We ran for three days.

  Walked at speed, technically — but the distinction was vocabulary, not exhaustion. I changed our route immediately. Ninety degrees north. Into terrain I hadn't wanted. Granite ridges. Dead pine. The air thinned and turned metallic. Because Bear's departure was not an ending but a report and the report would travel faster than we could.

  Bear now knew three things. I existed. I was here. And I had a weakness named Wei.

  The third was key. Location could be changed, existence denied. But Wei was a constant.

  "We're going north," I said.

  "How far?"

  "As far as we can."

  His jaw set. The stubbornness-muscle I'd tracked since his village. He looked at me — the look that carried the new layer. The one that had appeared after the lie, sitting on top of trust and underneath compliance.

  "How are your ribs?" I asked.

  "My ribs are fine," he said.

  They weren't. But this lie was his.

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  Three days. North. Through terrain that punished every trespasser. Scree, switchbacks, a ravine that added two hours and subtracted patience.

  I erased our trail as we went. By hand, qi was too signature-heavy. Obscuring footprints, displacing branches, redirecting evidence of passage into baseline forest noise.

  Wei's ribs were healing. The qi-assisted knitting had accelerated the process from weeks to days. His arm was slower — deep tissue bruising resolved on its own timeline and the timeline was indifferent to urgency.

  He marched without complaint. Wei didn't narrate suffering. The suffering was there. It had a schedule. It would leave when ready. A hawk circled overhead — patient, methodical, tracking something smaller than us.

  On the evening of the third day, he stumbled.

  Not a fall — a half-step, a correction, the body's way of filing a complaint. His face was white. The color of exertion that has exceeded the body's willingness.

  "Stop."

  "I'm fine."

  "Stop."

  He stopped. Not obedience — a recognition that arguing required energy he didn't have.

  I checked his channels. The ribs were knitting — qi-assisted healing accelerating what would normally take weeks. But the march was draining reserves faster than his body could replenish them. His qi-pattern was thin. Stretched.

  I fed a thread of stabilizing qi into his system. Minimal, careful — the smallest dose that would sustain him without triggering the stream's compensatory surge.

  His chin was set. Eyes forward. The determination of someone who has decided that the terms include suffering and who is accepting the terms without accepting the logic.

  "We walk."

  "I know."

  The forest continued. The silence continued.

  "The next ones will be stronger," I said. To nobody. To the truth I owed him.

  Wei heard. Nodded. Didn't answer.

  His not-answering was new.