The Heaven's Order left marks the way bureaucrats left marks: systematically, comprehensively, with the thoroughness of an organization that confused documentation with understanding.

  I tracked them for three days.

  The evidence, never the people themselves. The symmetry in the landscape: regularized tree spacing, graded stone arrangements, the subtle qi-residue of cultivation practices applied not to combat or advancement but to ordering. To organizing. To imposing the sect's fundamental philosophy on the physical world — the belief that reality, left to its own devices, was disorderly and that disorder was the root of suffering and that the correction of disorder was therefore the correction of suffering and that the correction was achieved through the systematic application of qi to the structure of things until the structure of things reflected the structure of the sect's ideology.

  It would have been admirable if it weren't terrifying.

  The marks were days old. Maybe weeks. Already fading, the landscape had partially recovered, natural systems reasserting their randomness the way they had for longer than organizations had existed.

  But the trajectory was wrong. Their path — visible in the pattern of ordered terrain — was curving. Not south, toward the Black Moor where I'd directed them. Northwest. Toward the mountains. Toward us.

  The false trail was failing. Or rather, the false trail was working exactly as intended and they were following a different trail entirely. A trail I hadn't laid. Wei's qi-signature, the lighthouse broadcast that his conscious mind suppressed during the day and that his unconscious mind released during the night.

  They were following the glow. The shadowless luminescence that Wei produced in sleep, visible to anyone with qi-perception above a certain threshold. A sect dedicated to detecting disorder, a sect that classified anomalies the way libraries classified books, would have registered, triangulated and pursued.

  We needed more distance. More altitude. Terrain hostile enough to discourage organizational pursuit and steep enough to attenuate the signal.

  More practically: I needed Wei to stop glowing.

  "We're pushing harder today," I said. Morning. Camp broken. Packs on.

  "Why?"

  "Because the terrain requires it."

  A half-truth. The terrain would accept any pace. But the properties were useful and using them required speed and the information I was willing to share was "the terrain requires it" because the actual explanation belonged to the category of truths whose delivery would produce more problems than their absence.

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  We climbed. Hard. Five hours without rest. The trail — made by goats and gravity rather than sects and ideology — switched back and forth up a slope that was steep, sustained, without a single stretch of level ground.

  Wei kept up. His body, whatever its instabilities, was robust. The qi-enhancement of his physical systems was operating at a level that made the climb manageable where it should have been brutal. He wasn't breathing hard. Wasn't sweating proportionally. He was climbing a mountain the way normal people climbed stairs.

  The tremor was worse with exertion. His fingers vibrating against the rock faces he used for handholds, the subtle percussion of fingertip against stone.

  He didn't mention it. Didn't slow down. Simply climbed, tremor and all.

  Around midday, the symmetry stopped.

  Not gradually — abruptly. One step: ordered. The next: randomness. Natural. Trees where seeds had fallen. Rocks where erosion had placed them. The wild, unmanaged, beautiful chaos of a world that hadn't been told what shape to take.

  We had crossed out of their territory. The altitude was sufficient — this high, this steep, the energy required to maintain landscape-scale qi-organization exceeded the return.

  "Feel that?" Wei said.

  "What?"

  "The — looseness. Like the air isn't holding its breath anymore."

  I felt it. The absence of imposed structure. The sigh of a world resuming its natural expression.

  "Heaven's Order," I said. Giving him this one.

  "They're down there?"

  "They are. We're above their operational range."

  He processed. "Operational range. They... organize the landscape?"

  "They believe disorder is the source of suffering. They correct it."

  "By lining up rocks?"

  "By lining up everything."

  He looked back down the slope. "Sounds exhausting."

  "It is."

  "Do they know about me?"

  "Possibly."

  "My qi. The beacon thing."

  "Your cultivation signature is distinctive."

  "Distinctive enough to follow?"

  "Distinctive enough to notice. Following requires resources they may not commit."

  "So we stay high," he said.

  "We stay high."

  "For how long?"

  "For however long it takes."

  He nodded. Practical acceptance.

  We set camp high. Above the treeline. Among rocks and grass and thin air that tasted of altitude and isolation.

  The mountains sheltered us. Passively. Through the simple mechanism of being large and steep and indifferent.

  I sat with my back against a rock. Wei: four meters away. The fire: small, because fuel was scarce this high. The sky: enormous, because altitude removed the visual obstructions that lower elevations used to pretend the sky was smaller than it was.

  Stars. More than usual. The full inventory: thousands, millions, the count that defeated counting and that existed therefore as magnitude rather than number.

  Wei looked up.

  "Yun."

  "What?"

  "I glow at night. Don't I."

  Not a question. A statement. The discovery made independently, through self-observation, through the data that his own body provided during the liminal minutes between waking and sleeping when consciousness was still recording but control was already releasing.

  Three seconds of silence. Four. Five.

  "Yes," I said.

  He nodded. Once. Looked at the stars. Looked at his hands. Looked at me.

  And slept.