The market was Wei's territory now.

  He'd claimed it the way he claimed things — not through declaration but through repetition. Going there. Coming back. Going again. The regularity of presence that established ownership without paperwork, the way rivers owned their banks and dogs owned their corners and Wei owned the third stall from the left where the dried-fruit vendor had discovered that the fourteen-year-old boy who appeared every three days was a superior negotiator and an inferior judge of quality.

  He went alone. Brought back things. Some were correct — rice, oil, the variety of dried mushroom that worked in soup. Some were wrong — a spice that turned out to be decorative bark, a vegetable already half-consumed by mold, a piece of fish that had stopped being fresh yesterday.

  But the wrongness was decreasing. Each trip produced fewer errors, the correction happening through experience rather than instruction.

  He haggled. I knew this because Auntie Huang told me — not directly, not in conversation, but through the medium of loudly discussing Wei's bargaining with another neighbor while standing close enough to my window that the discussion was either coincidental or a communication strategy.

  "The boy got the rice vendor down by two coppers! TWO! That man hasn't budged on price since the drought and the boy just stood there and said 'that's fair for yesterday's rice' and the man looked at the rice and looked at the boy and—"

  She laughed. The laugh of someone who found competence delightful and incompetence entertaining and whose range between the two was wide enough to contain an entire community's worth of opinions.

  "He'll be fine, that one," she said. Nominally to the neighbor. Actually to me.

  I didn't answer. Answers would have required participation and participation was available but not sought — the way I constructed my existence in a settlement that was not my settlement and among people who were not my people but who were Wei's.

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  Her son appeared. Deaf Boy — my name for him, not because he was deaf but because he treated auditory input from his mother with the selectivity of someone who had developed a comprehensive filter.

  He was eleven. Small. Energetic in the way that suggested his body had been given an energy budget designed for a larger frame and was spending the surplus on motion. He waited outside our house for Wei — sat on the step, drew patterns in the dirt, existed with the patient impermanence of a boy whose schedule was "until Wei comes back."

  Two children at the well. Younger — eight, nine. They saw me and paused. The pause of something they couldn't categorize. One whispered. The other laughed. They ran — not from fear, from the energy of encounter, the way children ran from anything that was not a child and was not explaining itself.

  I let them go.

  "SHEN! COME HOME!"

  He didn't look up. The not-looking was practiced. Refined.

  "That boy," Auntie Huang said, hands on hips, the posture of defeat disguised as management. "He hears when it's too late."

  The sentence landed. Passed through me. Settled somewhere in the part of awareness that filed things under "said casually, will return later, will hurt then."

  I let the thought go.

  Wei returned and they went to the garden. Did things — moved pots, debated the identity of the nettle-cousin, argued about whether the blade fragment should be repositioned. The argument was conducted at the volume and intensity of two boys who found disagreement entertaining and agreement boring.

  I sat in the doorway with my tea. The afternoon's assignment.

  "Auntie Huang wants to know if you need anything," Wei said at one point. Passing through the house. Getting water.

  "No."

  "She says you never need anything."

  "She's observant."

  "She says you should come to dinner sometime."

  "Tell her maybe."

  "I told her maybe last time. She said 'maybe' is the polite way of saying 'no' and she wants an actual answer."

  "Tell her maybe."

  He grinned. The grin of someone who understood that the exchange was a routine and that routines were a form of affection.

  He went back outside. To Deaf Boy. To the garden. To the wrong plants, the right stone and the fragment of metal. And the afternoon that was happening in a settlement where we had neighbors who asked questions and a boy who went to the market and came back.

  The sun went down. Deaf Boy went home — called, finally, by a volume that exceeded even his filter's capacity. Wei waved. Deaf Boy didn't wave back, which was either rudeness or the eleven-year-old equivalent of emotional reserve.

  I drank my tea.

  Cold, as always.

  I drank it anyway.

  As always.