Mao walked slowly, slower than usual, his habitual chin-tap absent. His hand hung at his side with the inertia of a gesture that had been habitual and was now exhausted.

  It was early morning. The hour before Wei woke — the space I occupied for the things that couldn't happen while he was present.

  Mao stood beside me at the well without speaking, assembling a sentence he didn't want to assemble.

  "The boy—"

  He stopped. Started again.

  "I can't say what it is. My experience isn't enough. But—"

  He looked at me. Eyes of someone who had arrived at a conclusion beyond his vocabulary and was bridging the gap with but.

  "It's getting faster."

  Three words. His diagnosis, his prognosis, his entirety. He had felt Wei's core — with rudimentary hands, palms designed for fevers and broken bones. And his rudimentary sensitivity had detected what mine had been measuring. The acceleration of Wei's flickers. The trend.

  He waited for me to say something.

  I said nothing.

  He nodded. Acceptance of my silence, of the wall between his knowing-less and my knowing-more.

  "You know what it is, don't you."

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  Not a question.

  I said nothing.

  He nodded again. Turned. Walked away. Chin-tap still absent. The slow walk of a healer who had identified a problem he couldn't solve.

  That evening, Wei sat at the table and looked directly at me.

  "It's getting worse."

  Not a question. A reading. He'd been feeling it — the symptoms he'd been calling tired, the flickers he'd learned to notice since our last conversation about it.

  I put down my tea.

  "How much worse?"

  A long silence. The silence of someone calculating which update to share, how much to add to a truth already partially told.

  "The acceleration hasn't slowed."

  He absorbed it. Not shock — the tightening of someone who had suspected the answer and was hearing it confirmed.

  "The training. The dampening. All of it — it's not working?"

  "It's slowing the progression. Not stopping it."

  He looked at the table. Looked at the gouge. Looked at the tea.

  "Why didn't you tell me it wasn't enough?"

  The question hung. Not new — a variation of the same question he'd asked before, on the road, by the fire. The pattern between us. He asks, I partially answer, he calls me on the partial, I adjust the partial, he accepts the adjustment, and the truth recedes one more layer.

  He knew the pattern. He was tired of the pattern. And so was I.

  All of these. None spoken.

  I also didn't say, that it was my fault. My qi accelerated his development. The proximity, the exposure, the ambient transfer that my presence produced — was the cause. I broke him before he knew what breaking meant. Every symptom he was experiencing was the consequence of my existence near him, of what my nature produced and his young core absorbed.

  The guilt-truth. The full truth. The version that included me. As cause. As origin. As the reason.

  Instead I said not enough. Told about acceleration. Which was true. Partially.

  The other half — the half that was mine — I held. Neither because of guilt nor strategy. But for protection. But who did I want to protect? Him, from the knowledge that his teacher was his damage? Or me, from the acknowledgment that my teaching was his breaking?

  I didn't know. And the not-knowing was the honest answer. And the honest answer was the only thing I was not providing.

  I know. You would have told him. You were always braver than me in that way.

  Wei looked at me. Across the table. Across the tea.

  And didn't ask again.