The road taught Wei things I hadn't planned to teach him.

  Three weeks north. The mountains leveled into foothills, then rose again — a different range, older, the stone darker and more weathered. The trails were animal tracks and seasonal shepherd paths, narrow enough that we walked single file, wide enough that the silence between us had room to settle into something structural.

  Wei trained while walking. The qi-circulation exercises I'd drilled into him — they adapted. He'd found the rhythm: route the energy through the primary channels on every third step, exhale the excess on the downhill stretches, draw fresh qi from the ambient air on the uphills where the altitude made the energy thinner and cleaner.

  He stumbled over roots. Regularly. The dual attention — footwork and qi-work — exceeded his coordination and the result was stubbed toes, muttered curses and the occasional full stumble he converted into a crouch and pretended he'd intended.

  "Eyes on the path. Not on your qi."

  "I can do both."

  He tripped over a rock he'd been looking directly at.

  "Clearly."

  He didn't respond. Kept walking. His jaw set — he'd heard me and disagreed and was going to prove me wrong, because contradiction was his fuel.

  We passed a village. Small — eight houses, a well, an old man on a stool watching the road with eyes that had stopped tracking what passed by. Wei slowed. Looked at the structures. At the smoke from a cooking fire. At the normal, unremarkable evidence of people living lives that involved walls and meals and belonging somewhere.

  "I could buy rice."

  I kept walking. "Too many eyes."

  "It's eight houses."

  "Eight houses talk. To traveling merchants. Who talk to towns. Which have cultivators."

  He followed. The village fell behind us with its smoke and its old man on his stool and its eight houses that would never know what had passed within a hundred meters of their walls.

  Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

  Mid-afternoon, the trail cut through a saddle between two ridges. Wei stopped.

  "What are those?"

  Three stones, waist-high, set into the ground at even intervals. The characters carved into them had been worn smooth by weather and centuries, but the arrangement was deliberate — too precise for boundary markers, too small for a shrine.

  "Ward stones. Old ones."

  He crouched beside the nearest, ran his fingers over the eroded surface. "They don't do anything."

  "Not anymore."

  "What did they do?"

  "Kept things out. Or kept things in." I kept walking. "Doesn't matter which. They stopped working before your grandparents were born."

  He lingered another moment, then caught up. I could feel him turning the question over — not the answer I'd given, but the ones I hadn't.

  That evening: fire. Small. Wei cooked — rice with dried herbs from his bundle. The edges burned. The center stayed raw. He studied the result with the expression of someone who had followed every step correctly and still arrived at failure.

  "That looks worse than it tastes."

  He tried it.

  "No. It tastes like that too."

  "You could cook."

  "I could."

  He waited. I didn't move.

  "But you won't."

  "Learning opportunity."

  He stabbed at the rice with his chopstick. I tried some wordlessly. Wei had cooked, I could at least try.

  He unrolled his blanket near the fire. Lay on his back, staring up through the canopy gap.

  "We are being followed."

  The statement was sharper than I'd expected from him. I let it sit for a beat.

  "What makes you say that?"

  "You keep looking behind us. When you think I'm not watching."

  He was watching more than I'd credited.

  "Go to sleep, Wei."

  "That's not a no."

  "That's a go to sleep."

  He rolled onto his side. Within minutes, his breathing evened out — the swift, uncomplicated surrender of a body that was thirteen and exhausted and hadn't yet learned to carry worry into the dark.

  The fire banked to embers. Stars through the canopy — clear, cold.

  I left.

  Not far. Not long. An hour's walk south — at my pace, which covered the distance in minutes. I moved through the forest without disturbing it, without leaving evidence.

  At a ridge overlooking the valley we'd crossed that morning, I stopped. Faced southeast. Extended my awareness — the smallest possible output, the cultivation equivalent of breathing on a mirror to see if it fogs.

  Then I built the trail. A qi-signature layered to read as authentic passage rather than deliberate placement. Energetic footprints — not mine, but close enough that a tracker would follow with confidence. Southeast. Into lower terrain, warmer valleys, the direction a fleeing woman might choose if she were heading toward civilization.

  The skill was older than these mountains.

  When I returned, I changed our route. Northwest. Steeper. Exposed ridges, wind-scoured plateaus, terrain that punished travelers with cold and altitude and the misery of camping on stone.

  I sat by the embers and listened to him breathe and heard the cough that was building in his chest — small, intermittent, the body's protest against conditions it hadn't agreed to.

  His comfort, or our survival. I chose survival. I always chose survival.