I felt them before dawn.

  Three signatures. Northeast this time. Moving in formation — evenly spaced, deliberate, the geometric precision of searchers who had divided a territory into sectors and were systematically sweeping toward a convergence point. Not strong. Qi Gathering, two of them. The third — slightly higher, the irregular pulse of someone who had broken into Core Formation recently and hadn't yet stabilized — was leading. A triangle, closing.

  The speed was wrong.

  It wasn't fast, but methodical. The pace of people who weren't chasing but cataloging — marking ground, reading residual qi-traces, building a picture from fragments. Three weeks of systematic, patient, grid-based searching and they had narrowed from five hundred li to forty.

  My false trail should have sent them southeast. Should have. The signature I'd planted was good — millennia of experience produced signatures that were indistinguishable from authentic passage. But these searchers weren't tracking my signature. They were tracking the absence. The negative space, the suppression zone, the area around me where the natural energy of the world dipped slightly because my existence, however muted, consumed it.

  I hadn't accounted for that. Or I had and calculated — correctly — that very few organizations possessed searchers skilled enough to track by negative space. But very few meant not zero.

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  Wei was sleeping. His chest rising and falling with the mechanical regularity of a body trained to breathe efficiently and doing it without consultation.

  "Wei."

  He woke instantly. Not the slow surfacing of village rest but immediate engagement — a body that had learned to treat sleep as a tactical state.

  "We need to move."

  He didn't ask why. Packed in three minutes. Bundle, knife, water. His movements were efficient — the economy of six weeks without a fixed location, the body memory of breaking camp and walking until the breaking and the walking became a single continuous action.

  We were moving before the first light cracked the eastern ridge.

  I walked faster than usual. Not my full speed — that would have killed him — but faster than the pace we'd maintained. Fast enough that he had to jog on the downhill stretches and use qi-enhanced steps on the uphills.

  He kept up. His channels doing the work his muscles couldn't — routing energy to his legs, stabilizing his joints, compensating for the oxygen deficit of altitude with a qi-efficiency that was remarkable for his experience level and troubling for the same reason.

  By noon, the signatures were behind us. Not gone — present, still searching, still closing their triangle — but behind. The gap was widening.

  I stopped on a ridge. Looked back. Felt.

  Three points. Fifteen li south. Still moving. Still systematic.

  "Who are they?" He assumed right.

  "Scouts."

  "Whose?"

  "Does it matter?"

  He considered. "No."

  We kept moving. North. Into terrain that even the scouts would hesitate to follow — exposed ridgelines above the treeline, where the wind scraped the stone clean and the only creatures that thrived were the ones that had made a philosophy of endurance.

  Like us. Probably.