We fed it to the coals in small pieces and pretended it was a plan.

  So: a small fire. Enough light to see each other's faces. Enough heat to acknowledge that warmth was desirable without fully providing it. The fire of two people rationing their resources and pretending they weren't.

  Wei had dirt on his face. Specific dirt — the grey-brown clay from the irrigation channels he'd been digging since noon, mixed with the darker earth of the root vegetable beds and the chalky dust of the collapsed wall section he'd helped clear. It was a comprehensive dirt. A topographical map of his day, written on his skin in layers.

  He sat across from me. Cross-legged. Hands on his knees. The posture of someone preparing to say something they'd been carrying for a while — I recognized it the way you recognize weather patterns: the stillness before the wind.

  The fire popped. A cricket started, thought better of it and stopped.

  "What are you?"

  He asked it to the fire. Not to me — to the fire. His eyes were on the coals, his voice quiet and the question dropped into the space between us. With weight. With intention. With the understanding that what came back would change the shape of everything.

  I waited. I'd known this question was coming the way I knew the drought was coming. The trajectory was obvious. Speed, healing, stillness, knowledge — the evidence had been accumulating and Wei was observant enough to collect it and intelligent enough to assemble it and stubborn enough to stop pretending the assembly didn't form a picture.

  The fire crackled. Night sounds — reduced, rationed, the ecosystem operating on reserve power.

  I could have lied. I didn't.

  "Old," I said.

  He didn't look up. Didn't react. The word settled into the silence like another coal.

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  "That's not an answer."

  "It is."

  Pause. A log shifted in the fire, sending up a constellation of sparks that rose and vanished.

  "How old?"

  "Very."

  "Older than the forest?"

  "Yes."

  He processed that. I could see the processing — the slight narrowing of his eyes, the compression of his mouth, the visible mechanics of a mind integrating information that exceeded its existing categories. He was building a new category. Right now, in real time, beside a small fire with dirt on his face. The category was labeled with my name and contained the sum of everything he'd observed and the gap between what he'd observed and what he could explain.

  "Older than the mountain?"

  I paused. Not for drama — for honesty. The mountain had been here for geological ages. I had not. But the reflexive comparison — measuring myself against the permanent, against the geological, against the things that endured not through choice but through mass — was a habit I'd developed somewhere in my second millennium and never corrected.

  "Yes."

  He swallowed. A dry swallow — no water to spare, the canteen empty, the stream too far for a midnight trip. The swallow of a twelve-year-old boy who had just been told, by a woman he trusted more than he should, that she was older than the rock beneath him.

  Then — and this was the thing about Wei, the essential, irreducible, maddening thing about Wei — he said:

  "No wonder you're in such a bad mood all the time."

  Something in my chest jerked — a short, involuntary exhale. Not a laugh. My mouth twitched. The left corner. Gone before it arrived. Not a smile.

  But Wei saw it. His eyes had moved from the fire to my face at exactly the wrong moment and his own face changed in response: a warmth, the look of someone given something small and knowing better than to comment on it.

  "Go to sleep," I said.

  "Did you just—"

  "Sleep."

  "You did. You almost—"

  "Wei."

  "Fine." He stretched out beside the fire, pulling his thin blanket over his shoulders. The blanket was inadequate for the temperature, which had dropped faster than the drought would suggest — the qi-drainage was pulling heat from the air along with everything else. He'd be cold by midnight.

  I would not give him my outer robe. I'd already given it to him once — shrugged it off like reflex, dropped it over his shoulders before I could think better of it. Once was a precedent I couldn't afford. Tonight, the fire would have to be enough.

  "Yun?"

  "What."

  "Thanks for telling me."

  He said it simply. Without ceremony, without gravity, without the kind of weight that adults attach to revelations. He was twelve. He had asked a question and received an answer and the answer was larger than his understanding and he was grateful for it anyway. That was all.

  "I told you nothing."

  "You told me you're old. That's something."

  "It's a word."

  "Still counts."

  He closed his eyes. His breathing slowed — the third-step pattern, automatic now, woven into the rhythm of his sleep like a second heartbeat. Within minutes, his face relaxed. His hands uncurled. The dirt on his cheek blurred as the firelight kept repainting him younger than twelve.

  I sat by the fire. The fire was small and getting smaller and the night was large and getting larger and the horizon pulsed with the heartbeat of a young man who wanted to touch the sky and believed he deserved it.

  Any morning now.

  I fed the fire. One piece of wood, rationed, measured, the minimum required to keep the heat alive until dawn.

  The fire would last.

  It had to.