The ledge where we made camp that night overlooked a valley that mist painted in shades of blue and grey.

  Wei was exhausted. The climb had taken everything his body had and some of what his qi had, which was a different category of depletion. He'd eaten his rice, which was improving. The burned layer was thinner now, barely a crust. He was sitting against a rock with his eyes half-closed.

  His hands trembled in his lap. Too tired to hide it. The stick he usually carved was in his pack and the distance between his lap and the pack was apparently larger than his remaining energy could traverse.

  "My fingers are buzzing."

  I looked at his hands. The tremor was visible even in the firelight — fine, rapid, qi-overflow rather than cold.

  "They'll settle."

  "They've been buzzing since the ledge." He held them up, studying them against the fire's light. "It's not bad. Like... holding a jar of bees. Tiny bees."

  "Don't circulate. Let the excess bleed off naturally."

  He dropped his hands. Flexed them. Closed his eyes.

  "Is this what it's like for everyone? The first year?"

  "No."

  He opened one eye. "Worse or better?"

  "Different."

  "You know that's not an answer."

  "I know."

  He almost smiled. The corner of his mouth — the left one, always the left — twitched upward and settled back. Too tired for the full expression.

  Wind moved across the ridge. Cold, carrying ice-smell from higher peaks. Somewhere below, water ran through stone — distant, persistent, mountains doing what mountains do.

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  I was adding a branch to the fire when a moth landed on Wei's wrist.

  Then another. Then three more, settling along his forearm like they'd been invited. Their wings pulsed — slow, synchronized, matching a rhythm I recognized. His qi-circulation pattern. Exactly.

  Wei opened his eyes. Looked down at his arm. "Huh."

  "Don't move."

  "Wasn't planning to." He watched them with the expression he gave most things — mild curiosity, zero alarm. A boy covered in moths the way other boys were covered in dirt. "Are they eating my qi?"

  "Drinking. There's a difference." Seven now. Eight. Their bodies glowed faint blue at the thorax — bioluminescent reaction to ambient qi. Common enough near sect compounds where the air was thick with it. Unheard of at this altitude. Drawn to a boy in his first year. "You're leaking."

  "I'm what?"

  "Leaking. Your channels aren't containing everything. Excess is bleeding through your skin." I flicked the nearest moth off his arm. It spiraled into the dark. "They can taste it."

  "Cool."

  The rest of the moths followed their departed comrade — a blue-glowing retreat into the valley, like lanterns carried off by invisible hands. Wei watched them go with something close to disappointment.

  "You could have let them stay."

  "They were accelerating your bleed rate."

  "They were pretty."

  I didn't answer that. He wasn't wrong.

  His qi pulsed again, warm against my awareness, bright. Something under the surface pressing outward, not escaping, not yet, but making its presence known. Like light through wet paper. Hold it to the sun long enough, the paper burns.

  Beautiful. The word arrived before I could stop it.

  Beautiful and dangerous. The kind of cliff worth admiring from a distance that survival specifies.

  He was accelerating. Not linearly — exponentially. What had taken weeks was now taking days. And I didn't know why, which meant the terrible thing might be anything.

  "Yun."

  His voice was half-sleep. Blurred at the edges.

  "What."

  "Am I doing something wrong?"

  The fire cracked. A spark rose, drifted, died.

  "No."

  "Then why do you watch me like that? When you think I'm asleep?"

  I looked at the valley. At the mist. At anything that wasn't the boy who noticed too much.

  "Go to sleep."

  He went. Breathing settling into the third-step pattern. Hands finally still on his knees.

  I sat by the dying fire. The numbers I ran every night, his channel's width, the flow rate, his core density and stability margins. They said too fast. They always said too fast.

  Tonight they added something new. His channels had widened three degrees since this morning. Not since yesterday. Since this morning.

  The moths had known before I did. The boy was becoming a beacon and beacons attract more than moths.

  I folded the numbers away. Watched him breathe. Listened for anything in the valley below that might have noticed what I'd noticed.

  Nothing yet.