He talked for an hour.

  An hour. Continuous. The verbal output of someone who had compressed a day's experience into pressure and was now releasing it.

  First, he found a mine. "Abandoned, totally, nobody there for years probably, but the walls — Yun, the walls have CRYSTALS. Not qi-crystals, just normal ones, but they catch the light and the whole tunnel looks like — like the inside of something alive."

  He gestured. The gesture involved both arms, a rotation that was either descriptive or gravitational and the spatial claim of most of our kitchen.

  Then he went to a waterfall. "Three tiers. The water comes off the top and hits the second pool and the sound is — you know when qi flows through a channel that's slightly too narrow? That sound. But water. And loud."

  His qi had "sung" there, he said. Not metaphorically — actually. His core had resonated with the water's force, producing a hum he'd felt in his teeth and his chest. It had made him laugh in a way that had nothing to do with humor and everything to do with the physical shock of harmony.

  At last, he saw a shrine. "Old. Really old. The characters on the lintel — I couldn't read them. Worn down. But inside there was a feeling. Like — like an old man sleeping. Not threatening. Just. Present. And dormant. Like he was waiting for something. Or someone."

  He paused. The first pause in an hour. He'd encountered something that exceeded his vocabulary and the searching for words was more honest than the finding.

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  "I left something there," he said. "A stone. From the garden."

  "Which stone?"

  "The grey one. The one I brought last week."

  An offering. A gesture. The act of a boy who understood that some places deserved acknowledgment.

  "I brought another one back," he said. "For the garden."

  He produced it. Smooth, grey-blue, the size of his palm. River stone, water-worn, shaped by patience rather than force.

  "Granite," I said.

  "And?"

  "Nothing. It's a good stone."

  He placed it next to the blade fragment. Between the dock grass and the lemongrass. Our garden was accumulating artifacts — wrong plants, a right stone and a blade fragment, the collection of someone who had decided a space was important and important spaces deserved decoration.

  "Can we get a proper pot?" he asked. "For the third one. The clay's cracking."

  "Tomorrow."

  "You always say tomorrow."

  "Tomorrow I'll say today."

  He almost laughed. The corner of his mouth moved the distance of appreciation without completing the journey to sound.

  "It was good," he said. Quiet. "Being out there. Alone."

  "I know."

  "Not alone-alone. Just — alone without someone watching."

  "I know."

  He looked at me. Something in the look I recognized from a distance — gratitude, maybe. Or its quieter cousin: acknowledgment that the watching had never been a cage and the not-watching today had not been a gift, but was his to take, whenever he wanted it.

  "Good stone," he said again. Patting it. Then he went to bed. The door stuck. He hit it. It opened. He went through. It stuck behind him.

  I sat in the yard next to the stone. Night fell and stars began to shine. The garden was filled with quiet peace, three pots, a blade fragment and a good stone.

  The settlement settled. Lights went out. Dogs performed their evening ritual of barking at things that probably weren't there.

  Six weeks. We'd been here six weeks and we had a garden with the wrong plants and the right stone. We had a door that stuck and a boy who went out alone and came back. The coming back was the part that mattered.

  I drank tea. It was still cold.

  I drank it anyway.