Healer Mao came because he always came when someone returned from the forest injured, because the settlement's information network was Auntie Huang and Auntie Huang's network was sound — she heard everything, relayed everything and her relaying was conducted at volume.

  Mao was old. Older than Lao Chen, though they disagreed about by how much. His hands were steady despite the age and his qi-sensitivity was rudimentary — the kind that came not from cultivation but from decades of proximity to the qi-rich valley. He couldn't channel. He couldn't fight. He could feel. But feeling was enough for checking broken bones, fevers, identifying herbs, creating poultices and the medicine of the body rather than the spirit.

  He examined the woodcutter first. He set the leg properly — corrected the angle and tightened the bindings. Professional. The competence of having seen six hundred broken legs and set five hundred and ninety-eight of them correctly.

  Then he came to Wei.

  "I heard you fought something," he said. Understated. He'd heard Auntie Huang's version — a beast the size of a horse and a fight lasting an hour — and had performed the necessary division to arrive at truth.

  "Rock lynx," Wei said. Still grinning.

  Mao put his hands on Wei's chest. Closed his eyes. Palms flat, fingers spread, the maximum-contact configuration that his rudimentary sensitivity required.

  He felt.

  His brow furrowed. Something partly familiar, partly not — the known layered with the unknown.

  "Your core is... bright."

  He said it carefully. The tentative delivery of an observation that might be wrong and whose wrongness would be embarrassing but whose rightness would be concerning.

  "Bright?" Wei asked.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  "More than I'd expect for—" Mao waved vaguely at Wei. For your age, for your level, for whatever categories he was using that didn't have enough room for what he was feeling.

  "Too bright?" Wei asked. A little worried, but curious. More was an achievement and achievements were positive even with Xu Ran's example in mind.

  Mao paused. The data seemed insufficient for a definitive conclusion.

  "No. Just — different."

  He withdrew his hands and tapped his chin — the habitual gesture of processing in progress.

  "Rest, boy. And drink more water."

  Wei shrugged. "He always says drink water."

  "Water is important."

  "You sound like him."

  Wei went to his room. To rest. To drink water. To grin about the lynx.

  Mao was still in the doorway, chin-tapping. I followed him outside.

  We stood in the garden. The lemongrass between us, the nettle-cousin blooming its white flowers. He looked at the herbs and didn't see them.

  "Something's off," he said. Quietly. The voice reserved for conversations that happened outside rooms where boys were resting.

  "Tell me."

  "His core. I don't have the vocabulary for what I felt." He rubbed his palms together — the gesture of someone trying to recall a sensation through skin. "Bright, yes. But not steady-bright. It flickers. Like a candle in a draft, except there's no draft."

  "How often?"

  He considered. "Every — I don't know. Several times while my hands were on him. Regularly. Like a pulse that has nothing to do with his heartbeat."

  Four twitches per minute, the last time I'd counted.

  "And there's something else," he said. "A — movement. Inside the brightness. I can't describe it. Circular, maybe. Like the light is going somewhere."

  He looked at me. The look of someone who had reached the edge of his competence and knew it.

  "Is it bad?" I asked. The question a guardian asks. The tone calibrated to sound like someone who doesn't already know.

  He rubbed the back of his neck. "I don't know. Probably not. Qi does strange things in young bodies. But I'll want to check him again in a few weeks."

  "Should we tell him?"

  Mao considered. "Tell him to drink more water." He nodded. His chin-tapping resumed.

  He left through the garden gate, slow, carrying the weight of something he'd sensed but couldn't name and that I could name but wouldn't.

  I stood with the lemongrass and the wrong flowers.

  The spiral — because that's what it was, the circular movement Mao's rudimentary hands had caught the edge of. A spiral. In Wei's core. The golden light organizing from center outward, tracing a curve that looked designed rather than emergent.

  It could be nothing.

  The spiral continued. In his core. In his sleep. In the room where he grinned and rested and was fourteen and was bright and was mine.

  The spiral continued.