The fire was small — no extra light, nothing to draw attention.

  He'd tried to cook rice. The result was edible in the survival sense — it existed, it contained calories and if you ate it with enough determination you could ignore the texture. I did not eat in ages, if you don't count the last months. And since we had only limited supplies, I went back to it. He ate his portion with the stubborn focus of a boy refusing to acknowledge that his cooking still wasn't good.

  The mountains were cold. Colder than the village, which had been sheltered in their valley — the altitude stole warmth with efficiency. Wei had pulled his collar up. Not enough. His breath made clouds. His fingers, when they weren't occupied with chopsticks or fire-poking, shook with something that was partly cold and partly the other thing — the tremor that had been there sice he woke up.

  The other thing. The overpressure. The qi that moved through his channels like water through pipes that were too new and too wide and hadn't yet developed the resistance that comes with use and age.

  I watched the fire and thought about places I'd left.

  Not intentionally. The thoughts surfaced unbidden, bubbles from a sediment deeper than memory.

  A village. Older by centuries, in a valley that no longer existed in any geography I could reconstruct. I'd stayed there long enough that the people had given me a name — not my name, a provisional title, because "the woman on the hill" eventually felt insufficient.

  I'd left that village too one morning. No explanation. No farewell. Packed less than Wei had packed, walked out through whatever gate they'd had and gone in whatever direction was away. The name they'd given me persisted for a generation, maybe two, before dissolving into the ordinary forgetfulness of human succession.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  The first step had been easy. Always easy. After that it got harder. Not the walking — the weight. The smell of cooking fires. The sound of a door closing. Morning light through windows that were no longer mine.

  A branch cracked in the dark. Something small — a fox, maybe, or a rock settling in the cold. The fire shifted, sent up a thread of sparks.

  She'd lived there. The woman with — no. Not her. Not now. The memory was too sharp and the sharp ones needed careful handling.

  You'd know about the sharp ones.

  I'd stopped sleeping under roofs after a while. Roofs meant staying. Staying meant names, faces, the smell of someone else's cooking. I'd cut it all out. It had worked. More or less. Completely, until it didn't.

  "Yun?"

  I looked up. Wei was watching me across the fire. His face was lit from below — shadows upward, the hollows of his eyes dark, his jaw sharp.

  "You were somewhere else."

  "No."

  "You were. Your eyes went—" He made a gesture. Distant. Gone.

  "Eat your rice."

  He ate his rice. Badly. With the stubbornness of a boy who knew he was being deflected and chose to allow it because pressing the woman who'd just left everything behind for him felt like a debt he wasn't willing to incur.

  The fire crackled. The mountain night pressed down. The stars appeared, one by one, in a sky clearer than the village's had ever been — the altitude stripping away the lowland haze, revealing a depth of starfield that made the universe feel larger and more indifferent than usual.

  "Yun."

  "What."

  "Are you going to tell me where we're going?"

  "No."

  "Okay."

  He lay down, pulled his thin outer robe tighter and closed his eyes. Within minutes, his breathing had shifted to the third-step pattern — automatic now, the body's default mode — and he was asleep.

  I sat by the fire. Watched the embers. Watched the boy.

  Didn't sleep. Hadn't planned to.

  The mountain was dark and cold and empty and three meters away, the boy was breathing in counts of three.