I took Wei and stepped.

  There was no other word for it. I took the distance between us and the scouts and compressed it into a single motion and on the other side of that motion was somewhere else.

  One step.

  The world blurred for a moment. Wei's eyes couldn't process the transition fast enough to register blur. For him, the world skipped. The forest was there, the clearing behind them, three kneeling scouts — and then the forest was different, the air was colder, the altitude was higher and thirty li of mountain terrain existed between him and the place he'd been standing a heartbeat ago.

  Wei buckled.

  His hands went to his knees. His stomach revolted. His face went pale. Then green. The color transition was rapid enough to be almost interesting. His jaw worked sideways — pressure, ears, the altitude difference hitting his sinuses before his mind caught up with the geography. His hands holding his ears. His throat working to equalize the pressure. The tremor in his hands — the low-level vibration that had been present since we left the village, the physical manifestation of his body's response to the stress of displacement and uncertainty — spiked into a full-body shake.

  He breathed. Hard. Fast. His qi-channels were screaming — the sudden displacement had disrupted his circulation pattern and the energy was sloshing through his channels like water in a shaken bottle, seeking equilibrium and finding none.

  "How—"

  "Don't ask."

  "How did—"

  "Don't. Ask."

  His mouth opened. Closed. The third-step pattern reasserted itself through sheer muscle memory, the body defaulting to the rhythm I'd built into him when the mind was too overwhelmed to choose an alternative. His color returned in stages — green to grey to something approaching human. His ears popped. He swallowed, winced, swallowed again.

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  "...okay."

  The word. Again. But smaller this time. Quieter. Delivered from a crouch on a mountain ridge with his face the color of old paper and his hands gripping his own knees to stop them from shaking.

  We were on a ridge. A different range — the geography had shifted, the rock formation older, the trees shorter and hardier. Altitude and latitude conspiring to make beauty an act of stubbornness. The valley below was unfamiliar. The scout signatures were gone — not suppressed, not hidden. Gone. Thirty li was beyond their sensing range.

  Behind us: nothing. Somewhere in the distance, three scouts were regrouping on a trail that no longer led anywhere, their jade tablet recording data about a target that had stopped existing between one step and the next.

  The step had cost nothing. The cultivation equivalent of a deep breath — an action so far below my capacity that it didn't register as exertion. As natural as blinking. As memorable as exhaling.

  That was the problem. Not the doing — the ease. The reminder that the gap between me and the world I moved through did not hold a river, but an ocean.

  Wei sat on the ridge. Looked at the valley. His hands were steady now — the tremor suppressed by his body's automated qi-regulation.

  He was adapting. To everything. To altitude and cold and displacement that should have ruptured his channels. To the casual impossibility of traveling thirty li in one step with a woman who treated the laws of physics as suggestions.

  You would have walked those thirty li. Every one of them. With effort. With pain. The honest way. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

  "You could have done that anytime?"

  "Yes."

  "You could have done that when the scouts appeared?"

  "Yes."

  "You waited."

  I looked at him.

  "I wanted to see the tablet."

  He considered that. "What did you see?"

  "They are organized. They have resources. They have information. They have a system for collecting and processing that information. They have a system for acting on it. They have a system for following up on their actions. They are not just strong enemies. They are methodical enemies."

  He nodded. Slowly. The nod that meant he understood the word and the weight behind it and the difference between three random scouts and three scouts with a jade tablet and an institutional mandate.

  "That's worse than strong enemies."

  "Yes."

  He stood. His knees held. He looked north and started walking.

  I followed.

  I only learned of this later, when I pieced it together from intercepted records, that thirty li behind us, three scouts regrouped and stood in an empty clearing. They reported, via sealed qi-message, that the target had vanished. The message reached a sect hall in a city Wei had never heard of. A functionary read it. And added it to a file.

  The file grew.