Wei's hands started shaking on the second water run.

  It happened between the spring and the boulder field — a transition that required precise footing and the kind of sustained grip strength that climbing develops and twelve-year-old boys acquire through practice rather than biology. His right hand released the stone he was using as a handhold. The fingers simply opened, the muscles overriding his intention with a truth that intention couldn't override: he was spent.

  He caught himself. Grabbed the stone again with his left hand, shifted his weight, found his balance. Kept moving. The containers on his back sloshed — half-full, at least. Chen's leg had flared up that morning, the old spirit beast wound reopening under the daily stress of hill-climbing. So Wei and Gao had gone back out a second time.

  I'd watched the progression over the past — how many days? They blurred. Each one was the same in its outline: wake before dawn, run to the spring, carry water back, distribute, check the rations, walk the perimeter, help Mrs. Liu with the well, help Elder Li with the structures and then — only then — eat his half-ration and collapse beside a fire that was barely a fire and sleep the dense, impenetrable sleep of exhaustion.

  He wasn't eating enough. I knew because I watched the portions the way I watched everything: automatically, continuously. He'd been giving away portions. Not obviously — not the kind of theatrical self-sacrifice that announces itself and invites admiration. Quietly. A handful of rice added to Mrs. Zhao's bowl when she wasn't watching. A dried fish slipped to the youngest Chen child, whose ribs had started showing. His own portion shrinking in increments so small that no single meal looked insufficient.

  The cumulative deficit was still building.

  His face was thinner. The softness was gone from his cheeks. The jawline was more defined than a twelve-year-old's should be. The eye sockets were deeper, shadowed, the skin beneath them carrying the dark, delicate bruising of chronic sleep deprivation.

  He was burning himself out. Methodically.

  You'd think watching would get easier with practice. It doesn't.

  I considered intervention. The calculus was simple: tell him to stop. To rest. To eat his own food and sleep eight hours and let the adults carry what the adults should have been carrying from the beginning. The words were available. The authority was available. He would have listened — not because I told him to, but because some part of him, the exhausted part, the twelve-year-old part that was still a child beneath the competence, was waiting for permission to stop.

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  I didn't intervene.

  Not because I didn't want to. I didn't intervene because he was learning something I couldn't teach him, something that couldn't be transmitted through instruction or correction or the careful, measured curriculum I'd been building since the first day he'd followed me home with mushrooms that would have killed him.

  He was learning what it cost to be responsible. The actual cost — not the theoretical weight of duty discussed in elevated terms by cultivators who'd never skipped a meal. The physical, cellular, measurable cost of choosing other people's survival over your own comfort.

  It would break him if it continued. I knew that too.

  So I compensated in ways that didn't require permission.

  At dusk, I'd come back with a small bundle of oily nuts and dropped them by Mrs. Liu's pot as if they'd been there all along. She'd looked at them, looked at me and then said nothing. She understood shortages. She also understood windfalls.

  Tonight, he hadn't eaten at all. His portion sat by the fire — rice, a sliver of fish, water. He'd sat down, looked at it and then not picked it up. His hands were in his lap. They were shaking.

  Not from cold. The night was warm. The shaking was simpler than that. Structural. His body informing him, through the language of involuntary muscle contraction, that it was reaching the end of what it had to give.

  He looked at his hands. Turned them over. Examined the tremor the way he'd examine an unfamiliar herb — with curiosity, with distance, with the analytical detachment of someone identifying a symptom rather than experiencing it.

  He wrinkled his eyebrows. Opened his mouth. Closed it again.

  Not one word. The entirety of his response to his own disintegration.

  He picked up the rice bowl. Ate. Slowly, mechanically, without the pleasure that food should produce and without the complaint that its absence should generate. He ate because eating was maintenance and maintenance was necessary and necessary things were done without conversation.

  The rice tasted faintly of smoke and oil.

  His hands stopped shaking by the third mouthful. The fuel arrived. His body stabilized.

  He finished. Set the bowl down. Looked at the fire.

  "Tomorrow," he said.

  "Yes."

  "It'll be bad, won't it?"

  "Yes."

  He nodded. The nod of someone who has asked a question and received the answer they expected and is neither comforted nor surprised.

  "Okay."

  He lay down. Closed his eyes. Was asleep in thirty seconds.

  I watched his hands. They were still, while he slept — curled against his chest, the tremor absent, the muscles finally given permission to stop performing. Small hands. Twelve years old. Carrying more than they should and refusing to put it down.

  I didn't eat my own portion. I had no portion — the village's resources were not mine to claim. But I looked at his empty bowl and I thought about the grandmother who boiled ginger and I thought about cost and I thought about the space between teaching a boy to survive and watching him learn the one lesson that couldn't be taught without damage.

  His hands were still. The fire was low. The horizon pulsed.

  Tomorrow.