The rain started on the eighth day and didn't stop.

  Not the brief, courteous rain of lowlands — the mountain variety, arriving with the authority of inevitability and settling in for duration. Grey sky. Grey forest. Grey ground turning to mud that grabbed Wei's feet with each step and released them reluctantly.

  We found a rock overhang in the late afternoon. Not really shelter — but at least a ledge of stone that extended far enough to keep the rain from falling directly on us. A technical dry. Sit in one position, don't move, accept that "dry" was relative and "comfortable" was aspirational.

  Wei built a fire. Small, sheltered, the wood too damp to produce anything except smoke and a heat that you had to believe in rather than feel. He wrapped his robe tighter. His jaw was set. His hands trembled between the sleeves and the fire.

  He cooked. Rice again. The ritual of normalcy against the despair that weather and displacement and uncertainty produce when they arrive simultaneously.

  The fire crackled. Barely. Rain on the rocks above us. Distance in every direction.

  Wei looked at me across the fire. His face was lit from below — orange shadows, hollow eyes, the dramatic lighting that made everyone look older and more tired than they were.

  "The whole world is afraid of you."

  Not a question. A statement, delivered with the casual certainty of someone who has observed enough evidence to consider the conclusion established.

  I looked at him. He looked back.

  "I'm not."

  The words settled between us. Without drama, without inflection. Flat, direct. A statement that needed no ornament because its structural integrity was sufficient.

  The rain fell. The fire popped. Silence opened between us. I waited for him to say something else. To ask a question. To challenge the statement. To process it in some way that would make it less final.

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  "Should you be?"

  He considered it. Genuinely. His eyes moved — tracking something internal, some calculation working its way from sensation to conclusion.

  "No."

  One word. Final. The period at the end of a sentence that he'd spent thirteen years assembling and that I would spend the rest of my existence remembering.

  The rain continued. The fire died to embers. Wei went to sleep. I stayed awake. The mountain was dark and cold and empty.

  A memory — Unwanted, unprompted, rising from the place where I kept the things that hurt, surfaced.

  A scholar. Thin, precise. I'd met him in a library — a real library, not the collections of scrolls that passed for libraries in most places. A building dedicated to the storage and retrieval of knowledge.

  He'd found me reading. Not casually — the sustained, intensive reading of someone who had read everything available and was now re-reading for what they'd missed the first three hundred times.

  He wasn't afraid. Everyone was afraid — even the ones who didn't know why. Something in them recognized something in me. He was curious instead. Pure, unadulterated curiosity. He asked good questions — precise, humble, designed to learn rather than impress.

  The fire shifted. A log collapsed inward, sending up a brief column of sparks that the rain caught and killed before they reached the overhang's edge. Wei murmured in his sleep — a sound without words.

  I answered some of his questions. More than I'd answered for anyone in centuries.

  He wrote books. Based on fragments I'd given him — edges of truths, crumbs from a table that held more food than any single human could consume. The books made him famous. The fame brought power. The power brought proximity to institutions that had questions of their own about the woman in the library.

  The curiosity became reverence. The reverence became fear. The fear became silence.

  Forty years. Forty years of crossing the same streets and he looked through me as if I were transparent. He died old, respected, surrounded by students who quoted his books without knowing their source.

  His books survived him two hundred years. Before they became dust.

  Reverence always tips.

  I looked at Wei through the dying fire. At the boy who wasn't afraid. Who had said "no" like it was a fact rather than a feeling.

  The memory sat in my chest like a stone.

  I said nothing. Fed the fire. Watched the embers.

  Reverence always tips.

  The question was whether "not afraid" was different from "revering." Whether what Wei had — this strange and impractical lack of fear — was built on a different foundation. Whether a boy who looked at me and saw a person rather than a phenomenon could maintain that vision when the phenomenon became undeniable.

  The rain fell. The fire held. The boy slept.

  I didn't have an answer. I rarely did.