Wei drank his tea. I drank mine. The kitchen held us both — the small space that was ours and that he'd chosen over the Iron Lotus training grounds and their impressive, uninteresting halls.

  "They had real masters," he said. After a while. Into the quiet.

  "I know."

  "Formations I've never seen. Training yards full of equipment. A weapons hall."

  He wasn't selling it. He was processing it — the inventory of what he'd walked away from, laid out between us like goods on a market table.

  "And you found it boring," I said.

  "Boring isn't the right word." He turned the cup. "They looked at me like — like I was a thing. A number. Like they already knew what I'd become and were deciding if it was worth the investment."

  He looked at me.

  "You don't look at me like that."

  I didn't answer. The answer would have been complicated and complicated was not what the kitchen needed.

  He went to his room. I sat and thought. I had enough contact with sects to recognize patterns across millennia of how sects operate.

  It was always the same.

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  A senior disciple identifies talent. The senior disciple doesn't report warmth, doesn't report the boy's grin or the hip correction or the way he held a borrowed sword. The senior disciple reports data. Qi-signature. Range. Instability markers. Training level relative to age. The gap between what the boy is and what he could become with proper resources — the gap that is the sect's value proposition.

  The report goes on jade. Always jade. Paper is for correspondence; jade is for assessment. The report travels up a hierarchy to someone who reads it and produces one of three conclusions — ignore, monitor or acquire.

  Wei's profile was extraordinary. His sheer amount of qi, the instability markers and previous training from a competent but unaffiliated source — would not produce "ignore." I had seen this pattern play out hundreds of times. The variables changed. The outcome didn't.

  Fang Liang had Wei's qi-signature. He'd had proximity — long enough and close enough for a senior disciple's passive analysis to capture everything. The friendliness, the mentoring, the recognition — all probably real. But also compatible with assessment. Warmth and evaluation were not mutually exclusive. That was what made good recruiters good.

  I didn't know what Fang Liang had done after Wei left. I didn't need to know. I knew sects.

  Wei's profile would be read by someone trained to read it.

  That someone would belong to an institution with protocols for exactly this.

  I had not warned him.

  I was not going to warn him.

  The reason was the principle. He has to learn to identify threats himself. Everything else would create a gap and the gap would be lethal in the long run.

  The gap might be lethal regardless.

  I sat in the kitchen, Wei in his room — asleep, his core broadcasting soft golden light through his shirt.

  Somewhere, the machinery was in motion. I couldn't see it. I didn't need to. I had seen it already. Over and over again. The pattern was predictable.

  I had conclusions. Wei did not. The asymmetry of experience . The asymmetry I was maintaining. Deliberately. As policy.

  The policy was the principle.

  And the principle might kill him. Or save him.

  And the gamble was all I had.