The run was going well, which was unusual enough to be suspicious.

  Wei moved through the forest with a fluidity that had not been there last week. His feet found the gaps between roots, the stable ground between stones, the path of least resistance that the terrain offered to anyone willing to listen for it. He listened. His breathing was synchronized — inhale on the third step, exhale on the sixth — and the rhythm carried him forward with a momentum that wasn't quite grace but was no longer its opposite.

  He cleared a log. Not over it — around it, feet shifting without stopping, weight transferring from one side to the other with a pivot that routed the qi-sensitivity in his soles directly into motion — sensory extension becoming reflex, his body reading the ground a fraction of a second before his brain could.

  Three steps. Five. Ten without falling.

  He stopped at the far end of the clearing. Turned. Looked down at his feet with the baffled pride of a man who'd taught his dog a trick and was now unsure which of them had learned something.

  He looked at me.

  He grinned.

  "Thank you, Shifu."

  The grin died.

  Not because he saw my face — although my face was doing something that I was not proud of, a rigidity that descended like a portcullis, shutting out everything behind it. The grin died because the word landed between us with a weight that its two syllables had no right to carry and the clearing, which had been pleasantly warm and acceptably alive with insect noise, became a vacuum.

  "Don't call me that."

  My voice was flat. Anger implied investment. This was older than anger — the smooth, featureless terrain left behind when every version of this conversation has already been had.

  "What? Shifu?" He cocked his head. The residual grin was trying to reassemble itself, hadn't fully committed to dying. "That's what you are, though. You teach me. You—"

  "I teach you nothing. You stand there and I talk. That is not instruction."

  "You fixed my arm."

  "Your arm healed."

  "You showed me the herbs."

  "I corrected your mistakes."

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  "You showed me the qi-steps."

  "I prevented you from injuring yourself."

  He counted on his fingers. The fingers of the arm I'd healed. "Teaching, healing, preventing injury. You're right — that's completely different from being a Shifu."

  I looked at the tree line. The trees offered no support. They stood in their usual positions, being wooden, contributing nothing.

  "I am not your master."

  He stopped smiling. The humor drained from his face and what replaced it was something older than twelve — the expression of a boy who had learned to read people the way he'd learned to read the forest, because reading things correctly was the difference between eating and starving.

  "What are you, then?"

  The question hung in the clearing. I felt it expand — touching the edges of the conversation, touching the edges of myself, touching edges I hadn't known existed because I'd spent thousands of years believing I had no edges.

  I looked at the forest. At the trees that had been here for centuries and would be here for centuries more, if the boy on the distant hilltop didn't burn them out of existence. At the sky, which was blue and unhelpful.

  "Someone who is here."

  The words arrived without planning. They were not the product of thousands of years of accumulated wisdom, or the careful deliberation of someone who understood the weight of language. They were what was left when I scraped away the refusal and the deflection and the solid wall between myself and anyone who had ever needed something from me.

  Someone who is here. Not a master. Not a guardian. Not a title with obligations attached. Just: present. Occupying the same location as this boy, at this moment, in this forest, with no promise beyond proximity and no obligation beyond the one I'd already broken by healing an arm I should have left shattered.

  Wei considered this. His face moved through several expressions — processing, weighing, filing the answer in a mind whose logic I couldn't predict. Then he nodded.

  "Okay."

  He walked back to the starting position. Stretched his arms.

  "Again?"

  I nodded.

  "Now," I said. "Breathe on the third step. Inhale. Always on the third."

  "I already do that."

  "You do it when you remember. I want you to do it when you don't."

  He ran. Fell. Got up.

  "Again."

  Ran. Didn't fall. For twelve steps, he moved through the forest with the qi-sensitivity I'd built into him, breathing and stepping in a rhythm that was half-learned and half-something he carried in his bones, the way some people carry music.

  He stopped. Turned.

  "Is this something I'll need to be able to do alone?"

  The question was casual. Thrown over his shoulder — carelessly, without ceremony, unaware of the shrapnel it produced on impact. He wasn't asking about the exercise. He was asking about something larger, something shaped like the future, something that assumed I might not always be standing at the edge of the clearing while he ran.

  He has to learn to do this alone.

  The thought passed through me with the cold efficiency of a blade through water — entering without resistance, moving through without friction, exiting without leaving a wound I could point to. Just a thought. Just a rational assessment of a practical reality.

  He was mortal. I was not. At some point, these two facts would produce a conclusion that no amount of training could prevent.

  "Yes," I said.

  He nodded. Didn't ask why. Ran again.

  I watched him run — falling and rising and falling and rising, the rhythm of a creature learning to navigate a world that was fundamentally hostile to its existence — and I thought: he has to learn to do this alone and the thought was correct and the thought was cold and I filed it in a place where I wouldn't have to look at it again.

  It would find me later. It always did.