Wei left without asking.

  Not without telling — there was a distinction. "I'm going out." Not a question. A statement.

  "Where?"

  "Out."

  He was already at the door. Already hitting it with his hip. Already through. The morning took him — sunlight, dust, the energy of a fourteen-year-old boy encountering a day that hadn't been assigned a purpose and was therefore available for exploration.

  I stood in the doorway. Watched him go. Down the path, past the neighbor's fence, past the well where two women were discussing something that required gestures and volume, past the market where the morning's commerce was beginning and into the territory beyond the settlement's edge — trees, hills, the landscape that surrounded us with the patient indifference of geography that existed before settlements and would exist after.

  He didn't look back.

  He was certain I was watching and certainty eliminated the need for confirmation.

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  I drank my tea. It was cold, but I drank it anyway.

  He was gone for hours.

  The hours were not interesting. Unless you were the kind of being that noticed absence the way other beings noticed presence. I was sitting in the shape Wei had left behind, drinking cold tea, performing the ancient art of waiting.

  I watered the garden. The dock grass was thriving. The nettle-cousin was producing something that might have been a bud. The lemongrass was lemongrass, doing what lemongrass did, which was growing at the same rate in the same direction with the quiet reliability of a species that had been doing exactly this for millennia.

  I visited Lao Chen. Not for conversation — for proximity. His workshop was open, the sound of stone on steel emerging in the rhythmic pattern that constituted his daily practice. He was sharpening a hoe. Treating it with the same reverence he applied to blades, because for Lao Chen, all metal was equal and all edges were worthy of attention.

  "The boy's not here," he said without looking up.

  "I know."

  "Good. He needs a day without supervision."

  I left, walked back and sat in the doorway.

  Evening came. The sun descended. The shadows extended their territory. The settlement's daytime activities yielded to its evening activities with a smooth handoff.

  Wei returned.

  His shoes were muddy. His face was sunburnt on one side — the side that had been facing south, which suggested he'd walked east in the morning and returned from the north and had therefore either circumnavigated something or gotten lost and applied stubbornness rather than orientation.

  He was grinning.