There was a stream ahead. The first water I'd encountered since the hut. Water was everywhere, the terrain webbed with small creeks, rainwater channels. The body simply hadn't sought it. The body walked and encountered things along the trajectory of walking and the stream was on the trajectory.

  The sound reached me. Running water over stone — the first sound in days that wasn't silence refilling silence.

  I knelt at the bank because my body knelt. Because knees bent at the proximity of water with the automaticity of ten thousand years of kneeling at water and the automaticity was stronger than the disconnection.

  The water was clear. Cold. Moving at the velocity that indicated shallow depth and rock-bed. The kind of stream that in another context would have been pleasant. The kind that Wei would have —

  No. That thought was not available. Or it was available but the connection between the thought and its destination, whatever the destination was supposed to produce, didn't complete. A cable reaching into noise. The frayed end.

  I cupped some water and drank. Thirst had disconnected somewhere between the hut and here, along with the rest of wanting. What moved my hands was mechanical sequence. Proximity to water triggered the motion.

  The water was cold in my throat. I registered its temperature and the sensation of it, but did not connect those two with preference.

  At the bank, where my knees pressed into the mud, the grass was dying.

  Not the dramatic death of the expanded pulse. The restrained, chronic death of sustained proximity. The continuous emission. The three-pace radius that was not an event but a condition, the baseline toxicity of a body that existed in a way that was incompatible with the small living things that surrounded it.

  The grass browned. Slowly. Green to yellow to brown — a gradient that would take days in drought but took minutes in my proximity. Curling inward. Tips first. Then blades.

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  Another ant colony — I could feel it. Below my right knee. The vibration of collective panic. Away from my knee, away from the dying grass, away from whatever frequency my body broadcast into the soil.

  Everything was always leaving. Until only I was left.

  Alone.

  I stood. The bank where I'd knelt held a small rectangle of dead grass in the shape of two knees. A signature. A mark that said that someone toxic was here.

  Walking. Through the forest. The continuous evidence.

  A bird — above. The kind that roosted in low branches and called between trees in the morning. It had been calling when I entered this section. It stopped when I passed beneath its tree. Predators triggered flight, alarm-calls, rallying. I triggered silence. The bird simply stopped.

  I passed. The bird waited. Thirty paces behind me, it resumed.

  A spider web. Strung between two trees at exactly the height that spanned the path. The spider sat in its center, waiting. I walked through the web — not deliberately, but not avoiding it. Because avoiding things required preference and will. The web broke against my face. The spider fell. Landing on my sleeve. Scrambling. Stopping. Curling.

  I flicked the dead spider off my sleeve. Debris.

  The forest was not empty. The forest was full, which was the problem. Every full thing near me became less full. Every living thing near me accelerated toward the thing that living things accelerated toward eventually — the thing I did not accelerate toward.

  I was the desert.

  A walking desert. The kind that carried its aridity with it, that turned the world arid upon contact. A desert that breathed.

  The realization was not new. The three-pace circle had been evident since the oak, the first night, the ants diverting. But then it had been observation. Now the question was inside the observation and it changed everything from data to indictment. This radius extends to everything near me. This radius kills what is near me. Wei was near me.

  Did I kill him?

  With proximity — the sustained proximity that was the condition for death in small things. Did the radius work on him the way it worked on the beetle, the grass, the spider? Slowly, chronically, until his structure failed?

  His core was already damaged. Before the sect, before the fight, before all of it. Cracked. And I was there — my toxic, death-producing presence. Was I the thing that turned the crack into collapse?

  No way to test. No way to confirm or deny.

  The stream continued behind me. Still flowing. Unaffected. The bank where I'd knelt was dead.

  Water moved through me the way everything moved through me — the food I didn't eat, the sleep I didn't sleep, the grief I felt and couldn't use. It entered and it left and it changed nothing. The nothing was the condition. I was here. I was a desert. I breathed.

  The forest diminished in my wake. Ahead of me it was full and alive. Waiting to be less.