He found me behind the inn. It was night. The alley was narrow — stone walls, drainage, conversations that didn't want witnesses. The moon was half.
I'd known he would come. His damaged perception had been grinding against my absence all evening. He'd figured it out during dinner — fragments aligning, his gaze landing on me and not sliding off because his damage let him see what his intact perception would have filtered.
Four meters. Close enough to talk. Far enough to run, though running was optimistic given his body and mine.
He was upright. The posture was costing him. But upright. Deliberately. The statement: I am not kneeling.
"I know what you are."
"Do you."
"The woman who stopped the sky. The one I've been—" He stopped. Swallowed. "—looking for."
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I said nothing.
"What are you?"
Wind. The half-moon traced its path.
I looked at him. The young man who had tried to reach Immortal and been struck down and spent months paying for me with pieces of himself and who was standing here with a cracked core and steady hands.
He didn't kneel. His legs trembled with the effort. But he stood. Because standing was the last thing he had.
"Old."
The wind shifted. My shoulders dropped — a fraction, a release I hadn't permitted in decades.
Xu Ran waited. Minutes.
"Why?" he asked.
"Why what?"
"Why didn't you kill me?"
"Why would I?"
"I threatened your village."
"It wasn't my village."
But it was.
He looked at me. Heard the lie. Chose not to challenge it.
"I'll find you again," he said.
"Many have said that."
"I'm not one of them."
He turned. Walked away — unsteady, wavering, a body that had spent its last reserves on standing upright. He walked to the corner. Turned. Disappeared.
I stood. Alone. In the half-dark. With a question still hanging in the air. I'd answered honestly, although I doubt he understood the implications.
And the honesty hadn't helped.
I went back inside.
