The memory didn't leave.

  It settled — not vanishing, but sinking to the bottom, present and permanent. I carried it through the day and into the evening.

  We camped in a hollow between two hills. Sheltered, windless.

  Wei built the fire. Efficient, precise — refined through repetition into something that didn't need thought anymore. Hands and flint and physical friction. The same way he'd always done it, the same way his father had done it, the village method carried forward into a life that was leaving the village behind.

  Fire caught. Light spread through the hollow.

  I sat across from him. Far enough. Never far enough.

  "Yun."

  "What."

  "What happened earlier? On the trail."

  I looked at the fire.

  "Nothing."

  "Your eyes looked like you were somewhere else. For a while."

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  "I was thinking."

  "About what?"

  He wasn't pushing. He was asking. He navigated the distinction with the instinct of someone who had learned that the difference between pushing and asking was the difference between a door opening and a wall going up.

  "Old things."

  He accepted it. Nodded. Turned back to the fire. Poked it with a stick — the physical equivalent of I heard you, I'm not satisfied, but I'm choosing to let it go.

  "You know," he said, "when I was little, my father used to — he'd get this look. When he was thinking about before-the-village. Before my mother. I don't know what happened to him before. He never said. But he'd get this look and it was the same one you had. Exactly."

  He paused.

  "I used to think it meant he was sad. But it wasn't sad. It was — heavy. Like he was carrying something that didn't weigh anything but still took up all his strength."

  I said nothing. The accuracy didn't require acknowledgment.

  "I never asked him what it was," Wei said. "I figured if he wanted to tell me, he would. And if he didn't, then asking would just make him carry it louder."

  He looked at me. Direct.

  "I'm not asking."

  "I know."

  The fire burned. The night pressed in.

  I'm the reason you are breaking.

  Six words. They lived in the back of my throat — paused at the gate between thought and speech.

  "Want some rice?"

  Wei. Holding a bowl out. Steam rising.

  I took the bowl.

  "Thank you."

  He nodded. Ate his own. The fire burned between us and the stream flowed and I ate the rice because eating was the only response I could give that didn't cost me the words I was holding.

  The rice was warm. The night was cold.

  Stars. Indifferent.

  Useful.

  You'd have asked. You always do.