You appeared again on the fourth day after the clearing. Or the sixth. The number is still irrelevant.

  You stood at the edge of the forest.

  Not dramatically. Not in the manner of a person making an entrance or establishing presence or performing any of the elaborate social choreography that arrivals usually involved. You just stood. At the tree line. Twenty paces from where my trajectory would take me through a gap between two pines. You stood and you waited.

  I registered you the way I registered the trees. A human-shaped, human-sized object in the visual field. You had a pack on your back — the same pack you still wear. Worn and patched, the kind of deterioration that meant weeks of travel. You smelled like unwashed roads and dried sweat and something medicinal, faintly bitter.

  The notebook in your left hand was already open.

  I walked.

  My trajectory did not change. The gap between the pines was where the body walked, so the body walked there. The human-shaped object at the edge of the forest was not an obstacle. Nor was it a destination and was therefore irrelevant to my trajectory.

  I passed you at twelve paces. You kept your place on the green grass. You stood in the world of the living.

  You did not speak. Not immediately at least. You watched me pass with the concentrated attention of a researcher observing a phenomenon — no fear, no reverence, no pity.

  I continued walking and heard your footsteps behind me. Following. The rhythm of someone matching pace at a deliberate distance — not closing the gap, not falling behind. Twelve paces. Your gait slightly uneven, the left side compensating. A body that had learned to carry damage without stopping.

  You followed for hours. Through forest. Through clearings. You followed with the patient endurance of someone who had decided following was the activity and who would perform it until it was complete.

  Most who followed me stopped when the grass died under their feet. You appeared to find this encouraging rather than concerning.

  At nightfall I stopped. In a clearing. I stood.

  You sat.

  Ten paces from me. Beyond the edge of the radius. The distance that kept you near but not inside.

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  You sat on the grass and the grass under you remained green. The grass near me browned and between us was a gradient that measured my toxicity. Brown to yellow to green.

  You opened the notebook and wrote.

  I stood. Eyes on the middle distance. Not looking at you, not looking away from you. Standing.

  "My name is Xu Ran." Maybe you weren't sure if I would remember.

  Your voice was clear. The clarity of someone who spoke to be heard. You had said this before — at an inn, in another life, when I was a different shape of broken and you were a different shape of damaged. I did not know whether you remembered.

  But I said nothing.

  "I've been searching for you for three months."

  Three months. The information entered me the way the beetle had entered me, the way the stream had entered me — received, not processed. Three months was a unit of time. Time passed. The passing was independent of my participation.

  "The withered forests were not difficult to follow."

  You said this without accusation. Without judgment. A navigational method — you had followed the dead zones, the way one follows a river or a ridge. You had tracked my toxicity for many li through forest, reading the dead grass and the silent birds the way a tracker read footprints.

  I was not difficult to find. I was the easiest thing in the world to find, because everything I touched died and death was the most visible marker in a living landscape.

  You continued writing.

  "I'm going to sleep," you said, after a silence that lasted long enough for the stars to appear. "I'll still be here in the morning."

  You said this to the clearing, or to me, or to the notebook. Then you curled onto your side on the green grass at the safe distance and closed your eyes.

  I stood.

  Eyes open. Stars overhead. The humming in my chest. Constant, low, the vibration that said alive. The alive-saying was directed at no one and the no one now included a person sleeping ten paces away on grass that remained green because ten paces was outside the radius.

  Your breathing was even. You slept deeply and quickly, the efficiency of a body that had learned to sleep in any condition. You slept on the ground, in the open, ten paces from something that killed grass and beetles and spiders and you slept with the confidence of someone who had calculated the risk and accepted it. Your risk assessment was either very precise or very absent. I had not yet determined which.

  I did not sleep.

  Morning came. I was still there.

  You opened your eyes and sat up. You looked at me — still standing in the same position with my eyes open — and you did not comment on the fact that I had not moved at all. You opened the notebook and wrote.

  Then you spoke.

  "You don't eat."

  An observation. Not a question. I remembered, that you had set food near me at some point during the night — rice, from a container, cold, placed four paces from me where the grass was yellow and the food was technically in the transition zone between death and life. I had not eaten it. I had not noticed it until you brought it up. Eating required the detection of hunger and hunger had disconnected.

  "You don't sleep."

  You were cataloguing me. The way a scholar catalogued a specimen. Methodical. Detached. Without warmth or coldness — something between. Professional attention.

  "And you don't leave," you said.

  You wrote.

  I stood.

  The grass around me — dead. The grass around you — alive. Between us — the gradient. Ten paces of transition from what I was to what the world was. You occupied the living side. I occupied the other.

  You were still there.