The question came on the third day. Or the fifth. Or whichever interval the body had been walking since the hut, along paths that existed and through spaces that didn't have paths, through forests that were forests and clearings that were the absences of forests.

  Something died at my feet.

  A beetle. Small and black. One of the leaf-litter kind that spent its life converting dead material into smaller dead material. It had been crossing the ground in front of me — carrying something pale between its mandibles, direct and purposeful. It entered the radius.

  And it stopped. Its legs folded. The body curled — not the defensive curl of a threatened insect but the involuntary curl of a body shutting down. It lay there twitching. Then not.

  I watched.

  Not deliberately — watching was the only action available when the thing being watched was at my feet and at my feet was where my eyes already pointed.

  The beetle was dead and I was not.

  The rock I sat on last night — the cold stone in the clearing where I had not slept — had frost on it when I sat down. The frost melted under me. Not from body heat, or not only from body heat. The frost melted. The stone warmed. I remained.

  A tree branch — above me, overhanging the path. Its leaves: green when I passed beneath, brown by the time I emerged. Seconds. The branch would recover. I would not return.

  Everything died. Near me. Around me. The grass, the insects, the leaves — everything that constituted the texture of a living world, subtracted by my proximity.

  Everything except me.

  The thought arrived not as language but as pressure. Internal. My chest tightened. My hands closed. The moment when a fact stopped being a fact and became a wound.

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  Everything dies near me. Except me.

  The wound had no name.

  What protects me?

  What is the mechanism? What is the thing that closes scratches and survives falls and regenerates tissue and maintains a body across millennia while every body near it fails? What is it?

  And — the second part. The part that turned the question from curiosity into violence:

  Why didn't it protect him?

  It protects me. Always. From everything. Automatically, unconsciously, without request or consent. It closes wounds I do not notice. It heals damage I do not feel. It maintains a body I never asked it to maintain. Relentlessly. Without exception. Without interruption.

  And Wei. Who stood beside me. Who lived in my house. Who prepared food and breathed air and existed in the closest proximity available to another human being. Who was near enough that if the protection extended — if it reached beyond the boundaries of my body to the bodies in its proximity — he would have been inside the radius. Inside the field. Inside the range.

  But he wasn't. Why?

  The protection was for me alone. The protection was mine. The protection did not extend and the not-extending was the selectivity, was the crime and always lead to the question.

  WHY NOT HIM?

  My qi jolted. Involuntary. Outward. A pulse.

  The radius expanded. Three paces to five. The grass beyond the normal perimeter browned. Faster. A circle of accelerated death spreading from where I stood, the tangible expression of a question that was not a question but a violation.

  The trees at the edge shuddered. Leaves fell — not autumn-falling, stress-falling. Green, then brown, then dry.

  The air felt heavier. Metallic. The weight of standing in a room where the oxygen was being replaced by something else.

  Then it passed. The pulse receded. The radius contracted back to three paces. The expanded death-zone stabilized. The grass was already dead but the trees recovered at the edges.

  I stood.

  In the expanded circle of dead grass. In the evidence of the question. In the physical manifestation of a thought that was a wound.

  Why not him?

  The question was the most alive thing inside me in weeks.

  And that was the cruelest part. The question burned. The question operated in the space where hunger and sleep and will had disconnected — it bypassed all of it and produced pain. Real pain. The kind the body acknowledged because feeling was the function that remained when wanting stopped.

  I did not answer the question. I could not answer the question. It had no available answer. The large category of things I knew did not contain this.

  I walked.

  The question walked with me. In the radius. In the brown. In the dead grass and the fallen leaves and the beetles that curled and stopped.

  Why not him?