It was night.

  Wei slept. The sleep of exhaustion earned honestly — through training, cooking and existing at the velocity that fourteen demanded. His body spent its days fully and then stopped fully, a switch-off that didn't do gradual.

  "My form was better today," he said from his blanket, eyes already closed.

  "Go to sleep."

  "You're going to sit there all night again."

  "Sleep."

  "You worry too much."

  "I worry the correct amount."

  "Night, Yun."

  "Good night."

  I sat with my back against the wall, his breathing as the room's only sound, the silence of a house at night that was different from the silence of a road at night because a house's silence was contained, bounded, intimate.

  Midnight. Or near it. A time that existed not on clocks but in the quality of darkness — the depth of it, the commitment to it.

  I felt his core before I saw it. The shift in the ambient qi — subtle, the kind of fluctuation that normal perception missed and that my perception catalogued because cataloguing was my function or my curse.

  Then there was light.

  Through his shirt.

  Through the fabric that covered his chest, through the threads and the weave. Opaque to sunlight and candlelight and firelight — but not to this. The glow that qi produced when it exceeded the body's capacity to contain it: warm, golden, like late afternoon compressed into a point and emitted from the sternum of a sleeping boy who didn't know he was a lantern.

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  I stood and crossed the room. Two steps and I was on his bed. I knelt beside him.

  His face in the glow was peaceful. Unaware of the broadcast. Awareness would bring control, control would bring suppression — the daytime version of Wei, the one that dampened, compressed and contained. That version was a performance of normalcy, increasingly expensive, paid in tremors and nosebleeds and other currencies his body hadn't agreed to spend.

  This — the nighttime version — was what he was. Unperformed. Uncontained. A core broadcasting at its natural strength, three stages above his age, still growing at a rate that defied every pattern I’d ever observed.

  I placed my hand above his chest. Not touching — hovering. Two centimeters. The space between my palm and his sternum filled with the warm pressure of qi dense enough to feel like a substance, like water caught between liquid and light.

  Beautiful.

  The word that kept arriving for things that were also terrifying. Beauty in the context of danger was the quality of sunsets — brilliant because unsustainable, unsustainable because brilliant.

  Three twitches per minute.

  I counted — automatically, with the detachment that wasn't detachment but a mechanism for converting experience into data because data was manageable.

  Three per minute. His core — pulsing, glowing, broadcasting — stuttered three times in every sixty-second interval. The stutter was the instability made rhythmic, the structural flaw expressed as pattern, the crack in the glass made audible as a ticking that wasn't sound but qi-fluctuation.

  Yesterday there were two. Today it was three.

  I withdrew my hand. Pulled up his blanket and tucked it around his shoulders — the ordinary gesture of adjusting bedding. I am here, you are warm, the covering is intact. Performed because it was the only action available. The other action was waking him, telling him that his core was flickering, that the flickering was worsening and that I had seen this shape before.

  I went outside.

  The half-moon hung at its angle, half-lit, half-dark.

  The garden. Three pots in a row. I grounded myself in the ordinary, the physical, the tangible. The dock grass, the nettle-cousin, the lemongrass. The blade fragment. The stone. Things that existed in the world and that I could touch, see and smell. And that had no capacity for broadcasting or stuttering or flickering.

  The blade fragment caught the moonlight. A thin line of reflective silver.

  Three twitches per minute.

  That is—

  I didn't finish the thought. The sentence. The calculation. Not because I didn't know the end but because knowing it and acknowledging it were different acts and the consequence of acknowledging it was making it real.

  Inside, the light faded. His core settled. The broadcast quieted. The boy slept.

  I stayed outside and longed for tea. And if it was cold, I drank it anyway.