The sky glowed.

  Neither the glow of sunrise or sunset nor the ambient light pollution of a distant city that hasn't learned to turn off its lanterns. This was qi — raw, dense, compressed — rising from the forest like a column of invisible fire. The air above the treeline shimmered. Not with heat — with pressure. The distinction mattered to no one in the village except me, yet I was not the one vomiting.

  Three children retched. Within minutes. The qi-pressure hit the unprotected human body the way a bass note hits a wineglass — finding the resonant frequency, amplifying it, shaking loose whatever wasn't firmly attached. Nausea was first. Then the headache — a band of pressure across the forehead that tightened as the column intensified.

  The animals that remained — Mrs. Zhao's rooster, two goats, a cat that had survived the qi-mutated phase by being the most cautious mammal in the province — screamed. Each in their own register, each with their own particular interpretation of terror. The rooster's contribution was the most enthusiastic. It had finally found a situation that warranted the volume it had been practicing its entire life.

  The ground shook.

  Not the modest tremors of the past weeks. This was deep, structural, originating from a point northwest of the village where the qi-compression had reached a density that the bedrock could no longer absorb passively. The earth itself was protesting — a geological complaint, delivered in a frequency that humans felt in their teeth and their joints and the soles of their feet.

  A wall fell. Elder Li's house — the one I'd already repaired the roof tiles on — lost its eastern wall. The mud brick simply separated from the corner posts and toppled outward, falling in a single sheet that hit the ground and broke into a cloud of red-brown dust. The dust hung in the air. Everything was dust now — the drought had turned the valley into a substrate that converted every impact into a cloud.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  Mrs. Zhao was thrown to the ground by the old beam in her doorway, the one that had been cracking for years and chose this exact moment to acknowledge its retirement. It caught her shoulder. She cried out — a short, sharp sound, more surprise than pain. Wei was there in seconds. He lifted the beam — he couldn't lift the beam, he was twelve and it was oak and it weighed more than he did, but he lifted it anyway, because his body had been given an instruction and his body followed instructions — and Chen pulled her free.

  Her arm hung wrong. Dislocated. The joint popped and swollen, the shoulder at an angle that nature hadn't intended and physics wouldn't sustain. She was conscious. Coherent. Angry, primarily, because she'd survived four decades in this village without being felled by her own architecture and she resented the irony.

  Wei looked at me. His face was asking a question his voice hadn't formed yet — the question I'd been waiting for since the first tremor, the question that had been building behind every day of water runs and rationing and fence repair and earthquake cleanup.

  What do we do now?

  "Move them," I said. "South. Now."

  He didn't hesitate. He'd prepared for this — the evacuation plan he'd built, the bundles at every door, the route he'd chosen. The southern path I'd cleared.

  He went. Running. His voice cracking through the dust — too high, too fast, the words tumbling out the way they did when he was scared and pretending not to be:

  "Get the bundles — the bundles by the doors — we're going south, the slope, come on —"

  The village moved. Not smoothly — smoothly was a fantasy that belonged to a different world — but it moved. People grabbed their packs. Lifted children. Supported each other. Mrs. Liu had Elder Li by the arm, half-dragging him because his leg had cramped from the tremor and his dignity wouldn't let him lean and her patience wouldn't let him fall. Gao carried Mrs. Zhao, arm hanging, shoulder swelling, her face set in an expression of concentrated displeasure that was more effective than anesthesia.

  I watched them go. Wei at the front, leading the way south, finding the path I'd marked, the route I'd cleared, the passage through the boulder field that I'd made safe with three days of manual labor and split hands and no qi.

  They moved. South. Away from the forest. Away from the column of pressure that was rising like a prayer no one had asked for and no one wanted answered.

  But I — didn't go south.

  I — went east.