It was market day.

  The village held one every eight days — a generous term for what amounted to six farmers spreading vegetables on blankets near the well while a traveling merchant occasionally appeared with salt, needles and questionable dried fish. Today the merchant was here, his cart parked at the village entrance, his voice carrying across the square as he haggled with Mrs. Liu over the price of lamp oil.

  Cover, noise, a foreign face — one more than usual. It was enough.

  I'd woken before dawn. Not that I'd slept — sitting on the stone all night, watching the stars rotate with the patience of objects that didn't care about villages or boys or women who had stayed too long. I'd made the calculations during the dark hours. Systematically, dispassionately, with the practiced efficiency of too many departures.

  North. The northern path, up through the passes. Harder terrain — steeper, colder, landscape that discouraged casual travel and travelers who might report unusual sightings to people who collected them. No sect presence. The southern and eastern routes were trade roads and trade roads meant cultivators — traveling, stationed, observant. The west was open farmland for two hundred li, flat and exposed, nowhere to disappear.

  North. Into the mountains. Where the air thinned and the trees turned to scrub and the only people you met were shepherds who had chosen altitude because they preferred sheep to conversation.

  Three vendors. I visited them in sequence during the market's busiest hour. Rice from the first — two bags, enough for a month if rationed. Dried meat from the second — tough, bland, calorie-dense. A knife from the merchant's cart — small, practical, suited for peeling vegetables and gutting fish and costing little enough that its purchase was unremarkable.

  I placed the coins, took the goods and left without speaking.

  Twelve coins total. Most of what I had. The rest I would leave in the hut — a quiet transaction with no recipient named and no explanation offered, the currency appearing on the table like something the wind had deposited.

  Wei was packing when I returned.

  He hadn't been told. I'd walked into the hut intending to explain — the route, the timeline, the reasons that were reasons and the reasons that were rationalizations and the large grey area in between where most of my decisions lived. But he was already packing.

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  One bundle: a change of clothes — threadbare, patched at the elbows, clean. His knife, the one he'd carried since summer. Dried herbs — the ones he'd collected and preserved with the obsessive care of a boy who had been taught which plants mattered and had decided that the teaching mattered so the plants mattered so the collecting mattered. A logical chain built on emotional foundation. His style.

  He was separating the herbs. Half into his bundle. Half into a cloth bag. The bag also held three coins — copper, worn, the entirety of his savings.

  "What are you doing?"

  He looked up. "Packing."

  "I can see that. Why?"

  "You are leaving, so we're leaving."

  I waited for the explanation. The reasoning. The argument.

  "I understand, that they want us to go," he said. Flat. No bitterness — statement. "And I saw you at the market. We go."

  He tied the cloth bag. Stood up. Walked out.

  I followed him to his family's house. Stood at the door while he went inside. Through the gap in the doorframe I watched him hand the bag to his mother. Her hands closed around it — automatic, the reflex of receiving before the mind catches up with the implications of what's being received.

  "That's enough for three months. If you're careful."

  His mother stared at the bag. At the herbs inside, tied in neat bundles. At the coins — three, warm from his hands. At the sum total of everything her son owned, transferred to her in a single gesture that was equal parts generosity and farewell.

  She started to speak. He shook his head.

  "I'll come back."

  He believed it. Thirteen's certainty — absolute, unfounded, luminous.

  She didn't believe it. Her face said so — a mother's features when she knows her child is lying and loves him too much to say so, accepting the lie as a gift because it's the last thing he's giving her and refusing it would be worse.

  She nodded. Once. The nod I knew — the one that means acceptance without agreement. Father's nod. Mother's nod. The family's signature gesture.

  His sister stood in the doorway behind their mother. She didn't come out.

  Wei turned and walked past me without stopping.

  We left through the north gate — such as it was, two posts and a crossbeam — during the market's peak hour. The merchant's voice covered our footsteps. Mrs. Liu's argument about lamp oil provided the acoustic camouflage. Two figures, walking north, one carrying a bundle and the other carrying nothing visible and everything invisible, disappearing into the treeline before anyone thought to look.

  No goodbyes. We walked through the north gate and the village stayed behind us with its elder and its shuttered windows and its clearing between the forest and the river where a boy had collected herbs and a woman had sat on a hill.

  Wei walked ahead. Two steps in front of me. The same distance he'd maintained when he'd first followed me out of the forest — but reversed now. He was leading. Not because he knew where to go, but because looking backward was a luxury he'd decided he couldn't afford.

  I walked behind him. Watched his back. His thin shoulders, the bundle bouncing with each step, the slight stumble when his foot found an uneven root and his new qi-awareness compensated a fraction too late.

  The path climbed. The village fell behind us. The trees closed in.

  We didn't look back.