The rain stopped.

  Wind was coming up — air moving as the front passed, the pressure equalizing, the shift from rain to dry that happened in minutes when weather changed its pattern.

  The forest stood around the brown circle under my feet. The trees were weakened but still upright, the moss on their trunks dried at the edges — everything around me less alive, by the margin my presence subtracted.

  I stood.

  My left forearm — the scratch from the wall, the descent, the speed. The scratch that had healed automatically, in seconds, while I knelt beside a body that didn't heal.

  The scratch was gone, the skin smooth and unblemished — a body that did not retain damage because retaining damage was the function of bodies that were susceptible to time and I am not.

  Always.

  From everything.

  A cut healed, a wound healed, the broken rib from eight centuries ago healed, the third-degree burn from the siege of Lin'an healed, the sword through the abdomen in the era before the era before the era that anyone alive remembered healed.

  Everything that happened to this body was reversed, corrected, returned to the template that existed before the damage. Always intact. The default state of my body. Immutably, constitutionally, architecturally intact.

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  This body. This personal, individual body that walked through forests and killed grass and sat beside dead students and watched them not-heal while it healed.

  The question had been forming since the scratch closed and his hands didn't — the simultaneity of closing-and-not-closing of wounds producing the question. Gradually — like pressure behind a dam, each detail a drop adding to the mass that would eventually breach the structure.

  And it breached.

  Not as thought but as sound — mouth open, voice active, because I could no longer contain it.

  "Whatever protects me — why not him?" I yelled.

  Into the forest. At the trees, the air, the moss, the wind, the world that was present and indifferent.

  The words were simple — the kind of words children used when asking about fairness, the fundamental vocabulary of disparity that required no sophistication.

  Why was I protected? Why did the protection extend to me — always, automatically, without request or consent — and not to him? Why did the same force, the same whatever-it-was that closed my scratches, healed my wounds and maintained my body like a museum maintaining an exhibit — why did it not extend to the boy who stood next to me? Who lived in my house? Who ate my food? Who fought with my training? Who existed in my proximity — my close, personal, daily proximity — and whose proximity should have been the conduit?

  Why did the walls hold and his core didn't?

  Why did my barriers work and his body didn't?

  Why was I the thing that was protected and he the thing that was not?

  The words disappeared between the trees without echo. The forest absorbed them the way forests absorbed everything — patiently, silently, converting sound into more forest.

  No answer.

  The forest did not answer because forests did not answer. The universe was not a being. The answer was nothing.

  I stood in the forest with my question and the question stood with me.

  Neither of us had an answer.