Three days since the wave.

  Three days since I'd pressed my hands against his chest and felt his channels reshape under my fingers — and the village had watched me do it. Watched me crouch over a boy and do something that had no name they could use and no explanation I would offer.

  Wei hadn't woken up.

  He was sleeping. The deep, borderless sleep of a body rebuilding itself from the foundations up, each breath a measured construction project that his nervous system was executing without his input or consent. His channels were wider than they'd been. Stronger. The qi flowing through them had settled into a rhythm that matched his heartbeat, the third-step pattern I'd drilled into him over weeks of repetition now running like a second pulse.

  Under his skin, at his wrists and temples, the faint glow had finally faded, gone. The channels were stable. The restructuring was complete. All that remained was the waking.

  I sat beside him on the floor, on the mat, in the hut that still smelled like ash and dried herbs and the mineral tang of dispersed qi that hadn't quite dissolved into the ambient background.

  Outside, a chicken scratched at the doorstep. Claws against packed earth. The same sound it had made yesterday and the day before and every day since the egg.

  I waited.

  I don't wait. Thousands of years of existing had refined my relationship with time into something functional: I moved through it, or it moved through me and either way I didn't sit in one place and watch a boy breathe and count the intervals between his inhales and measure the depth of his exhales against a standard I'd established three weeks ago when he was a stubborn twelve-year-old who couldn't hold a Qi-breathing count past four.

  He was thirteen now. His birthday had passed somewhere in the crisis — during the drought, or the tribulation preparation, or the days when everyone was too busy surviving to count dates. I hadn't noticed. He hadn't mentioned it.

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  The lie tasted familiar.

  His mother sat in the corner. She'd been there since the healing — since I'd pulled my hands back. The glowing lines had faded and the boy had shifted from unconscious to sleeping. She hadn't left. Had barely eaten, as far as I could tell. Her hands were in her lap, folded tight, knuckles white, stillness chosen because the alternatives were worse.

  She didn't look at me.

  She looked at her son. At his face. At his breathing. At the steady, rhythmic rise and fall of his chest that meant alive, safe and changed in ways she couldn't understand and didn't need to.

  Her pulse was too fast at her throat. Her breathing shallow. Every few minutes her eyes flicked toward me — quick, involuntary — then back to Wei.

  Not afraid for him. Afraid of me.

  On the second night, Wei's qi had spiked — a single pulse, sharp enough to rattle the clay cups on the shelf.

  His mother had gasped. I'd already moved. Hand on his forehead, channels mapped, the spike traced and smoothed before the cups stopped rocking.

  She was on her feet, halfway across the room. "What's happening to him?"

  "Growing pains." I pulled my hand back. "His qi-channels are restructuring. Like a river finding a new bed."

  "That — that is not — I don't understand."

  I did not answer her unspoken question.

  Wei slept on. Undisturbed. The glow at his wrists pulsed once, faintly, then stilled.

  Outside, the village was quiet. The wrong kind of quiet.

  Doors had closed, windows shuttered. The paths around the hut — once traversed by children and the occasional chicken — empty.

  Elder Li had come to the door twice. I'd felt his footsteps — measured, deliberate, the gait of a man assembling courage. Both times, he'd stopped three meters away. Stood there. Then turned and walked back.

  The third time, he made it to the threshold.

  "How is the boy?"

  His voice was steady enough. His hands weren't.

  "Sleeping."

  Elder Li stood there for a moment longer. The silence between us carried everything he wanted to ask and nothing he dared to. Then he nodded — once, tight — and left.

  I sat and watched him breathe, counting the intervals.

  The chicken had moved on. Its scratching faded toward the well, replaced by the low drone of insects in the late-afternoon heat. The village was still, the wrong kind of still — and in the hut, the boy breathed in counts of three.